Reimagined RoboCop Back Laying Down the Law There’s no doubt that a big budget remake of director Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 satirical, hyper-violent 1987 sci-fi classic RoboCop always felt like a bad idea. There was no way a Hollywood studio, in this case Sony Pictures and MGM, would allow any of the deep, dark, unsentimentally brutal […]

Imagination Runs Wild in Idiosyncratic LEGO Movie I can’t say I was looking forward to The LEGO Movie. Much like Transformers or G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (or their sequels), the whole idea seemed like nothing more than an extended commercial solely engineered to sell millions of dollars in toys and nothing else. As […]

Clooney’s Monuments Men a Well-Intentioned Disappointment George Clooney’s latest directorial effort The Monuments Men is both too much and too little both at the exact same time. The film is an episodic endeavor attempting to tell a story much larger and more fragmented than its 118 minute running time allows to be easily processed. At […]

Bloodless Vampire Academy Doesn’t Make the Grade Vampire Academy isn’t so much bad as it is pointless. A weird amalgam of Mean Girls, a Harry Potter adventure and a random episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” director Mark Waters and writer Daniel Waters have taken author Richelle Mead’s popular source material and not done a […]

Gloria is a stunning masterwork told with passionate confidence, the whole thing anchored by a performance from García that’s titanic in its self-contained luminosity.

Winslet is superb. She doesn’t cut corners, refuses to soften the edges, making sure Adele doesn’t become some sort of caricature of feminine regret and disappointment while at the same time not asking the audience to warm to her in ways that would feel forced or unnatural.

That Awkward Moment so quickly devolves into something reprehensible and abhorrent it almost feels like I’m being disingenuous when I try to claim there was a good movie hiding here before it all went tragically wrong. But there was, make no mistake, that fact only making the film as a whole that much more a dispiriting experience when all is finally said and done.

Intriguing Vermeer an Underdeveloped Portrait In all honesty, I am not quite sure I get all the fuss and acclaim for the documentary Tim’s Vermeer. Do I respect it? Certainly. Filmed over an eight year period, following inventor and visionary tech wizard Tim Jenison (it’s doubtful the Desktop Revolution – look it up – would […]

Well-Meaning Shelter Does Its Subjects a Disservice Agnes ‘Apple’ Bailey (Vanessa Hudgens) has escaped. She’s 16, frightened, desperate and extremely angry, living with her junkie prostitute of a mother June (Rosario Dawson) proving to be untenable. Worse, she thinks she might be pregnant, making every move she makes even more a complicated burden. Turning to […]