If the mind of “National Lampoon’s Vacation” director, Harold Ramis, was to morph with the unkempt, lewd intellect of Bob Saget or Louis C.K., you’d have the framework for We’re the Millers. It mixes harmless family humor with blandly offensive material, creating a slapstick comedy that, against what some may think is a good mix,…
Masculinity, tortured and wounded, is clearly the meat on which Nicolas Winding Refn likes to gnaw, but he’s salivating over the subject a little too ridiculously with his latest feature, the violent revenge drama Only God Forgives. That intriguing title never lives up to its grand potential, as Refn approaches his theme of choice with…
While Despicable Me 2 may not contain as much charm or innocence of the original 2010 production, “Despicable Me,” it nevertheless includes enough fun, laughs, new characters and an interesting storyline to make it a fine family film in a season where good movie fare has certainly been difficult to come by. Again produced by…
Josh Lambert may have gone into the astral plane world of “The Further” to save his son in “Insidious,” but something isn’t done with him or his family just yet. We know this because the first creepy trailer for James Wan’s Insidious: Chapter 2 tells us so. Starting off well enough with a happy household,…
In this world of commercialistic glitz and glamor, it’s hard to come across a truly riveting story these days. But in Disconnect, viewers get just that, and it happens (surprisingly) to revolve around a social criticism of the crazily convoluted, always plugged-in world we live in. The film begins with a glimpse into the life…
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…
I’ve seen enough documentaries, especially those that regularly stream on Netflix, to recognize the hallmarks of what I can only label “vanity documentaries,” in the manner that the term vanity has been applied to subsidy presses. By this I mean that the filmmaker is an amateur — often wealthy, with too much time on their…
