
A Cure for Wellness movie review: it ails me
Ominous signs and psychological detours get tossed out and tossed away on the path to ridiculous gothic nonsense that takes itself far too seriously.
film criticism by maryann johanson | handcrafted since 1997
Ominous signs and psychological detours get tossed out and tossed away on the path to ridiculous gothic nonsense that takes itself far too seriously.
Limp and lifeless, this overlong and undercooked would-be blockbuster cannot focus on either the hard-edged realities or the magical mysteries it toys with.
What with all the Pirates of the Caribbean folks involved here, I wasn’t expecting this to be so serious…
Here’s an at-a-glance look at my picks for tomorrow night’s Academy Awards…
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.
Oh, thank the gods. Thank crazy Walt Disney’s head in a cryogenic freezer. Thank the army of producers and FX geeks and writers and cast and studio execs and focus-group gurus and everyone else who made this prepackaged, ready-for-synergy-marketing, lowest-common-denominator junk cinema the most cheesalicious, escape-a-riffic it could be.
Is it ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ or ‘Highlander 2: The Quickening’?
Forget that this is based on a ride at Disney World, and a pretty sorry one, at that — know that it’s a wonderfully exhausting, refreshingly unironic, delightfully old-fashioned swashbuckler.