Why is the Twilight series exponentially more popular than the more intriguing “Interview with the Vampire?” Anne Rice’s Louis and Lestat witness history, carry around significant emotional baggage, and speak dialogue worthy of a screenwriter. The Twilight Saga vampires are wooden caricatures, repeat the 12th grade over and over again, and carry on some of…
It seems strange to criticize a movie for its beauty, especially considering the chief architect of that beauty is a filmmaker as visually and poetically gifted as Ang Lee, but beauty is exactly what fells the beast in Lee’s glossy Life of Pi. Adapted rather faithfully from Yann Martel’s celebrated 2001 novel of the same…
Dreamworks, which scored last year with “Kung Fu Panda 2” and earlier in 2012 with “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted,” brings another ambitious animated film to the screen with the telling of William Joyce’s book, Rise of the Guardians. And while not as colorful or giddy as the above-mentioned pictures, this combination of “The Polar…
Pat (Bradley Cooper) does not handle stress in a manner acceptable to society. When he unexpectedly comes home from work and discovers his wife in the shower with a co-worker, he beats the guy almost to death. His plea agreement with the courts sends him to a mental institution where they determine him to have…
Fittingly, the minuscule indie drama The Sessions, a bitsy biopic about the sexual awakening of iron lung inhabitant Mark O’Brien, is a movie of give and take. The actors give the most, while writer/director Ben Lewin, adapting the story from an article O’Brien wrote, mostly takes. It’s a bit of a dysfunctional relationship in some…
On paper, Bait 3D sounds like a hoot and a half. After all, the film was co-written and produced by B-movie extraordinaire Russell Mulcahy, and it’s about a supermarket which gets flooded during a tsunami and invaded by sharks. Alas, however, this Australian-produced shark thriller is underwhelming. Only occasionally showing signs of goodness, the picture…
In 2012, Abraham Lincoln is on currency, in hundreds of dusty books, and sitting in a chair in his own memorial at one end of the National Mall. His image is stale; he is not a man, but an unknowable symbol. Steven Spielberg, however, fashions the legend into a flesh and blood human being in…
