Category: Mindless Mondays

I ranked this movie about a Manhattan sex addict as one of the best twenty I saw last year, and that might have been too generous, but I still think it’s worth watching (as long as you’re not with your parents). What Works: Carey Mulligan–too often Michelle Williams’s sleep walking sister–gives the most alive performance…

This movie is dog shit. I hate to start off the new year with such a bad movie, but here it is. [I’m using today to clear out some of the movies that I technically saw last year but haven’t gotten around to reviewing yet.] What Works: Nothing. This movie is one of the absolute…

It seems like everyone in America saw this movie already this weekend (who knew Tom Cruise could still pack houses like that?) but for those that didn’t…let me muddy the waters of if you should go or not by saying this is a solid B movie. If you like cartoonish action movies (I prefer darker…

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…