Every so often a movie will come along that captivates movie reviewers and the statements you read about it make you wonder if, perhaps, someone at my theater switched it out for some inferior test version. Looper is a perfect example of that. This time-travel film stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Joe (everyone in the film […]
Richard Gere is back with a new film called Arbitrage. Gere plays a business tycoon/wheeler-dealer who seems to be the darling of Wall Street but, like many such perspectives of recent years, appearances can be deceiving—and so can Gere’s character. The real draw of the film is in the evil way it brings us into […]
I had another good weekend for movie-going catching two. First up was Headhunters, a Norwegian film that caught me entirely by surprise. Roger Brown is a player of the highest order. He’s clearly one of Norway’s top vocational headhunters finding talent for only the largest and most successful companies. He has a stunningly beautiful live-in girlfriend […]
I wasn’t going to see The Cabin in the Woods. Its marketing efforts somehow managed to totally fail with respect to garnering any of my interest. I saw a preview a while back and it looked like another campy, quirky horror/slasher film that would be quickly forgotten. Then a friend of mine from Penn Gamers, […]
Two psychiatric giants intellectually joust in A Dangerous Method. This biopic on the complex relationship between Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Jung’s patient/mistress (played by Keira Knightley) looked riveting from the previews. I was sold on the concept from the outset. The film comes from David Cronenberg who knows how to present a highly-disturbing story. Initially the film was everything I expected. I […]
As 2011 came to a close I found myself seriously behind on my yearly movie count (that is first-run movies I see each year at a theater). In a bid to get the number up to a respectable level I talked my friends into a movie marathon day on Sunday where we managed to stuff […]
Take Shelter is the story of a seemingly plain Ohio husband and father who is suddenly beset by a serious of eerie hallucinations and dreams that drive him to worry about his own mental health. Should he heed the portentous signals or commit himself to psychological therapy or more? The acting here is spot-on. The lead […]
The term “The Ides of March” refers, in modern parlance, to an impending doom. It’s most common use is in the William Shakespeare play Julius Caesar who recounts a seer warning Caesar in advance of his assassination to “beware the Ides of March.” In that case it was simply a reference to the middle of […]
An opportunistic Irish cop teams up with a by-the-book FBI agent to go after a local group of drug smugglers in The Guard. This movie, starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle, introduces us to Sgt. Gerry Boyle (Gleeson), who just happens to be a cop from Ireland. In fact, this is the first oddity of […]
A pure sense of hope against a world filled with callous motivations.
The previews for Super 8 make it crystal clear that Steven Spielberg was involved with the film and suggest he played a pretty big role in every part of its development. The end product, quite heavily, feels as if director J.J. Abrams set out to create an homage to Spielberg with this major release. Many films […]
This past week I finally caught up with Bradley Cooper‘s latest film, Limitless. The concept is one that’s been touched on before but not quite to this degree. Cooper’s character, Eddie Morra, is a rather typical, average guy, depressed and just sliding along in life. He’s a mess. He tells everyone he’s got a book […]