Free Men (Les hommes libres) (review)
I kept hoping to get caught up in this untold story of the French Resistance in more than a coolly intellectual way, but that never happened.
war/antiwar
Avengers Assemble (aka Marvel’s The Avengers) (review)
How many superheroes spoil the broth? More than six, apparently, at least when Joss Whedon is wrangling them.
The Lucky One (review)
Never let it be said that Nicholas Sparks doesn’t prefer easy fake greeting-card melodrama instead of something that looks more like complicated reality.
Battleship (review)
Pretty much the dullest alien invasion movie ever, featuring an uninteresting incursion by nondescript aliens doing boring things and not even blowing shit up in exciting new ways.
Wrath of the Titans (review)
And now we learn the secret of that dreadful Clash of the Titans movie from a coupla years back. Its incoherence? Its soullessness? All by design.
In Darkness (review)
It’s The Diary of Anne Frank, only with sewers. Elegantly presented, chock full of moments of dreadful suspense in a horrible milieu, and buoyed by strikingly naturalistic performances…
John Carter (review)
This dreary Disneyfied inconsequence features all the bigotries of century-old pulp fiction and none of the romance, neither the sexual nor the adventurous kind…
Black Gold (aka Day of the Falcon) (review)
There’s a lot of golden-age Hollywood in this tale of the earliest days, in the 1930s, of the Arab oil kingdoms. Some of it is just plain fun; some of it is cornball old-fashioned…
In the Land of Blood and Honey (review)
Written and directed by actress Angelina Jolie, there is nevertheless nothing “Hollywood” about this film: it stars local actors and is in the local languages, and it shies not one whit from the horrors of the Bosnian civil war.
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol movie review: mission finally accomplished
The most fun straight-up action movie in ages: while it touches on concerns about terrorism and rogue nukes, there’s nothing too heavy. But what makes it so special is how up-close and personal it is.
