Category: Monday Morning Movie Reviewer

One of the movies that opened during this busy Christmas week, and also (unfortunately) one of the least successful at the box office. It might be a one-joke movie (it’s literally in the title) but it turns out that that one joke is a pretty good one. What Works: Matt Damon instantly elevates this story…

I’ll be right up front in saying I enjoyed this movie. It may not be the movie I was hoping it would be (it was directed by the amazing David Fincher after all), but I feel it did the best possible job it could have with the book’s source material. I haven’t actually read the…

At the risk of severely angering any European or African fans of Alabama Liberal (all…well I was going to say “all two of them” but there are probably as many people on other continents reading the site as those in Alabama itself), I have to admit right off the bat that I was a little…

This movie stars George Clooney as a Hawaiian father of two whose wife is left permaneantly comatose from a boating accident, and only after that accident does he learn that she was cheating on him. It is also a sure thing best picture nominee and will be on almost every critic’s top ten list. Problem is…I’m…

The good news: this movie is exactly what you think it would be…that’s also the bad news. What Works: This is clearly a sequel that wants to leave the first one’s audience happy so once again Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are back as the ambiguously gay duo, Holmes doesn’t want Watson to get…

Later today will bring reviews of some more current movies (Sherlock Holmes 2 and The Descendants) but first comes this smaller hit that opened earlier in the year but somehow I never got around to seeing it. In it, Ed Helms plays a mild-mannered, (very) small town insurance salesman who goes to the “big” city of Cedar…

And so concludes our quartet of films in limited release, but unlike Melancholia, A Dangerous Method, or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I would strongly recommend this movie with no hesitations. This is a lock for my “Ten Best of the Year List.” Young Adult stars Charlize Theron as a young adult book author (or ghost…

Another movie playing in only a handful of theaters now but primed to expand soon. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is based on the excellent John Le Carre book (and also the BBC miniseries based on the book) of the same name about a retired master spy named George Smiley getting asked to ferret out a…

Another movie playing in very limited release. This one based on the true story of the father of psycho-therapy, Sigmund Freud, his protege turned rival Carl Jung, and the Russian patient of Jung’s that came in between them when Jung began an affair with her. What Works: The movie nails the disappoints and resentments that…

This review kicks off a day of true quality, as I’ll be reviewing four independent movies (this, A Dangerous Method, Young Adult, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) only in limited release. So for once I’ll be ahead of the curve in seeing movies before most of America does…but, then again, I doubt most of America…

Unlike all of the other movies I’m reviewing today, this one is still in (very few) theaters. It will be a couple months before anyone can rent it but I would really recommend that. I think this is the kind-of movie that plays best at home for four or five bucks instead of in a…

Another one for the scrap heap. And by that I mean that Bellflower technically came out months ago (I believe it first went into very limited release in early August) but I only now caught up with it On Demand. Bellflower is a bit different than The Dilemma or Super or Last Night in that…

A straight turd from January of this year that I never actually saw until it showed up on HBO last week. So I killed two hours and held my nose to watch it. What Works: Some of Vince Vaughn’s fantasy sequences as he’s lying really work. They snap the movie out of its formulaic rhythms…