There’s only one movie in theaters this holiday season where you can see tap, ballet, hip-hop, and other dance styles performed by CGI cat-people (or are they people-cats?) and you can bet it’s not the latest Star Wars movie. It’s also not exactly good, at least in the way that nearly everyone who watches movies…
The World War II satire Jojo Rabbit is a daring mockery with war-themed carnage as a surreal backdrop that combines misplaced idolization with an unconventional coming-of-age tale for a young boy. Indeed, filmmaker Taika Waititi (“Thor: Ragnarok”) is wading in rough waters with a strange take of unusual growing pains — particularly when his featured…
Interestingly, it is the audience who seems to be the ones getting hustled in director Chris Addison’s forgettable feminine con-artist comedy, The Hustle. In it, Oscar winner Anne Hathaway (“Les Misérables”) and funny fireball Rebel Wilson (“Isn’t It Romantic”) are paired as a couple of cute scammers looking to manipulate the finances out of clueless…
Isn’t It Romantic is extremely self aware, breaking the fourth wall with more frequency than “Deadpool.” It knows the tropes that define the rom-com genre and the rules at play. Thus, there is a desire to establish itself as something different. The problem here is — it can’t. It functions on the complexity level of…
After two heralded breezy and finger-snapping editions, the sassy songbirds of the Barden Bellas are back for a supposedly final installment, and sad to say it is not a charm the third time around in the lame, toe-tapping Pitch Perfect 3. In 2012 movie audience giddily fell for the vocalizing vixens of “Pitch Perfect” making…
I wasn’t there of course when the concept for this movie, The Brothers Grimsby, was bandied about by writers (including Sacha Baron Cohen), but I can only imagine it went kind of like this: “Hey, I’ve got an idea about two brothers who were separated by adoption as children. One goes on to become a…
Some romantic comedies can be conventional in nature and not really want to invest in anything substantive beyond the familiar follow-the-dots formula of lightweight lunacy. In director Christian Ditter’s romantic romp How to be Single the gloves come off and are thrown in an entirely different direction. Sure, one can applaud Ditter for not hanging any…
