Wild Card movie review: hardboiled rotten egg
Piles of noirish exposition get the better of Jason Statham in this unpleasantly retrograde crime drama. What happened in Vegas should have stayed there.
Stanley Tucci
The Wind Rises review: Jiro dreams of flying
Visually ravishing, as you’d expect from Hayao Miyazaki, but there is, disappointingly, no drama and no conflict here.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire review: reluctant heroine
A devastating indictment of pop culture as propaganda — about its power and the limits of its powers — and an upending of the typical teen-girl romance movie.
Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters review: clash-of-the-titan babies
Spectacularly mediocre fantasy junk food, perfectly inoffensive for youngsters but too featherweight for adult genre fans.
Jack the Giant Slayer (review)
Keeps trying to fly off into potentially fascinating directions and then getting yanked back into a mushy mediocrity…
Gambit (review)
I found myself oddly transfixed by how the stale the humor is…
Margin Call (review)
Wily humor and sly observations about the lives of these high rollers are the highlights. It’s when those give way to issues of morality that the film disappoints, just a little…
Gambit (trailer)
The Coen Brothers have written a new movie, and it stars Alan Rickman and Colin Firth and Cameron Diaz and Stanley Tucci? *cinemagasm*
The Hunger Games (review)
Every once in a while, just as I’m about to succumb to Hollywood-stoked despair and ennui, a movie like The Hunger Games comes along to rescue me…
Captain America: The First Avenger (review)
It’s now a tossup whether the best comic-book superhero movie of 2011 is X-Men: First Class or Captain America: First Avenger… But I’m leaning toward Captain America.
