Movie Reviews
Movie
Based on Paul Lieberman’s Tales from the Gangster Squad, Gangster Squad has a good premise. It centers on Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), an ex-boxer who’s trying to be the main mob boss in L.A. in 1949. So ruthless that he chains a ...
Movie
The Impossible, a new film from Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage), benefits from the fact that it has built-in drama. Based on the true story of a family that somehow survived the horrible tsunami that ripped...
Movie
A drama about fracking? Are you fracking serious? Hard to imagine that discriminating director Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Milk) thought Matt Damon and John Krasinski’s Promised Land screenplay — which is based on a Dave E...
Flicks
We fully admit we have yet to see these three critics’ darlings: Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Zero Dark Thirty. But we spent countless hours in darkened theaters sitting through a slew of other movies. Some truly disa...
Movie
We read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in French class, saw the musical stage adaptation three times and know most of the words to the non-stop sung dialogue, so we’re no strangers to the story of ex-convict Jean Valjean. Impriso...
Movie
Overly long and excessively violent, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained isn’t as great of a movie as some critics make it out to be. And yet, Christoph Waltz’s performance is so terrific, it practically redeems a film. A vete...
Movie
We haven’t read the 2005 novel One Shot that’s the source material for Jack Reacher, the new thriller that stars Tom Cruise as Reacher, a renegade private investigator of sorts. But even if we had, we still can’t imagine we’d h...
Movie
Joyce Brewster (Barbra Streisand) is the kind of doting mother who can’t just let things be. And she’s really insecure. She thinks her son Andy (Seth Rogen) moved from their New Jersey home out to Cali just to get away from her...
Movie
Getting old is a bitch. At least that’s the point of This is 40, writer-director Judd Apatow’s sort-of sequel to 2007’s Knocked Up. The film centers on Debbie (Leslie Mann) and Pete (Paul Rudd), a couple (still) struggling with...
Movie
Based on “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate,” the article Mark O’Brien wrote for Sun magazine in May 1990, The Sessions isn’t as compelling as Breathing Lessons, an Academy award-winning 1996 documentary that addressed this story...