Kung Fu Panda 2 (review)
What saves this from feeling like it should have gone direct to video is the animation, which is breathtakingly beautiful: this fantasy ancient China is gorgeously designed…
adventure
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (review)
I’ve listened to my fellow critics snarking on the film’s many many faults and I’ve laughed, but only at myself, because they’re not wrong and yet still it doesn’t change the fact that I really had a lot of fun with this movie.
Water for Elephants (review)
As cornball goes, there’s nothing cornier than running away to join the circus. And that’s why Water for Elephants works so beautifully: It doesn’t pretend to be anything other than an old-fashioned melodrama yarn-spun for as much emotion and tragedy and romance as possible.
Your Highness (review)
It’s one thing to say that Hollywood scoops up indie filmmakers, chews them up, and spits out McG and Brett Ratner clones, which absolutely happens. But that’s on a whole ’nother level to what it has done to David Gordon Green. Someone took the most glorious bottle of vintage champagne and whipped up Tang mimosas.
Rio (review)
So tediously familiar that I could barely remember most of it after I left the cinema. I’m exaggerating just a tad, but even if I didn’t remember it, I could have told you what it was about anyway, because it deviates not one whit from the formula that we’ve come to understand is somehow “essential” for “family” movies…
Mars Needs Moms (review)
Do kids really need to be reminded — in IMAX 3D! — that Mom loves you and has your best interests at heart when she tells you to eat your broccoli and gets mad when you feed it to the cat instead? I guess someone at Disney figured this was the case.
Sucker Punch (review)
This SUCKER PUNCH from my man Zack Snyder is just like so totally fukkin awesome I dont even know where to start. Who the fuk wants to watch fukkin hobbits gettin all weepy and shit get to the part where we get to see orcs vomittin black blood when there heads get loped off and shit. And its all in the fukkin slomo shit where you can like really savor that shit and make it last. Thats what SUCKER PUNCH is just one long aaaaahhhh of awesomeness.
Paul (review)
What if you and your most superbly geeky bestest friend ever met an alien? I mean a real life honest-to-Carl Sagan extry terrestrial. What if? You would plotz. You would. Like Nick Frost’s Clive does here, you would giggle like a loon and then faint, out cold from the sheer splendidness of this happenstance. I know I would.
Rango (review)
How can it be that a kiddie movie is wiser and funnier and more relevant than the Coens Brothers’ True Grit? This is, in fact, what a Coens’ animated flick might look like and sound like, if they got an assist from Terry Giliam: this is a deeply weird and deeply demented movie, and thrillingly so.
Sanctum 3D (review)
Sanctum is extreme people in extreme danger in an extreme place. In 3D! The good kind of 3D. And both Ioan Gruffudd and Richard Roxburgh take their shirts off. What, you need Shakespeare, too, on top of all that?
