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…
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…
If you were slightly underwhelmed with the first trailer for Oz: The Great and Powerful, you will find the second trailer makes up for it. Mostly. Released today by Walt Disney Pictures, it alludes, in greater detail, to a great war between Oz, a down-on-his-luck illusionist made out to be a great wizard and an…
Just when you’ve thought you’d seen all there was to see about zombies, along comes a movie like World War Z. Based off of the novel, “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” by Max Brooks, zombies are not the solitary creatures easily shot or stabbed. Now they act together as a…
Cloud Atlas is a challenge. It does not arrive as 99% of its film peers do, with a beginning, middle, and an end. Six different stories spanning over 500 years of time are woven together and make your mind work overtime not only keeping them apart, which is its job while you watch the film,…
