Have you ever had the feeling when you’re watching a movie that the initial premise is so good — so well-written and executed — that there’s no way that it could maintain that throughout the whole picture?
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Video Reviews
Riddick trades in all the macho clichés that Diesel has become known for in the Fast & Furious movies, but it lacks the impressive action scenes that make the last two films in the FF franchise guilty pleasures.
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Here’s my TV review with clips of David Lowery’s melancholy crime drama Ain’t Them Bodies Saints starring Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, and Ben Foster on KCTV5′s It’s Your Morning. The movie opens today in Kansas City at the Tivoli and Glenwood Arts theaters.
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Elysium is the first film in four years from writer/director Neill Blomkamp, who tackles class warfare and features a host of other political hot-button parallels from immigration and healthcare reform to drone strikes, but also throws in some campy ultra-violence.
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Opening at the Alamo Drafthouse in Kansas City this weekend is a remarkable achievement in the genre of documentary filmmaking called The Act of Killing that must be seen to be believed.
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2 Guns certainly doesn’t reinvent the buddy-cop genre, but it does play to its strengths without taking itself too seriously, which is where many of its brethren get tripped up.
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Here’s my KCTV5 review with clips from ‘The Wolverine,’ as well as my capsule print review from Lawrence.com.
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Any way you look at it, Grant’s shooting is an awful tragedy, and debates about the whether the amount of time served by the man who shot him was enough (11 months of a 2-year sentence) are completely warranted. Coogler’s intention, however, for this film is clear: to give voice and dignity to Oscar. This isn’t the story of two people and their chance trajectories ending in tragedy. It’s the story of the victim.
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The directing debut of Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, The Way, Way Back is a charming coming-of-age film that overcomes a lot of pitfalls of the genre because its protagonist is so beautifully inexpressive and uncomfortable to begin with that when he finally does make the small strides needed to come out of his shell, it feels like a huge triumph.
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If big-budget summer movies are supposed to be entertaining, escapist fun, then Pacific Rim is a perfect example of that. I’ll be damned if del Toro’s silly, exuberant, dramatic Kaiju flick didn’t give me that “rah-rah” feeling, amplified of course by the sight of giant monsters and robots bludgeoning each other while towering over our puny cities and coasts.
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Man of Steel is like The Dark Knight trilogy drained of all its moral complexity and vibrant storytelling. What’s left is an oppressive movie filled with a blaring seriousness, inconsistent production design, mundane conflict, heavy exposition and a huge amount of super-destructive action that leads to nothing.
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The actors in each movie don’t have much to do, but at least one of these movies understands where its strength lies — in putting bodies in constant motion and thumbing its nose at the laws of physics.
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Abrams has grown into a confident cinematic storyteller, capable of setting high stakes, staging impossible situations, and having his characters get out of them, one after another, with a combination of exciting action and just enough of their intellect.
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At its core, Iron Man 3 is a screwball comedy about Tony Stark and Pepper Potts, post-intergalactic invasion. What makes it so enjoyable as formulaic escapist entertainment are the little tweaks that Black has made to the template.
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His slow-motion prowess and action-film chops add a surreal element, but Bay’s camera leers at the world the same way his characters do. He wants to celebrate his “heroes” at the same time he’s making fun of them, but his over-the-top delivery gives him away. On top of that, the constant narration gives away too much of the mystery of their motives and it ends up trying way too hard to be funny.
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