Movie Reviews

Monstrous

Animal, er, Monster House

Everybody loves Mike and Sully, the scaresome monster team from Monsters, Inc. So, maybe they’ll be happy to see them again as college students in Monsters University. So happy that they won’t mind the clichéd ...

Growl and grumble

Kneel before Zod

Look! Up on the screen! It’s absurd! It’s inane! It’s Snyder’s Man! Zack Snyder sucker-punches Richard Lester’s Superman II to date Hollywood’s final say on how to film a comic book. Credit the man of ...

Thames travel

The way to Londontown

A monumental achievement in cinema-as-time-travel. Writer, director Julien Temple (Absolute Beginners, The Filth and the Fury) and his frequent editor, Caroline Richards, availed themselves of the opportunity to boil down 800 hours of sparklingly restored ...

Before Midnight: For starters, you’re crazy

Modern Greek drama

As Before Midnight draws near to its titular hour, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) gets a mid-argument chance to make a list of his beloved Celine’s (July Delpy) flaws. “Well, for starters, you’re fucking crazy,” he begins ...

The cranky conjurer

Fool me once...

If you’ve already had your fill of illusory summer movie magic, why not set aside the comic books and spend some time watching the Iron Man of misrepresentation. In the hands of crackerjack conjurer Ricky ...

Dammit, Jim

Boldly going nostalgic

Star Trek into Darkness is a showcase for director J.J. Abrams at his most J.J. Abrams-y. Do you identify Abrams by his fondness for lens flares? You will not be disappointed. Lens Flare spends enough ...

The "great" character

Gatsby née Gatz

Anyone who’s seen the screamy, thudding trailers for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby knows that it is not a paint-by-numbers cinematic re-presentation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegant, economic novel. The numbers are there, of course: ...

Lumbering Man

More metal mancrush

Iron Man 3 is, like its hero Tony Stark at the outset and Stark’s girlfriend Pepper Potts at another point in the story, a hot mess. It does what third installments tend to do: revisit ...

No gain, all pain

In order to help underwrite their addiction to steroids and dumbbells (and also to impress the bitches), a trio of meathead bodybuilders resorts to a life of crime by kidnapping an unscrupulous Florida businessman (Tony ...

Malick’s (un)romantic musings

The world is poisoned and so are we.

"Why do we come back down?” asks Marina (Olga Kurylenko) in Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder. Why, after mounting to transcendence, do we sink back willy-nilly into everything we sought to transcend? To take an ...