Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit review: CIA you again
Why reboot remains a question, but this is a smart popcorn thriller with a surprisingly sensitive performance by Chris Pine, and a wonderfully badass one by Kevin Costner.
spy
Closed Circuit review: cheating in the War on Terror
Eric Bana and Rebecca Hall are as engaging as ever, and the film raises intriguing issues concerning the “War on Terror”; pity the plot descends into the ridiculous.
Machete Kills review: justice is bloody (hilarious)
Forget about the socially conscious core that fueled the exploitation engine of the first film. This one is flat-out, no-message action comedy, outrageous and hilarious.
Red 2 review: global positioning
Smart, breezy spy action, with an of-the-moment vibe that takes it post-post-9/11 and into the Wikileaks era of global politics.
Despicable Me 2 review: a little bit despicable itself
In an almost terrifying reversal from the first film, this is crude, racist, and sexist, in entirely well-worn ways. (But the Minions are still funny.)
The East review: content to be a mosquito when it could have been a black widow
Brit Marling never knows what to do with her great ideas. She runs them right up to a moment when all that electric potential zaps itself out of existence in a flash.
The Gatekeepers documentary review: secret police speak out
The Oscar-nominated documentary in which the six living former heads of Israel’s ultrasecretive domestic security agency talk about their antiterrorism work…
A Good Day to Die Hard (review)
Bland generic action pudding that manages to be sociopathic, too.
Zero Dark Thirty movie review
If only this were a wholly fictional story, I could get behind it 100 percent, instead of the 95 percent I can give.
Skyfall movie review
What we witness here is the destruction of the old Bond mystique, and the creation of a new one. This is the sneaky cleverness of the film: it is, at last, going to tell us why Bond still matters.
