REVIEW SYNOPSIS: Sluggishly paced, taking few chances and not nearly as engaging as it should be, the second installment of the popular trilogy still maintains enough interest to be enjoyable, thanks in large part to interesting supporting characters and a more in-depth look at the world that can host such sport.

MY REVIEW:

SYNOPSIS: Hunger Games survivors Katniss and Peeta find themselves once again in a battle to the death, this time with other Hunger Games winners.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Mostly good performances from leads Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson, with solid secondary performances by Jeffrey Wright and Amanda Plummer; interesting glimpses of the world outside of District 12 and the Capitol.
CONS: Bland and uninteresting turns by many of the recurring characters, including hammy performances by villains Donald Sutherland and Philip Seymour Hoffman; sluggish, faltering beginning that never fully allows the movie to gain its footing; only fitfully suspenseful; routine screenplay and obvious direction; heavy-handed treatment of themes and ideas.

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REVIEW SYNOPSIS: Stiff, surprisingly bloodless adaptation of a classic science fiction novel, maintaining a certain fidelity to details but neutering much of the source material’s key thematic materials.

MY RATING:

SYNOPSIS: After aliens have attacked earth, Earth’s International Fleet recruits young Ender Wiggin to train for, and ultimately fight, the next battle.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Good supporting young cast….
CONS: …wasted by given absolutely nothing to do; surprisingly bland performances from the leads; hammy performances from the supporting cast members, especially seasoned veterans like Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley; routine screenplay that never fully engages; unremarkable direction.
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REVIEW SYNOPSIS: More technically adept and visually breathtaking than emotionally compelling, Alfonso Cuarón’s follow-up to Children of Men immerses without ever fully engaging.

MY RATING:

SYNOPSIS: Two astronauts in near-earth orbit find themselves stranded and in need of a way back home when debris from a destroyed satellite collides with their space shuttle.

MY REVIEW:

PROS: Impressive concept; well-executed suspense and genuine sense of danger; outstanding special effects; striking visuals.
CONS: Unnecessary introduction; clichéd approach to character and theme, hampered by undemanding performances from its leads; heavy-handed (yet still effective) symbolism and philosophy.

“Life in space is impossible,” a caption reads at the opening of director Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, something, perhaps, the audience should know but that Cuarón and his brother Jonás (who co-wrote the screenplay), perhaps, do not trust his audience to fully comprehend.  Forget what they should, by now, have learned in seventh-grade science class, or though common sense and logic, or even through fifty-plus years of space programs since the Soviet Union lobbed Yuri Gagarin around our pale blue dot.  Surely moviegoers, many of whom have spent countless hours watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, Marooned, or even Apollo 13, understand a setting like near-earth orbit enough to know that space has no air (and therefore no sound), that temperatures bounce between too cold and too hot, and that lack of friction turns even the smallest piece of debris into a high-powered bullet.  Regardless of intent, this simple setup seems like a misstep.
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REVIEW SYNOPSIS: Director Edgar Wright concludes the Cornetto Trilogy with the tastiest morsel of all, a lean yet loving tribute to John Wyndham, Jack Finney, and Ira Levin that never skimps on inspired comedy or genuine emotion.

MY RATING:

SYNOPSIS: More than 20 years after they attempted to complete the infamous Golden Mile, Gary King invites his old school friends to return to the town of Newton Haven to make it to the World’s End, the final pub along the Mile, only to discover that the town has been taken over by robots.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Insightful screenplay; interesting characters portrayed by compelling actors; very funny; good blend of action, acting, and ideas.
CONS: At times feels overstuffed.
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REVIEW SYNOPSIS: Despite an interesting heist element, above average action, and glimpses of an intriguing future, Neill Blomkamp’s follow-up to his surprise hit District 9 lacks subtlety, genuine social conscience, and intelligence.

MY REVIEW:

SYNOPSIS: After an accident that exposes him to lethal doses of radiation, Max DeCosta agrees to pull a heist that ultimately will take him to the space station Elysium, where he can be cured.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Alice Braga, somewhat sympathetic as a mother who wants to bring her daughter to Elysium to cure her illness; good sequence involving an information heist; intriguing vision of a Los Angeles slum.
CONS: Mindless screenplay and direction lacking subtlety; flat characters that never develop; world makes very little sense.
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REVIEW SYNOPSIS: Enjoyable if forgettable, The Wolverine’s balancing of comic book superhero adventure and existential thriller never fully engages as either.

MY RATING:

SYNOPSIS: Haunted by the death of Jean Grey, Logan travels to Japan to meet with a former Japanese soldier, whom he saved during the bombing of Nagasaki, who offers him the chance to become mortal again.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Good fight sequence on the outside of a bullet train; humorous sequence as Logan and Mariko check in to a love motel; Rila Fukushima’s Yukio.
CONS: Routine performance by Hugh Jackman as the title character; bland villains and flat suspense; sluggish screenplay riddled with clichés; James Mangold’s uninspired direction.
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REVIEW SYNOPSIS: Despite impressive action and effects, Guillermo Del Toro sends a labored, often lifeless love letter to the giant monster genre.

MY REVIEW:

SYNOPSIS: When giant monsters rise from a portal beneath the Pacific Ocean, humanity engages them in battle with an army of behemoth robots piloted by pairs of human beings.  When the struggle continues for more than ten years, master pilot Raleigh Beckett is called back in to service for one last surge.

MY REVIEW
PROS: Incredible monster design; stunning action sequences; Charlie Day’s amusing turn as a xenobiologist and “kaiju” groupie; Ron Perlman as a dealer of black market alien remains.
CONS: Charisma free leads in Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, and Rinko Kikuchi; routine, derivative, and clichéd screenplay, allowing interesting subplots to be overtaken by uninspired central plot; unmemorable dialogue spoken by mostly dull characters.
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REVIEW SYNOPSIS: Overly long, sloppily scripted, needlessly violent, with changes that need not—and in some instances, should not—have been made, Zack Snyder’s telling of the classic superhero’s origins, despite some good touches, never coheres into a unified whole.

MY RATING:

SYNOPSIS: Kryptonian scientist Jor-El sends his only son to Earth as his own world perishes.  The boy grows to manhood and learns of his identity and extraordinary powers as a renegade general from his home planet demands his surrender.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Good cast, with strong performances by Russell Crowe and Amy Adams; incredible rendering of Krypton; small, standout scenes.
CONS: Muddy, redundant script; too much action; too little character development, with the main characters underfinished; a major change in the title character that goes against his primary image.

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REVIEW SYNOPSIS: Though it starts strongly, the sophomore journey of the fresh-faced crew of the starship Enterprise covers too little new ground.

MY REVIEW:

SYNOPSIS:  When a rogue Starfleet agent attacks a secret archive, Captain James T. Kirk is tasked with hunting him down and terminating him.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Good opening sequence; strong interaction between Kirk and Spock; good turns by Karl Urban and John Cho.
CONS: Anemic, especially in its revelations; far too derivative of the previous movie; laughable emotional sequences; action scenes that drag on far too long.

Star Trek Into Darkness, director J. J. Abrams’s follow-up to 2009’s Star Trek, is everything its predecessor was, only too much more so.  This isn’t necessarily a good thing, though several good things work in its favor.  Abrams’s gamble with making over Gene Roddenberry’s classic space opera with a new perspective on a much-beloved universe and fresh faces on seasoned characters reaped a handsome payoff, though astute audience members wondered if he could sustain what often seemed a one-picture trick.  They had a right to question how a crop of young actors possibly could play roles so identified with elder thespians that they wove their dramatic tics into the fabric of their characters.  Loyal fans, by contrast, knowing the full future history of the United Federation of Planets and the floor plans of the NCC-1701 U.S.S. Enterprise down to the last rivet, expressed honest trepidation at possible revisions to Roddenberry’s timeline, to say nothing of its philosophical underpinnings.  The resulting Star Trek was an entertaining if occasionally brainless affair, balancing well the expectations of both a summer movie crowd and faithful Trekkers despite dangling plot lines and scientific rationales bent into configurations that would snap the most pliable rubber.

But it worked even after the novelty wore off, and proffered challenges for a sequel.  Could Abrams and company make a follow-up that was less cluttered with the need to make the new timeline work and more focused on the things that made Roddenberry’s utopian vision compelling—namely, character and story?
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REVIEW SUMMARY: Messy and needlessly convoluted, lacking much of the cleverness and insight of Iron Man and Marvel’s The Avengers, Iron Man 3 still engages thanks to director Shane Black’s remarkable set pieces.

MY REVIEW:

SYNOPSIS: As Tony Stark deals with the emotional fallout of his previous adventure with the Avengers, the terrorist knwon as the Mandarin strikes targets in the U.S., once more causing Stark to return to service as Iron Man.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Watchable action sequences; good twist on the Mandarin character.
CONS: Characters too broadly drawn; routine and at times clichéd screenplay; feels smaller than previous efforts.

The biggest threat posed in Iron Man 3, the first post–Marvel’s The Avengers superhero movie featuring a member of Joss Whedon’s groundbreaking team-up, is neither Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) and his group nor the Mandarin’s (Ben Kingsley) terrorist bombing plot, but scope itself.  Iron Man worked because director Jon Favreau injected independent film sensibilities into a blockbuster comic book movie, something that other directors either never attempted or tried unsuccessfully.  This hampered Iron Man 2, a soulless placeholder that, for all its numerous, crippling faults, still gave us Garry Shandling and Sam Rockwell in a popular superhero picture.
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REVIEW SUMMARY: An eclectic, enjoyable mix of fiction and nonfiction suffering only from one or two significant absences.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: 17 remarkable stories and four insightful essays all dealing with our simian cousins.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: The strength of the fiction included in the anthology, from groundbreaking genre classics such as Leigh Kennedy’s “Her Furry Face” and Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love” to lesser-known tales such as Gustav Flaubert’s “Quidquid Volueris”; interesting essays from Jess Nevins and Scott Cupp on apes in literature and comics, respectively.
CONS: Odd if understandable exclusions; one or two obvious inclusions; the editor’s own contribution on apes in cinema a bit too brief.

If one wanted to get technical, any story featuring a human being is an ape story; zoologist Desmond Morris even identified us as such in his 1967 book The Naked Ape.  So our fascination with gorillas, chimps, and orangutans, among others, in ethology and in popular culture, should come as no surprise; after all, our nearest genetic cousins share so many of our features that we cannot help but feel kinship and awe.  We gaze into these alien faces and of course see ourselves.
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REVIEW SUMMARY: Often visually arresting sequences never save this homage to 1970s science fiction films from flat characters, routine action, and uninspired direction.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Decades after an alien invasion, a memory-wiped drone technician begins to question his assignment after an astronaut who resembles a woman in his dreams crash lands amid the rubble of a ruined earth.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Breathtaking imagery of a world devastated by an alien invasion.
CONS: Clichéd characters who never generate much life or interest, especially in the affectless performances by Tom Cruise and Olga Kurylenko; uninvolving direction by Joseph Kosinski; generic, uninvolving action sequences; flat screenplay heavily reliant on obvious plot twists; noisy score by Anthony Gonzalez and Joseph Trapenese.
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REVIEW SUMMARY: Dumb, noisy, and ultimately pointless reboot of Sam Raimi’s groundbreaking picture shows as much life as the revenants shambling across the screen.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Five friends meet at a derelict cabin in the woods, where one finds an ancient book deep within a cellar strewn with decaying animal carcasses.  When one utters an incantation scrawled in its pages, it summons the demons living in the woods.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Occasionally interesting shots.
CONSs: Generic characters and situations; strained pace; fumbled misdirection; routine direction; underfinished screenplay; poor nods to the earlier movies.
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REVIEW SUMMARY: Well-executed set pieces, clever touches, and tongue-in-cheek manner manage to save Bryan Singer’s mostly by-the-numbers fantasy adventure.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Farm boy Jack accepts a payment of beans for a horse, which sprout into a beanstalk beneath his home up to a world of Giants who are none too happy being relegated to a land away from humans.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Efficient direction from Singer, who finds a good balance between action and humor; reasonably good casting (especially of Stanley Tucci as Roderick and Ewan McGregor as Elmont); amusing, often clever sight gags; interesting blending of the classic English and Cornish folk tales.
CONS: Largely bland leading man and woman; character motivations at times make no sense; script’s blending of folk tales not smooth and starts too slowly.

It must be a challenge to make a fantasy movie in the wake of Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (to say nothing of the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter franchise), especially when it comes to making movies out of other successful series, each more anemic that the last.  Challenging and even foolhardy; how many of even the genre’s most devoted fans would bother to sit through, say, Joe Johnston offering a cinematic tour of one of Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels, or even (wait for it) a Zack Snyder–helmed rendition of Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Sha-na-nara?  Even scarier, how many would want to?
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REVIEW SUMMARY: A pretentious, self-indulgent, and ultimately silly first feature from director Panos Cosmatos that never captures the erratic grace or fitful elegance of early 1980s trash science fiction cinema.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: At the Arboria Institute in the early 1980s, scientist Barry Nyle performs experiments using odd metaphysical technologies on the mind of a captive young woman.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Michael Rogers, who looks precisely as a mad scientist should in a trash classic; unique attempts to give the visual and aural textures of a science fiction movie from the 1980s; odd, occasionally effective imagery, intriguing music from Jeremy Schmidt…
CONS: …all of which in the service of Cosmatos’s obtuse and uninvolving script and painfully redundant direction; set design and visual cues borrowed too heavily from other, better movies and directors; a finished product that never quite convinces it is of the period.
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REVIEW SUMMARY: Plodding, ponderous, and ultimately pretentious, Peter Jackson’s prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy never reaches its predecessor’s epic heights.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Gandalf the Gray and a gathering of Dwarves enlist Hobbit Bilbo Baggins into a quest to reclaim treasure stolen by the dragon Smaug.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Breathtaking realization of the riddle scene and the goblin kingdom beneath the Misty Mountains; impressive rendering of goblins, Gollum, and the brief glimpse of Smaug.
CONS: Lumberingly paced; script stretching the source material to excruciating lengths; Peter Jackson’s restless yet surprisingly murky direction; 48 frames-per-second resolution giving the entire movie a cheesy look.

They’ve made a mistake.  Several, actually.  Though clogged with too many songs and meals, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, or There and Back Again benefits from a deft touch and, despite occasional lapses, an elegance in its telling, even when the twee narrative spills into the annoyingly cute.  While it occasionally touches on big themes, it recounts the adventures of the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins, the wizard Gandalf the Grey, and a band of Dwarves out to reclaim familial treasure from the Dragon Smaug in a way that never bogs down.  Perhaps it lacks the epic sweep of The Lord of the Rings, but its relatively simple quest makes it more immediate and, in a way, more engaging.

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MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: James Bond returns in a visually lush and emotionally involving adventure that benefits from a strong script and one of the best casts the series has seen in its 50-year history.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Outstanding cast, specifically Daniel Craig and Judi Dench in the forefront as James Bond and M, respectively, with Javier Bardem as the truly insane Silva; kinetic opening sequence; exceptional screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan; Sam Mendes balancing action and character nearly seamlessly; Roger Deakins’s outstanding cinematography.
CONS: Thomas Newman’s serviceable but unmemorable score; occasional plot contrivances that allow events to become too convenient; underuse of Bérénice Marlohe; odd elements that may disturb the series’ continuity for some.
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MY RATING:

SUMMARY: Audacious, daring, and never uninteresting, yet the execution falls far short of its visionary ambitions.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Visually absorbing and lush; interlocked narratives that run the gamut from historical journey to far-future adventure.
CONS: Stories too jaggedly pieced together and never compelling on their own; intriguing cast playing things too broadly.

Tom Tykwer and the siblings Wachowski deserve a good deal of credit for attempting to bring David Mitchell’s sprawling novel Cloud Atlas to the screen.  Alas, they also must accept the blame for so much of what goes wrong with Cloud Atlas, which, like David Lynch’s completely wrongheaded adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, retains much of the structure and many of the characters but fails to understand the core theme.  Or perhaps they understood it, but felt they needed to change it to meet studio and audience needs.  The former seems more plausible; the creators of The Matrix Trilogy and the director of Run, Lola, Run and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer certainly have shown themselves willing to tackle bold projects, even when they demonstrate glib comprehension.

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REVIEW SUMMARY: Ambitious and often clever, Rian Johnson’s first foray into science fiction never quite pieces its philosophical content together with its thriller elements.

RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Time travel hitman Joe begins to have doubts about his chosen vocation when his next target is…himself.

MY REVIEW:

PROS: Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis, as Joe and his older counterpoint, respectively; notable supporting cast, especially Jeff Daniels and Paul Dano; good blend of science fiction and noir in a well-rendered future; effective set pieces and intriguing use of time travel tropes.

CONS: Second act slows to a crawl to introduce philosophical elements that do not mesh well with its suspense narrative; important story details revealed late, giving the story uneven structure; unconvincing makeup to make Gordon-Levitt look like Willis; Emily Blunt’s bland Sara.

In the future, time travel exists but has been outlawed, so of course only outlaws have time travel.  The Rainmaker, a mob boss headquartered in Shanghai who, based what audiences see of the year 2072, studied the methods of Pol Pot as well as Al Capone, sends those he wants taken care of thirty years into the past—the past being 2044—and into the sights of the loopers, hit men contracted specifically to eliminate said undesirables.  (Though one wonders why the Rainmaker, who appears to wield enormous influence in this future overrun by gangs, would go to the trouble of using time travel to rid the world of his enemies, rather than simply eighty-sixing them in his own time period without consequence.  Perhaps with absolute power comes absolute deniability.)  The loopers obey only a few rules: when you’ve killed your mark and discover bars of gold on his body (based on the loopers’ Kansas City headquarters in 2044, women need not apply), it means your loop has been closed—you are, in essence, responsible for your own execution—and your contract is terminated.  (Loopers never see the faces of those they kill because their targets wear hoods.)  Another, and perhaps even more important condition, is that the looper must not let the target escape.

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REVIEW SUMMARY: Covering almost no new cinematic ground, director Pete Travis and screenwriter Alex Garland nonetheless concoct a tight, gritty, and resiliently dark picture featuring John Wagner’s and Carlos Ezquerra’s classic character.

RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: While investigating the deaths of three individuals in the 200-story Peach Trees tower, Judge Joe Dredd and rookie Judge Cassandra Anderson become the prey of drug lord Madeline Madrigal and her army.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Karl Urban, disappearing beneath the helmet to become Dredd; Olivia Thirlby’s nuanced Anderson; Lena Headey’s menacing turn as Ma-Ma; Alex Garland’s lean, spare script; Pete Travis’s tight direction; exceptional action sequences; good blend of gritty realism and fantastical ultraviolence, even when using slow-motion techniques.
CONS: Worldbuilding of Mega-City One sacrificed for speed and efficiency; unassuming score from Paul Leonard-Morgan; competent yet unnecessary use of 3D; perhaps not newbie-friendly.

Cinema history poses the most significant challenge in making a movie based writer John Wagner’s and Carlos Ezquerra’s Judge Joseph Dredd.  Forget that anybody who wants to bring him to life must contend with the iconic image of Peter Weller’s chrome-bodied cyborg in Paul Verhoven’s RoboCop; audiences inevitably will compare the vast urban landscapes of Mega-City One, regardless of how well rendered, to Bladerunner’s postmodern Gothic spires and Escape from New York’s decaying infrastructure.  When Dredd speaks in the panels of 2000 AD, fans hear Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan growling at yet another lawless punk ready to make his day.  Granted, the comic always borrowed heavily from others in crafting Dredd’s adventures; one followed the series for its audacious vision, not for its originality.
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