It has been a frustrating few months for me when it comes to the movies. Repeatedly, I went to a movie that seemed sure to impress and walked away underwhelmed. I thought maybe it was me, that I had become hard to please, but the box office reports . . .
This fall, I’ve reviewed a string of movies that have good working parts that do not quite come together to make a good movie. For various reasons, they have fallen short of their intended tone, or simply fallen flat. Secret in Their Eyes continues . . .
The fear of being buried alive is a primal terror that has spawned its share of scary stories and legends. Yet, for miners, that fear is connected to a very real danger. In the event of a mine collapse, being buried alive is a real possibility. In . . .
With our own elections dragging on for longer each cycle, audiences might wonder why they would want to see a movie about a presidential campaign in a Central American country, run by American strategists. Our Brand Is Crisis offers many of the frustrating . . .
Every year, a new version of Malala Yousafzai’s story has come out. Two consecutive summers featured the release of an autobiography by the iconic activist. This year’s offering is the documentary He Named Me Malala.
He Named Me Malala takes a non-linear . . .
As we headed into the theater on Friday, my fiance turned to me and asked, “So, is The Martian just Castaway on Mars?” Although the connection seems obvious, I think the emphasis on community in the film gives it a lighter tone and many fun characters . . .
In 2011, after 12 years on the run, James Bulger, one of the most notorious Irish mobsters in Boston, was captured and faced 32 counts of racketeering, including 19 murder charges. Black Mass, a movie controversial among those who lived through the . . .
Amid the genuinely terrible movies that come out at the end of summer, came a film starring Robert Redford, Nick Nolte, and Emma Thompson. With that formidable cast, and a plot that seemed hard to mess up, I was sure that A Walk in the Woods was better . . .
In The Man from U.N.C.L.E., director Guy Ritche seeks to blend Mad Men style nostalgia for Cold War period pieces with the winking style of current genre films. The result is a stylish, fun, but ultimately unremarkable spy movie that is enjoyable to . . .
Have you ever run into someone at the store and not been able to place where you know them from, so you just played along? Now, imagine if that awkward moment did not end there, but instead spiraled into unwanted visits, confrontations, and drudging . . .
A paper town is a fictional town that is invented by cartographers to make it obvious if someone violates their copyright. This fact is perhaps the most interesting part of Paper Towns, the novel, and now film, by John Green. Even still, Paper Towns . . .
I am as big a fan of the Minions as any adult really has the right to be. There’s something wrong, however, when I take my eleven year-old sister to see Minions and the hardest she laughs is at the title characters singing the fanfare for the Universal . . .
If the opening sequence to Pixar’s Up made you cry, pack your tissues for Inside Out, the studio’s new film about what happens inside your head when you have a feeling, a daydream, a nightmare, and more.
Inside Out focuses on the emotions—Joy . . .
If you grew up in the 1990s, chances are that Jurassic Park holds a pretty special place in your memories of childhood entertainment. For me, it’s right up there with Twister and Independence Day. It was the movie that introduced me to how feeling . . .
Last weekend, the box office offered a remake of a campy old ghost story and an original, if Disney-ified, adventure tale. Although I’ll undoubtedly eventually see Poltergeist, as the story that both terrified and amused me when I was a kid, . . .
When I think of comedy duos, the names Vergara and Witherspoon never would have come to mind. I, however, really like Reese Witherspoon and I kind of like Sofia Vergara, so I figured that I had nothing to lose seeing Hot Pursuit, a buddy cop movie . . .
In Artificial Intelligence research, there is something called the Turning Test, which is used to determine if the machine can pass for human. This test, and the question of what exactly qualifies as human intelligence, is at the center of the sci-fi . . .
Given the preponderance of low-quality found footage horror movies, I think I was justified in being skeptical when the ads for Unfriended claimed that the film was a great new innovation in the horror genre. While certainly not groundbreakingly original, . . .
Last weekend, audiences taught studios a lesson about underestimating girls and women at the box office. Home more than doubled its estimated opening weekend earnings, thanks to its lovable characters and diverse cast, enticing both adults and children . . .
In an era of remakes and mashups and anti-heroes, it was hard to understand why Disney would go forward with a high-budget version of Cinderella that was so traditional in its style and narrative. Although I feared that I would be bored by Kenneth . . .
When it comes to scary movies, I really like the artfully made ones or those that are so bad that they are as fun as they are scary. A really bad horror movie, in my book, is a mediocre one. The Lazarus Effect has some clever and campy elements, but . . .
On The Daily Show a couple of weeks ago, Colin Firth joked that he got his role in Kingsman: The Secret Service for being the actor who least looked like he could beat someone up, and that his character aggressively taught others their manners. It’s . . .
Seeing The Loft this week is a testament to just what I will put up with for James Marsden. The film is set up as a seedy film noir adventure, but proves to be too despicable and overly plotted for its own good, providing no characters to care about, . . .
While American Sniper generated giant ticket sales and controversy last weekend, I opted instead to see an adaptation about a beloved bear from “darkest Peru” who tries so hard to get things right, but stumbles into trouble anyway. Paddington . . .
Selma, the new film about the historic protests in Selma, Alabama, opens with a jarring shift. The audience is taken abruptly from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. accepting his Nobel Peace Prize to the shock and horror of the 16th Street Baptist Church . . .
Several times recently, I have hinted at my frustration about movies coming out in limited release. It is not unusual for a film that isn’t guaranteed to be a commercial hit to come out first in several hundred theaters and then get a nationwide . . .
When I finished reading Suzanne Collins’s Mockingjay, I wished that there had been a fourth book. The last installment of The Hunger Games Trilogy packed in so much character development and action that I felt shell-shocked when it was all over. . . .
Back in the ’90s and early 2000s, I was a big fan of Behind the Music and E! True Hollywood Story. Like a lot of teenage girls, I was fascinated by celebrity, and a lot of the juicy gossip that seemed to go hand-in-hand with major talent. Even . . .
If you watch enough movies, it starts to seem like the same stories are repeated over and over. Sometimes, though, a movie manages to infuse a shopworn story with enough creative energy to make it feel new. I found that was the case with St. Vincent.
St. . . .
One of my favorite parts of the fall is that the really good movies-the Best Picture contenders-start to show up in theaters. The problem, however, is that for those of us who don’t live in major cities, seeing these movies is often not an option. . . .