Video Reviews

The leather man panties and hyper-stylized violence is back! Plus, more boobs! 300: Rise of an Empire is a teenage boy’s wet dream.

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Costner is essentially playing the same over-the-hill, reluctant-but-badass gun-toting hero that Willis has been playing for years, and in 3 Days to Kill, he’s even saddled with something more challenging than killing bad guys with names like The Albino and The Wolf — keeping a teenage daughter out of trouble.

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The satire is still there, albeit not as angry and way more obvious, and the targets have shifted ever so slightly to keep up with current events. Had the film been a carbon copy, though, there would have been no point in making it.

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As long as the subsequent films in the franchise avoid turning Ryan into a superhero and keep their plots at least somewhat rooted in reality, the Jack Ryan franchise may stand a fighting chance. At least they finally have the right actor.

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As Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) leaves his spotless, lonely high-rise Los Angeles apartment for work, he is surrounded by thousands of people doing the same thing—every one of them zoned into their own little bubble, talking to someone (or something) on devices that are networked into their home computers.

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Everything is fake—from Christian Bale’s hideous comb-over/toupee combo to Amy Adams’ English accent—in David O. Russell’s messy, hilarious crime comedy American Hustle.

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Even more so than usual in a McKay/Ferrell collaboration, the movie feels like string of sketches very loosely tied together — as if the plot only exists to expose how stale these kinds of comedic blueprints are in the first place.

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Out of the Furnace is one of those movies that spends so much time building mood and character that by the time the plot really kicks in, you realize it was in the service of nothing terribly special.

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As Marvel’s cinematic universe extends into its second phase, Thor: The Dark World finds itself sandwiched between movies seven and nine in the franchise (or one and three, depending on how you look at it).

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The new documentary Muscle Shoals, which opens this weekend at the Tivoli Cinemas in Westport (please check out their Kickstarter page to upgrade their projectors to digital and stay in business), posits that the spirit of community forged by the musicians that created this music was part of its magic, and listening to it in the movie, it’s hard to argue.

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Ultimately, what makes writer/director Gavin Hood’s streamlined adaptation of Ender’s Game successful is its devotion to the awakening conscience of its main character, criticized by some as “the innocent killer.”

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Inevitability is a theme that is foreshadowed, warned about, and then played out in grisly fashion throughout The Counselor, which is crammed with so much nihilistic philosophizing that it makes the fatalistic tirades of Killing Them Softly seem like Fried Green Tomatoes.

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Like most modern remakes, few of the character motivations remain ambiguous. It isn’t a deal-killer, but the script fills in too many of the blanks of the original with clearly drawn lines that lessen the film’s visceral impact.

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There is such detail in every frame that this is one movie you need to see in on the big screen to get the full effect.

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Englishman James Hunt (played by Chris Hemsworth) is a risk-taking womanizer, and Austrian Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) takes a calculated approach to everything, from romance to engine torque.

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