Ben-Hur movie review: it’s fine, everything is fine
It’s not great. It’s not terrible. It is bland manufactured entertainment product. It’s fine. Hollywood is not creatively bankrupt. Everything is fine.
Rodrigo Santoro
The 33 movie review: swallowed up by the earth
A missed opportunity to tell what should be a captivating real-life disaster tale that is instead plodding, scattershot, and lacking in dramatic impetus.
Focus movie review: con inartistry
Unpleasant, humor free, and contrary to accepted codes of movie morality. And that’s before it shows its hand as a pile of implausible sentimental mush.
300: Rise of an Empire review: Artemisia rocks
Eva Green stalks this movie with pride and honor, and is almost the only thing worth watching amidst frenetic CGI battles and endless ancient carnage.
Heleno (review)
Avoids the game of the world’s first sports superstar to instead place a lurid focus on his other notorious public exploits…
What to Expect When You’re Expecting (review)
It’s intended to be delightful, but it feels as long as a pregnancy itself, this roundrobin of forcefully interconnected tales of incipient parenthood.
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…
I Love You Phillip Morris (review)
Bad Santa writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa graduate to writer-directors here, and give us a warmly human and hugely funny story that’s almost a sendup of both prison melodramas and hetero romantic comedies… yet is also a truly amorous and very satisfying tale about the extremes to which a man will go for love.
Post Grad (review)
People have names like Ryden Malby only in the movies. And we’re only expected to like people like Ryden Malby in the movies… though I don’t see why we should give in to that kind of peer pressure.
300 (review)
The first person who uses any aspect of this flick to justify the American debacle in Iraq is getting a swat across the nose with a copy of *My Pet Goat.* Which King Leonides of Sparta does not sit reading while his country is threatened and attacked.
