Category: Mindless Mondays

An excellent film that’s already borderline underrated since audiences don’t seem to be fully responding to it and critics are split on whether it’s a celebration of amoral excess or a satire of it. [A bogus debate if there ever was one, and clearly meant to make the person having it feel morally superior to…

This movie’s already been talked to death, but what’s one more bloviating blogger to the mix? What Works: In this tale of con-men, corrupt politicians, mobbed-up casinos, and a loose canon FBI agent who will break every rule to expose corruption (yet the paradox of this is lost on him) anything feels like it can…

Sure this movie (about two old-time boxers getting back into the ring to settle a score) is contrived, generic, and thoroughly uninspired, but once you get past the “Rocky vs. Raging Bull” marketing hook, you actually get something that could have been a lot worse. What Works: Stallone mostly phones it in doing a variation…

Another slight, pleasant movie that won’t stay with you long enough to really make it worth the trouble to watch. But man when it comes to HBO, watch out, because then you should watch the hell out of it… What Works: This film about the making of a film follows Emma Thompson as the prickly…

Oh boy… What Works: This film about, you guessed it, 47 masterless samurai is admirable in its old-fashioned attitudes. There are only occasional flights into fantasy, and I think the fanboys will be surprised (and disappointed) that there aren’t more battles with mutant monsters instead of sober scenes set in real history. [Of course, if…

A deserved flop… What Works: Even though the animation is realistic, so what? Other dinosaur-based films haven’t looked like The Land Before Time… What Doesn’t Work: This film is very slow and I had a hard time staying awake. The plot is extremely hokey and relies on too many eye-rollingly cheesy moments instead of genuine,…

Let’s get on with it…[This list could be subtitled “heavy-handed metaphors” since even a straight-forward genre pic like Mandy Lane has artier aspirations to really be about sexual paranoia and obsession among teenage boys, and untrustworthy teen girls playing off those emotions.] All the Boys Love Mandy Lane…This long-shelved horror film was supposed to be…

Two documentaries on two very different artists: Cutie and the Boxer follows a temperamental Japanese painter (who literally boxes paint onto canvasses) and the complicated love story with his animator wife. “Ricky Jay: Deceptive Practice” follows the famed magician, card shark, historian of magicians, and student of con games and artists Ricky Jay, but even though Jay’s…

More 2013 releases to dump… Movie 43…This film is widely considered one of the worst of 2013 and it’s easy to see why. It’s an anthology film that somehow gets A-list talent like Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet to show up in a skit about a guy who has a pair of balls on his…

In my cram to review just about every movie that came out in 2013, I present four that slipped through the cracks… Only God Forgives…What It’s About: Ryan Gosling reteams with his Drive director to make a movie about violence and revenge in Thailand. His brother commits a crime, then a rogue cop enforces order…

In my end of the year cram to watch as many movies as I possibly can in a run-up to grading all of them in a couple days, I watched two “cult” comedies I was only barely aware of when they hit theaters early in 2013. [Cult seems to growing into an operative word meaning “only 100…

2013 was widely heralded as a good year for “black” cinema (12 Years a Slave, The Butler, Mandela, Fruitvale Station, and three different black Christmas movies) but how about the indie dramas or documentaries that slipped through the cracks? War Witch…A young girl in a rural Ugandan village is forced to shoot her parents in the first…