Movie Reviews

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 ...

Shut up, racist

Black in blue

Television veteran Chadwick Boseman gives a fine, canny performance in 42 as Jackie Robinson, the man who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Well, except for when he talks ...

Sister act

Down under wonder

The studio rep described it as “Dreamgirls, only happier.” A stop at the concession stand to pick up an air-sickness bag seemed in order. Well, blow me down! The Sapphires is a feel good movie ...

Starbuck, king of conception

How do you say Neil Simon in French? A professional sperm donor, going by the name Starbuck (Patrick Huard), anonymously fathers what amounts to his own chapter of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada. Eventually, ...

Impossible Germany

Lore: History by the losers

Lore is a loser’s history of World War II, a less fantastical, more moving post-apocalyptic wasteland film out of Australia than the one that starred Mel Gibson back in 1979. Less fantastical because it’s set ...