Critical Quips

Oblivion

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 09:13:00 -0400

If only it were less easy to laugh at “Oblivion,” a lackluster science-fiction adventure with Tom Cruise that, even before its opening, was groaning under the weight of its hard-working, slowly fading star and a title that invites mockery of him and it both

-4/19/2013

Dead Man Down

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 17:46:15 -0500

Beatrice doesn’t say coppers, which is too bad, because the movie might have been better if its Danish director, Niels Arden Oplev, had played with the genre clichés stuffed in this turkey instead of going for straight-up action.

3/8/2013

Dead Man Down

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 17:45:06 -0500

Yet while Colin Farrell and his sensitive, hardworking eyebrows help keep it from becoming a full-bore lampoon, the gangland clichés, nutty plot and seemingly random casting choices (F. Murray Abraham, Armand Assante, Isabelle Huppert) stoke your hopes that true movie madness may rise out of the darkening shadows and pessimism.

-3/8/2013

Oz the Great and Powerful

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:04:26 -0500

When another woman’s lover chases him, Oz hops in a hot-air balloon and, after riding out a storm, arrives in a garishly hued, digitally rendered land that brings to mind the (bad) cover of a prog rock album and announces that, while we aren’t in Kansas anymore, neither are we in movie dreamland.

3/7/2013

Oz the Great and Powerful

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:02:00 -0500

…maybe they could have jabbed some sense into the director Sam Raimi, best known for the first “Spider-Man” movies, and his five male producers, and then used those needles to shred Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire’s script.

3/7/2013

Oz the Great and Powerful

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:58:12 -0500

The bigger bummer, though, is that the studio that has enchanted generations with Tinker Bell and at least a few plucky princesses has backed a movie that has such backward ideas about female characters that it makes the 1939 “Wizard of Oz” look like a suffragist classic.

-3/7/2013

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 15:28:29 -0500

Heads pop like Champagne corks in “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2,” the final chapter in the megamillion-dollar series about love, war and franchise immortality.

-11/15/12

The Man With the Iron Fists

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 08:58:51 -0400

But RZA, with his sleepy eyes and an affect so laid-back it’s a wonder he can remain standing for minutes at a time, is too recessive a screen presence to make the character pop, much less hold your interest.

- 11/1/12

The Man With the Iron Fists

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 08:54:00 -0400

Directed by the hip-hop impresario turned would-be auteur RZA (a k a Robert Diggs), of the group Wu-Tang Clan, ”Iron Fists” is a sweetly sincere, lightly cheeky gloss on the film genre wuxia (“martial chivalry”) and those entertainments known for their flying swordsmen (and women), crouching tigers, hidden dragons and often fabulous hair, gowns and wirework.

- 11/1/12

Looper

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 08:34:01 -0400

It’s a juicy premise, ripe for the squeezing, though it takes a while to get over Joe’s looking less like a young Mr. Willis and more like Keanu Reeves with a dash of Marlon Brando doing Japanese minstrel for “The Teahouse of the August Moon.”

- 9/27/12

Toronto Film Festival - Cloud Atlas

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 10:39:00 -0400

Cloud Atlas… weaves together multiple stories through a lot of airy cosmic convenience and a cavalcade of false noses. Most of these are worn by Tom Hanks, a man of a thousand honkers; some are worn by Halle Berry. Jim Broadbent appears to wear his own schnoz.

-9/14/2012

Blockbusters Yield to Magic

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 15:22:00 -0400

MD: If I were running a studio (ha!), I would take the money that I’d set aside for the next bad idea (like a remake of “Total Recall”) and give a handful of directors, tested and less so — Todd Haynes, Barry Jenkins, Kelly Reichardt, Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Aaron Katz, Benh Zeitlin, Damien Chazelle — $10 million apiece to make whatever they want, as long as the results come in with an R rating or below and don’t run over two hours.

AO: Well, that would be cool.

- 8/8/12

Daddy Day Care

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:31:58 -0400

Every so often a comedy comes along that’s so flat, pointless and grimly unfunny that you have to ask yourself: What in the world happened to Eddie Murphy’s career?

- 5/9/03

Ladder 49

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:19:02 -0400

Given this emphasis on action over introspection, special effects over everyday affect, it’s no surprise that by the time the story loops back to the present with Jack groaning under debris and running out of oxygen, you know as little about this guy as you did at the beginning.

- 10/1/04

Ladder 49

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:17:12 -0400

Pegged as a true-to-life story, one meant to put a lump in your throat and a tear in your eye, this is essentially a male weepie about strong, simple men and the strong, simple women behind them, and as such it’s platitudinous rubbish.

- 10/1/04

Ladder 49

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:16:04 -0400

A sob story about a Baltimore fireman, the film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Jack Morrison, a once and future hero who battles untold infernos, saves untold lives and quaffs untold draft beers to become a fireman’s fireman, the kind who fearlessly enters burning buildings and puts everything at risk, including a picture-perfect family and a self so radically unexamined, so thin and vaporous, it’s a wonder it doesn’t drift off the screen along with all the billows of enveloping smoke.

- 10/1/04

Ladder 49

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:14:44 -0400

In “Ladder 49” fires smolder and rage and generally act in a far more lively and persuasive fashion than any of the men struggling to put them out.

- 10/1/04

The Forgotten

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:11:47 -0400

As Telly, a Brooklyn mother in mourning, Ms. Moore delivers a performance that has all the emotional commitment of a bored kid playing with a light switch.

- 11/24/04

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:09:40 -0400

Written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber, making his first and what may be his last feature, “DodgeBall” reveals an almost pathological anxiety about homosexuality of the sort that’s generally best worked out in a therapist’s office.

- 6/18/04

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:08:18 -0400

It would be easier to dismiss “DodgeBall” as a bump on the trajectory of Stiller’s comic evolution if not for such recent duds as “Duplex” and “Envy” and the aggressively lazy “Starsky & Hutch.”

- 6/18/04