For scrawny 12-year old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein), life is up and down. Going up, however, does not mean moving up the ladder of success but only riding a cable car to do his “work” at the top of a mountain ski resort, a playground for wealthy tourists. Ursula Meier’s heartbreaking Sister, Switzerland’s submission for…
Terrible. If you have any standards for film, DO NOT see Spring Breakers. It is by far one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Director Harmony Korine scraps together 94 minutes of screen time that culminates into an utter disaster. There is no plot, not a single relatable character or any sort of saving…
It’s been done, this whole alien taking over a human’s body thing in movies. It’s been done and done better. The concept goes back at least to the 1950s with “The Thing from Another World” and the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Now, for the umpteenth time, we get the same premise — only…
Loud, confusing, pointless and plotless are not exactly words one likes to use in a film review, but in this case, these terms are more than an apt description of G.I. Joe: Retaliation, the second G.I. Joe movie (the Hasbro Studio generation, not the classic 1945 picture starring Robert Mitchum). And like the company’s last…
Set in Communist East Germany in the early 1980s, cold war paranoia is in full view in Christian Petzold’s Barbara, winner of the Silver Berlin Bear for Best Director at the Berlinale. In Barbara, Petzold has fashioned not only a superb character study but a film that illuminates the effects of oppression on the human…
DreamWorks Animation, often the poor stepbrother to Pixar, has had a pretty good run over the past two years with “Kung Fu Panda 2,” “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted” and “Rise of the Guardians.” That trend continues with The Croods, a wild, colorful tale about the end of the Neanderthals, continental drift, plate tectonics and…
U.S. Presidents have not always fared so well in Hollywood over the years. After all, Franchot Tone died of cancer in “Advise and Consent” (1962), Henry Fonda had to deal with the Reds blowing up everything in “Fail-Safe” (1964) and Fredric March was weakened and almost overthrown that same year in “Seven Days in May.”…
