DVD & Blu-ray
DVD — Latest
B- |
**½ |
+3|
Teens & Up
Coming on the heels of
Fireproof,
Courageous is the fourth film from Sherwood Pictures, and it’s another step forward for the church-based film company … While the film’s church-based roots and the tendency toward didactic, schematic storytelling are still in evidence,
Courageous is their most ambitious and watchable film to date.
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Here’s my 30-second review of
The Ides of March, now on home video (somehow I neglected to post it before, so here it is).
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A |
**** |
+3|
Adults
There is a moment in
The Mill & the Cross in which the power of art, in particular sacred art, to capture the eternal in the hugger-mugger of ordinary life — even in the most horrific and seemingly meaningless events — is revealed with stunning clarity. André Bazin, the great Catholic film critic and theorist, wrote about the mission of art to rescue the world from transience and corruption, to capture moments and events in time and space before they slip into the irretrievable past, and so bear witness to the hand of God in creation. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen this idea more resoundingly affirmed than in
The Mill & the Cross.
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C- |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up
Real Steel is just plain unpleasant to sit through. So much of the movie is spent amid screaming crowds and abrasive music, often in dark, trashy dives, watching giant robots pound each other into scrap metal. The robot boxing is surprisingly good (Sugar Ray Leonard was a consultant). It’s the humans that are unpleasant.
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F |
½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
Like the title phrase, which is recognizably English and yet obviously wrong,
Dark of the Moon offers just enough vestiges of grammatical intelligibility to be recognizable as a bloated, steroid-inflamed simulacrum of a mindless summer blockbuster action movie. I almost think it would be better, or at least it would hurt less, if it were a bit more incomprehensible, although I’m told that its predecessor,
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, actually was, and it didn’t help.
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DVD — Recent
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
After a rash of immature, bad-boy cinematic superheroes for whom responsibility is a bigger challenge than taking down supervillains — think
Iron Man,
Thor and
Green Lantern — a hero for whom decency, humility and self-sacrifice come naturally is a breath of fresh air.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Visuals aside,
Cars 2 is the first Pixar film ever (or at least since
A Bug’s Life) that could one could easily imagine as a DreamWorks film—circa
Shark Tale perhaps, with its punningly fishified analog of the human world. Or, with its frenetic action and gimmickry,
Cars 2 bears some resemblance to a Blue Sky Studios cartoon (circa
Robots, say, or
Rio, with its world culture flavor). In a word, not only is
Cars 2 mediocre, it doesn’t even feel like mediocre Pixar.
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A+ |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
While working on
Citizen Kane, Welles joked that "If
they ever let me do a second picture, I’m lucky." He was only
half right. He was lucky enough to make many additional pictures,
some of them masterpieces in their own right. But the luckiest he
ever got, which is more than lucky enough, was getting to make
Citizen Kane itself. That unprecedented level of control
and magical synergy was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — and,
to his immortal credit, Welles made the most of it. He made
Citizen Kane.
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Contagion may not be everyone’s ideal date movie, but I’m married to an RN who prefers a good medical thriller to a trite chick flick. Suz was impressed with the technical realism of
Contagion. I was impressed too. Here’s my 30-second take.
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C+ |
**½ |
+2-2|
Adults
Putting Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford in Stetsons is clearly an excellent idea. Both men have faces made for Westerns, rugged and rough-hewn. There is a sense of stoic reserve and working-class grit about them; neither is the sort of man one can only imagine being an actor, or leading a life of privilege.
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C+ |
*** |
+2-2|
Adults*
In spite of these problems, I’m more struck by the movie’s generosity and empathy toward all its characters, and by its frank, countercultural clarity that acts such as adultery, divorce, casual sex and promiscuity — however understandable they may sometimes be, and however seemingly rewarding they may feel at the time — not only don’t lead to lasting happiness, not only are obstacles to true happiness, but ultimately bring a great deal of unhappiness, not only for oneself and one’s loved ones, but also to other people as well that another movie might not consider at all.
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Here’s
Dolphin Tale in 30 seconds from my “Reel Faith” co-host David DiCerto.
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C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Kids & Up*
Somebody has to say it: Made at the height of Disney’s early brilliance alongside
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
Fantasia,
Pinocchio, and
Bambi,
Dumbo is the odd weak link in the chain.
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C+ |
**½ |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
If only the filmmakers had put as much creative energy into the character of Hal Jordan as they did into his lovingly rendered CGI-enhanced suit, which pulses and glows as it hugs every bulge and swell on Ryan Reynolds’ impeccably sculpted torso.
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B+ |
***½ |
+2-2|
Teens & Up
Here at last, in the final chapter, the Harry Potter franchise rouses itself toward something approaching greatness.
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B- |
**½ |
+2-2|
Teens & Up*
Based on Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling 2009 novel,
The Help is largely about the daily humiliations and injustices to which black maids and nannies working in white homes were subject, and the invisibility of these humiliations to their white employers, until, in this fictional account, their stories are told, first in secret and then in public.
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B |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
Returning screenwriters Jonathan Abel and Glenn Berger recognize that what’s needed is deeper emotions and darker themes as well as more action and higher stakes … At the same time, the movie makes three key mistakes.
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C- |
** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up
It is with some astonishment that I realize that until now Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts have never played romantic leads opposite each other in a romantic comedy.
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C+ |
**½ |
+1|
Kids & Up*
Chronologically,
The Lion King stands between the striking triumphs of the early Disney renaissance (
The Little Mermaid,
Beauty and the Beast and
Aladdin) and the bumpy deterioration of the latter 1990s (
Pocahontas,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
Hercules, etc.). One way or another, it’s at the turning point between Disney’s creative renewal and its eventual decline. Fans might locate it near the pinnacle, along with
Beauty and the Beast, but I don’t feel the love.
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B+ |
*** |
+1-2|
Adults
It’s a nostalgic film about nostalgia — nostalgia for when Paris was Paris, for one thing. Even if you’ve never been to the City of Light, even if phrases like “the Lost Generation” and “la Belle Époque” hold for you none of the magic they do for Allen, the film makes you feel their power for his onscreen alter ego, appealingly played by Owen Wilson. For that matter, even if you aren’t an Allen fan — even if you aren’t convinced Allen was
ever Allen —
Midnight in Paris could almost make you nostalgic for the Allen that fans remember, or seem to.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
Moneyball is an ugly name for such an exhilarating film. Indeed, it seems a misnomer, though the filmmakers were more or less stuck with it, since Michael Lewis’s explosive 2003 book, on which the film is based, made such an impact on the baseball world that the word has passed into baseball jargon.
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D |
*½ |
-2|
Kids & Up*
While the Atwaters’ book is not exactly a classic, it’s beloved by generations of readers — but not by the people who have brought you this big-screen adaptation starring Jim Carrey. The makers of this film do not love
Mr. Popper’s Penguins. At all. It’s hard to believe that this junk was directed by Mark Waters, who presided over the big-screen adaptation of
The Spiderwick Chronicles, a smart, scary adaptation of a children’s book series that honors its source material almost as much as
Mr. Popper’s Penguins doesn’t.
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C+ |
**½ |
+2-2|
Teens & Up
Was Catholic novelist Tim Powers’ 1987 historical fantasy-adventure novel
On Stranger Tides in some way the inspiration, or an inspiration, not only for this fourth Pirates of the Caribbean flick, but for the whole franchise?
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C+ |
*** |
-2|
Teens & Up
Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a smartly made, effective movie — but what sort of movie is it, exactly?
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C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
Gone are the days when a movie like
E.T. could open to a mere $11 million, build on word of mouth, and go on to earn more than $350 million in North America. Obviously, Abrams remembers those days. In a way,
Super 8 is as derivative and familiar as anything in theaters today, only the movies it’s copying are all over a quarter of a century old: Spielbergian fare like
The Goonies,
E.T.,
Gremlins and
Close Encounters, with echoes of earlier and later films.
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C |
*½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
As played by English actor Charlie Cox (
Stardust), Josemaría emerges as a likable, dedicated, virtuous young man much loved by his circle of friends, the first generation of Opus Dei. There are a few evocative scenes, such as the impression that a barefoot friar’s tracks in the snow make on the young Josemaría. Yet despite a line or two about Opus Dei spreading to other countries, there’s little sense of Escrivá himself as a figure of any particular note.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
It starts pretty promisingly, and it stays pretty promising throughout, and at some point you realize it’s never actually going to deliver on that promise. There’s never a moment where it goes really wrong — it just never really gets started.
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F |
½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
Like the title phrase, which is recognizably English and yet obviously wrong,
Dark of the Moon offers just enough vestiges of grammatical intelligibility to be recognizable as a bloated, steroid-inflamed simulacrum of a mindless summer blockbuster action movie. I almost think it would be better, or at least it would hurt less, if it were a bit more incomprehensible, although I’m told that its predecessor,
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, actually was, and it didn’t help.
Read more >
Here is a film that not only asks, with unusual insistence, why God allows suffering, but contemplates God’s own answer to that question in the Book of Job, amplified by the sweeping vistas of the natural world available to modern science, the Hubble telescope and Hollywood special effects: God did
all this; who are we to think we can judge or question him? It also asks why a stern, bullying father hurts his children. Is God like that father?
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B- |
*** |
+2-2|
Teens & Up*
Warrior opens with a rash of Christian iconography and references: a Pittsburgh church adorned with Eastern-style three-bar crosses from which we see Paddy Conlon (Nick Nolte) emerge; a rosary dangling from his rearview mirror as he drives home to discover his estranged son Tommy (Tom Hardy) waiting on the stoop of his house; a Bible that Tommy contemplates on Paddy’s table.
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F |
½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
Zookeeper is offensive to women, men, children, parents, WASPs, Asians, African-Americans, animals and zookeepers. Also Nick Nolte fans may not be too happy. Have I overstated things? Possibly, but how will we ever know? It is a movie with no conceivable audience. Somewhere in Hollywood are producers who entrusted money and equipment to people who put talking zoo animals in the same movie as Kevin James inadvertently flashing Rosario Dawson and Leslie Bibb with his off-camera member. “Oh! That’s going to be hard to unsee,” Dawson exclaims in dismay. Parents: Think long and hard about those words.
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