James Franco and Sam Raimi return to Oz for the first time in Oz the Great and Powerful, but is the trip worth it? The answer is a resounding, “kind of.”
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Print Reviews
The ABCs of Death is a compilation of short films from 26 different directors, each assigned a letter of the alphabet. They were each given free reign to to choose any word they wanted beginning with that letter, and tasked with making a short film about death.
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True/False 2013: Leviathan is the most metal documentary you will ever watch about commercial fishing. Winter Go Away! is an impressive array of journalism and good filmmaking.
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Thursday is True/False Film Fest’s official opening, but Friday is when Columbia, Missouri’s surprising gem of a festival really gets the party kicked into high gear.
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Even though it yawns a bit when the last act begins to look too much like a traditional action movie, ‘John Dies at the End’ is a whole lot of B-movie fun.
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Since Hoult and Tomlinson don’t generate much heat and the story has zero surprises, there’s not any reason to stay invested in this dull fairy tale re-imagining. The film suffers from timing, I suppose, being the most recent in this lame fairy-tale update trend, which seems to exist only to let Hollywood’s VFX artists loose on properties that are immediately familiar to a global audience.
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‘Snitch’ is a character study that’s short on action and a treatise whose true purpose is to lecture the audience on the the evils of mandatory minimum sentencing for drug-related crimes.
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The credit for the warm undertones beneath the anguish should go to Haneke’s extraordinary actors, whose own life experience is on display here. It is key to the movie’s success that the upperclass Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) have a rich past together, especially since only glimpses of it are actually referred to in Haneke’s efficient, clear-eyed screenplay. It is this economy of theme paired with the subtle richness of character that make Amour so powerful.
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‘Identity Thief’ is a feckless, frustrating comedy with a dozen variations on the same fat joke.
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In the end Side Effects isn’t a magnum opus. It doesn’t stand in the same class as Traffic or Out Of Sight, but it does speak to Soderbergh’s talents that the film not only works, but is an overall solid thriller.
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As long as you know that you are sitting down to enjoy the latest Walter Hill film starring an aging Sylvester Stallone, then you should be well prepared for everything that follows.
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From writer/director Jonathan Levine (50/50, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane) comes a post-apocalyptic zombie love story take on William Shakespeare’s classic Romeo and Juliet which definitely has a pulse.
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While This Is Martin Bonner is a very thoughtful, well-acted, interesting character study, at a paltry 83 minutes, it could have survived another 15 or so to give some closure to the stories of Martin and Travis, who both seemed on the verge of a breakthrough in their lives.
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At the Sundance Film Festival, first-time director Meul O. presents a movie that straight-up indicts the U.S. government for a largely forgotten act of genocide with his movie Jiseul, a drama about the 1948 South Korean uprising on the island of Jeju, a nightmarish event that claimed thousands of lives.
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As a piece of cinema, Bastian Günther’s film should be commended for this kind of work, for Houston never just tosses a character component on the table for its audience to absorb, but instead dresses its scenes with subtle visual cues that tell a larger story.
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