Steve Jobs would have HATED this movie. Where Jobs the man was a revolutionary thinker outside the box, JOBS the movie is a swamp of cliches. Where Jobs the man was a detailed and exacting mass of conundrums, JOBS the film is a hodgepodge of carelessly assembled factoids, loose ends, facile conclusions, and haphazard montages. [...]
This time around, Superman has not only lost his red underpants, he's lost his identity-- and he used to have two! Remember Christopher Reeve's charming, bumbling Clark Kent who kept his cape under wraps around Margot Kidder's sassy Lois Lane, that is-- just until he'd explode out of his glasses and suit in order to [...]
It's great-- once it stops. The first frantic 45 minutes of filmmaker Baz ("Moulin Rouge") Luhrman's eye-popping, screen swollen, 3D, musical mashup of F. Scott Fitzgerald's mythic novel brought me to the brink of motion sickness. Then it settled down, and the dramatic interplay of these iconic characters, against the deeper backdrop of the American [...]
The cheap thrills of summer begin with the noisy, hyperactive and superficially entertaining third installment of IRON MAN 3—which pits Robert Downey Junior’s brash industrialist Tony Stark as the man in the can against a maniac called "The Mandarin." The third time's not the charm-- but in the words of one of my colleagues-- it [...]
The latest Tom Cruise film OBLIVION in which the superstar once again saves the world is a muted, muddled sci-fi fandango that finds Tom tangling with his identity. There are those who think the now eerily youthful looking Cruise seems more plastic than ever. No matter how many times I've see him on a talk [...]
It's the only number to be retired by all of baseball and belonged to the tough, multi-talented athlete Jackie Robinson who rose out of poverty in rural Georgia to break baseball's color barrier when he signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Written and directed by Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Mystic River), "42" is a [...]
I've recently experienced the crap shoot that is the college admissions process, though it did not-- unfortunately-- involve either Tina Fey or Paul Rudd. They would have made it infinitely more entertaining as they do here in ADMISSION, an engrossing, quirky comedy that is flawed but is among the better candidates for a movie outing [...]
Osama Bin Laden is dead. The chilling and detailed ZERO DARK THIRTY directed by Kathryn Bigelow (the first woman ever to win an Oscar for Best Director: THE HURT LOCKER) and written by Mark Boal tells us with great suspense and precision of the ten-year hunt for the terrorist leader, and his execution by Navy [...]
I have always loved this musical onstage, but was never so miserable as when I sat through all 157 minutes onscreen. LES MISERABLES--despite some exceptional musical performances--dies a torturous death by close-up at the hands of tone-deaf director Tom Hooper. "LES MIS" as we familiarly call it, is the theatrical extravaganza put to music by [...]
Ben Affleck has done it behind the camera again-- directed a first rate thriller! It's sleeker, sharper, and surer than his previous directorial work-- and it's already being touted as a possible Best Picture nominee: ARGO. It's a movie about making a movie, a story within a story, and as such is a great cinematic [...]
