Based upon the popular soap opera that ran from 1966 to 1971, it tells the story of the Collins family, who thrived in the fishing market in the 18th century. As a young boy, Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) comes to America and eventually begins a relationship with Angelique (Eva Green). However, he admittedly feels nothing for her, which leads him to a relationship with Josette (Bella Heathcote), a woman he is madly in love with. What Barnabas doesn’t know is that Angelique is a witch, and in her jealousy, she decides to force Josette to kill herself and curse Barnabas by making him a vampire. After Angelique turns the townspeople against him, Barnabas is forced into a coffin and left buried in the ground.

200 years later, he is dug up by a construction crew, and after killing them all, he returns to his family’s enormous mansion known as Collinwood. There he finds the last remaining members of his once-powerful family including Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer), Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), Carolyn (Chloe Grace Moretz), and David (Gulliver McGrath). Also staying in the house are the caretaker, Willie (Jackie Earle Haley), David’s new nanny, Victoria (Bella Heathcote), and David’s doctor, Dr. Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), who has been with the family for a few years due to David not being able to get over the death of his mother. Barnabas, seeing the state of his family, decides to help make things like they were before, but this isn’t easy with Angelique still alive and running a rival fishing company.

The original soap opera was well-known for being a mixture of fantasy and horror, which the new version does in part, but aside from that, it also throws in some awkwardly-placed humor and romance. In short, the writer, Seth Grahame-Smith, just didn’t know what he wanted the film to be, leading to him throwing in a little bit of all of these genres in hopes of coming up with something. Unfortunately, all he ends up doing is causing the film to feel like it’s merely meandering for about two hours without coming up with much of a story.

The humor is actually the strangest thing about it. It doesn’t blend very well with what would have been better off as a dark, gothic tale. It’s not even particularly funny, giving us jokes that amount to such attempts as having Barnabas tell us that the Collins always had the biggest balls, as in parties. Had they actually stuck to the original tone of the show, there would have been a bigger chance of success. Instead, we get far too many attempts to milk humor out of Barnabas being 200 years out of date.

For those familiar with Burton’s other work, you know you can usually expect a kind of gothic touch in his films, which made “Dark Shadows” seem like the perfect fit for his talents. The look of the film is exquisite from the old, creepy rooms of Collinwood to the characters themselves. It’s unfortunate that the writing couldn’t stand up to the film’s production design. Perhaps they felt like if they nailed the visual aspects of the show then the rest would just fall into place. Sadly this did not happen as these characters just aren’t given much to do.

Depp, who is usually a delight to see on screen, suffers from this perhaps most of all. His character is very one-note, talking in the same tone as he goes about trying to get accustomed to the 70s while having to deal with Angelique and a romantic interest as well. It’s not really a bad performance, certainly not as off-the-mark as his interpretation of Willy Wonka back in 2005, it’s just that the character, as well as the film itself, becomes rather dull to watch what with the meandering nature of the story.

Burton and Depp have been working together for awhile now. It’s always interesting to see what the two of them will deliver next whether it’s a great film like “Sweeney Todd” or something that doesn’t quite work like this or “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” The thing is, a “Dark Shadows” remake should have worked quite well. The attempt to turn it into a comedy should have been spotted as a folly from very early on as that’s not what the material lends itself to being. If they truly wanted to make an homage to the original show, then the best course to take would have been to do a more straightforward adaptation instead of turning it into a directionless mess of tones. It had so much potential, but given the result, it should have stayed in the shadows.

2/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The man is named Frank (Joel Murray). He is divorced, has a young daughter who doesn’t want to see him, and also suffers from migraines and insomnia. He constantly spends his nights listening to his loud neighbors and their always-crying baby and routinely falls asleep in front of a television set spewing out terrible reality shows. One day at work, after listening to his coworkers going on and on about an awful contestant on one of these shows, his frustration comes out in the form of a long rant about how terrible people can be and how unoriginal conversations are nowadays. Shortly afterward, his boss calls him into his office to let him go due to trying to cheer up a coworker by sending her flowers.

This, coupled with his doctor diagnosing him with a brain tumor, causes his anger against the people he was ranting about to come to a head when he decides to kill a star on another reality show. This murder is witnessed by another young girl, Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), who is extremely pleased with what Frank did, causing her to want to go with him and help him on his “quest.” Together they hit the road, determined to kill those who they deem to deserve it.

One of the most interesting parts of “God Bless America” is how Frank’s and Roxy’s criteria for who deserves to die differ. Frank mainly wants to kill people who are rude, like those making fun of the person who can’t sing on “American Superstarz” (an obvious jab at “American Idol”), people who talk in a movie theater, or a really mean political talk show host. Roxy appears to want to do it for far more general reasons such as not liking someone’s movies or wanting to kill people who give high-fives or even just people who use certain words, something Frank jokes about as she has a rant of her own.

There’s also a continual theme of mistaken intent running through the film. From the very start, after Frank kills the mean reality show star, he plans to kill himself, but Roxy tells him that all he’ll be remembered for is killing a girl that he had a mad crush on, which was obviously not his intent. After killing several people in a movie theater playing a war documentary, reporters automatically assume that it was the violent content of the documentary that caused Frank and Roxy to commit the murders when it was actually the simple problem of their victims talking and being rude.

Then there’s the controversial talk show host who tells them that if they kill him, he will become a martyr for his fans, which does indeed happen, but Frank doesn’t care at this point as his reason for killing him was simply that he was rude to his guests. All of these things lend themselves to the black comedy that the film is, whether it’s trivial reasons for wanting to kill someone or the way in which media mistakenly portrays what murderers are trying to do.

Like with several black comedies, it’s not really a laugh out loud kind of film, but more so an attempt to be shocking, or to use a word that Roxy dislikes, “extreme.” There are also numerous pop culture jabs being made aside from mocking “American Idol” and how that’s the only kind of thing people talk about anymore. As part of Roxy’s rant, she goes into how much she hates Diablo Cody (Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Juno”), and, in one of the film’s sicker jokes, disses Green Day while praising Alice Cooper and the Goth movement.

“God Bless America” was written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, whom you may know as the squeaky-voiced comedian who has lent his familiar voice to several animated shows. He also brought us the bizarre, but well-done film “World’s Greatest Dad” back in 2009, which told the story of a father exploiting the death of his terrible son. Back then, I was surprised that he was the one to deliver such an interesting film, and now he’s delivered another one. He’s shown he has a knack for writing films with strange lead characters whose morals you will question, but whose exploits you will want to follow to the end. It also shows that, in order to find strange and interesting alternatives to mainstream films, sometimes you have to turn to the most unlikely of people.

3/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The film starts off with Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), director of S.H.I.E.L.D., checking on Dr. Selvig’s (Stellan Skarsgard) progress with the Tesseract, a cube containing unlimited energy that they are trying to harness. However, the cube also acts as a gateway, through which Loki (Tom Hiddleston) unexpectedly arrives. Loki escapes with the cube with the intention of using it to bring forth an army to conquer the Earth, which he would then rule over.

In order to recover the Tesseract, Fury enlists the help of Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson), a special agent, to help him assemble “The Avengers,” a group of people who have special skills and powers. This includes Tony Stark, aka Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Dr. Bruce Banner, aka The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and Thor (Chris Hemsworth). Together, they must use their skills to find the cube and stop Loki before he is able to carry out his plan.

If you’ve never read up on these Marvel characters or didn’t see any of the previous films, then the synopsis here might seem rather strange. Most of these characters are well-known, but even the studio realized that there would be a portion of people who didn’t know much about them, which was one of the reasons for the previous individual films. However, that being said, knowing their backstories is not really a prerequisite to being able to enjoy the film.

As mentioned earlier, this is an action-packed film, but unlike most similar films nowadays, this one actually has an interesting story and developed characters to go along with it. Therefore, when there’s a lot of action occurring on screen, you actually care about what’s going on instead of just rolling your eyes or looking at your watch. As you could probably guess, it all eventually comes down to a major battle to decide who is to be victorious and they’ve really spared no expense in making this an epic-sized battle for Earth.

Then again, if you’ve seen the other films, you’ll already expect that anyway. These films have been good overall and rather entertaining. I wouldn’t go so far as to call them great, but I have enjoyed watching them. “The Avengers” continues this trend of being enjoyable to watch, and certainly recommendable, but not really lifting these superheroes up into the realm of greatness.

The only real problems with the film are in its pacing. The middle of the film lagged a bit, particularly in the section where you’re still waiting for The Avengers to finish assembling. The other pacing problem comes in that final battle where it felt like it just went on a little too long while our heroes smash and destroy countless generic robot/alien invaders. Luckily this doesn’t put too much of a damper on the excitement that the film is able to generate.

As far as the filmmakers are concerned, the studio couldn’t have made a better choice than to put Joss Whedon behind the camera. Whedon is, of course, the creator of several popular television shows like “Firefly” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and just recently helped give us the great film “The Cabin in the Woods.” His keen eye for action and story help make this a much more enjoyable film than it otherwise might have been.

On top of all that, Whedon also wrote the screenplay. It really is quite something that he was able to take so many characters and put them into a movie where nobody gets left behind. With almost everyone’s backstory being told already, he didn’t need to spend much time telling us where anybody came from, allowing for more time to deal with the present crisis. Even so, the film runs for well over two hours, with an extra scene setting up the next film of course, and even though it could have stood to lose a few minutes in a couple spots, there’s little to complain about otherwise. The inevitable sequel will be most welcome.

3/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

Mei (Catherine Chan) is a young Chinese girl with a very special gift. She has an amazing memory that allows her to remember things very well such as really long numbers, a talent that has Chinese and Russian gangs, as well as corrupt policemen chasing after her. While they are in the process of trying to find her, Mei just happens to come across Luke Wright (Jason Statham), an ex-cop turned cage fighter, who decides to protect her from those trying to kidnap her.

As Luke finds out, Mei has information in her head that the gangs want, particularly a long sequence of numbers that is the combination to a safe containing $30 million dollars, but as to what the money is for is a mystery involving all those trying to get at it. With people trying to kill him left and right, Luke must do his best to make sure that Mei doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

For starters, the story here is very skimpy. I say part of it is a “mystery,” but it doesn’t remain a mystery for very long because the necessity of the plot requires that a character reveals that information very easily or else the story wouldn’t be able to move forward. What we end up with is another film that feels like the story was merely an excuse for the action sequences, which seem to pop up every few minutes, only slowing down long enough for the plot to move forward another inch.

This in turn makes the film feel like it’s stuck in a rut of endless fights and gunfire. There is a little entertainment to be had out of Statham stylishly and systematically taking out several people at once, but after awhile, you begin to realize that this is pretty much all the film is since the story is rather minimal and predictable as well.

The film comes to us from director/writer Boaz Yakin, whose previous credits include co-writing the screenplay for the disappointing “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” and directing “Remember the Titans,” a great sports film. “Safe” is adequately directed, though not particularly noteworthy for it, with the actions scenes coming off as well-done for the most part, something that many directors still have trouble doing nowadays.

The screenplay, as you could have probably guessed by now, could have used a lot of work, especially to flesh out the characters better, perhaps building on the relationship between Luke and Mei a little more so that the audience could form an attachment to them. The story here obviously needed a little more attention what with it being inundated with repetitive action scenes and little plot development. Action scenes can be good, but not when you let them rule over the story.

Perhaps one of these days Statham will stop making the same movie over and over and try something new. He’s done some good films like “Snatch” and “The Bank Job,” but mostly films that are interchangeable. It seems like “Safe,” “The Mechanic,” “The Expendables,” “Killer Elite,” “War” and the three “Transporter” films have got him stuck in a rut of his own. Unfortunately, with another “Expendables” on the way, it looks like a change isn’t about to happen anytime soon. I guess when you think about it, he’s simply playing it “safe.”

2/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) is living the good life. He lives in a large house with his beautiful wife Diana (Synnove Macody Lund) and has a decent job as a headhunter for a large corporation. The problem is, he can’t afford the lifestyle he has chosen, causing him to be an art thief on the side. However, his latest acquisition hasn’t even provided him with enough funds to make a payment on his expensive house.

At his wife’s gallery opening, he meets Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a former consultant for a nanotechnology company. Roger is currently looking to fill a position at his company, so he offers Clas a meeting to discuss it. However, Roger becomes even more interested in him when he hears through his wife that Clas has a work by Munch sitting in his apartment that is worth millions. He immediately plans to steal it, and is successful, but shortly after, he finds himself the victim of the relentless hunting skills of Clas, an ex-soldier and expert tracker.

As mentioned earlier, you may think this is a heist film by the way it’s set up. It’s interesting that they seemed to take a lot of time with this section too, thoroughly arranging how the heists were to be carried out. The film even opens with Roger’s list of rules that include a time limit and making sure not to leave any DNA behind. His friend at a security company disables the alarms, deletes the logs, and takes a percentage of the score. In a way, it’s all just to tease you before things get really crazy.

The mystery and thrills are what end up driving “Headhunters.” While Roger is taking the expensive Munch work from Clas’s apartment, he also finds his wife’s cell phone, leading him to believe that the two are having an affair. For us, it only adds onto the question of why Clas is hunting him.

We know that Clas is having an affair with his wife, which causes Roger to reject him for the position at his company, but this is also after he has stolen Clas’s property, so which of these things is the reason behind the hunt, or is there the possibility that all three are the reason? The answer ends up being a little simplified, but it doesn’t stop the excitement of the film as we watch Roger try to escape.

The black comedy also helps move things along rather well. These aren’t particularly laugh out loud moments, but they are moments that may shock you or just have you staring in disbelief. One of these moments is reminiscent of “Slumdog Millionaire” while another moment featuring Roger driving a tractor down a road will leave your jaw hanging open at the absurdity of the situation.

The film also has an interesting sense of paranoia about it. As we learn early on in the film, Clas used to work with nanotechnology and helped develop micro-transmitters that can’t be removed. Roger remembers this and tries his best to get rid of them by getting rid of his clothes and taking other extreme steps, not knowing if he was successful or not. Then there’s also the problem of who he can trust. His mistress really wants to stay with him, but she could be in on it. He doesn’t even know if he can trust his wife, who is having an affair with the man trying to hunt him down.

This all comes down to a conclusion that feels like a puzzle being put together. Everything has to be just right, or at least appear to be, to make the plan work flawlessly. As to whether it does or not, you’ll have to discover for yourself. “Headhunters” is a rather strange film, but it’s also a rather entertaining one. Its tonal shifts may have your head spinning, but in the end, this is one that is very much worth seeing.

3/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The film tells the tale of a group of pirates lead by the Pirate Captain (Voice of Hugh Grant). These pirates are not exactly great at what they do (pillage, plunder, etc.), and yet the Pirate Captain wants to enter the Pirate of the Year awards, something he’s done for at least the last twenty years, but has failed to win every time. The award is one that goes to the pirate with the most booty, so after being laughed at by all of his rivals, who have vast amounts of it, he decides to step things up by plundering every ship he can find.

This doesn’t turn out too well as every ship he finds ends up not having any gold. One particular ship he finds is occupied by Charles Darwin (Voice of David Tennant), who is on a scientific expedition. Darwin notices that the Pirate Captain’s “parrot” Polly is actual a dodo, a bird thought to have been extinct for over 100 years. He tries to convince the Captain to let him have Polly to present at a science show in order to win a big prize, but the Captain decides to present Polly himself so that he can use the prize to win the Pirate of the Year award. However, this means that he and his crew must sail to London, home of Queen Victoria (Voice of Imelda Staunton), the biggest pirate-hater of them all.

The stories for kids’ films tend to be a little simpler than in most films, but this one seemed even simpler than usual. While the film itself is pleasant enough, it’s the story that ends up making it not particularly memorable. Again, this isn’t saying that the film is bad, just that it’s not particularly interesting, which will cause many people’s attention to wander during what should be an exciting film about pirates.

While most kids’ films nowadays attempt to accommodate both kids and adults, this one just seems to go about it the wrong way, causing what felt like a strange disconnect between the story and several adult references made throughout the film. For starters, one of the main characters is Charles Darwin, famed scientist and author of “The Origin of Species,” one of the most important scientific texts ever written. It’s doubtful that most young kids are going to know who he is or what he is famous for.

There are also a couple of references to Jane Austen and Joseph Merrick, also known as “The Elephant Man,” people that kids are even less likely to know about than Darwin. This ends up making it feel as though the simple story was meant for the kids while the rest of it was meant for adults, whereas the best films that attempt split-level entertainment usually find a way to make the story and references work for both groups.

As for the interesting things about the film, it features a first-rate vocal cast that I found almost entirely unidentifiable. One of the fun things about animated films is not knowing who’s doing the voices and trying to figure it out throughout the film. By the end of “Pirates,” I had identified only one voice, that of Brian Blessed, whose voice is unmistakable. Aside from him there’s Hugh Grant, David Tennant, Brendan Gleeson, Jeremy Piven, Salma Hayek, Martin Freeman, and Imelda Staunton all doing great work on their respective characters.

The other interesting feature is the animation. The style used here is claymation like that seen in “Chicken Run” and the “Wallace and Gromit” films. It’s a painstaking technique where the filmmakers have to move the characters and sets around themselves to get the shots they require, and while it’s not exactly in the realistic realm of Pixar or something like the recent “The Adventures of Tintin,” it still yields an interesting look for the film.

In the end, it was mainly the story that needed a bit more work in order to make it a little more exciting. With pirates as the main characters you would think that the film would be rather thrilling with all the interesting things that could happen, but instead the writer, Gideon Defoe, opted for a lighter story with a silly third act. It’s got great vocal talent and well-done animation, but it proves once again that the story is the key ingredient.

2.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The film opens with Rebecca (Sarah Bolger) returning to an all-girls boarding school where she is reunited with her best friend Lucie (Sarah Gadon). When a new girl, Ernessa (Lily Cole), arrives and begins to spend a lot of time with Lucie, Rebecca not only becomes a bit jealous, but from the girl’s creepy behavior, she also begins to suspect that Ernessa may have a dark secret. However, all she has are suspicions, that is, until the night she witnesses Ernessa walk right through a closed window.

That’s as far as the plot gets, spending copious amounts of time with Rebecca trying to figure out what Ernessa’s secret is as her best friend slowly has the life sapped out of her. At the same time, Klein, who adapted her own book, feels the need to spell it out for the audience by having Rebecca studying vampires in her literature class. Then when she does figure out that something bad is happening between Ernessa and Lucie, we get the obligatory section of no one believing her and instead just thinking that she’s jealous.

All of this makes for a film that feels like it’s far too stretched out, which, even for a film that runs less than 80 minutes, makes for a very tedious sit. With the plot not moving forward very far, the pacing becomes completely shot. It was in desperate need of something to shake it up throughout as it felt as though it was at a standstill for pretty much the entire film. Perhaps Klein felt that suspicion of a vampire would be enough to replace plot development. Sadly, she was mistaken.

What makes “The Moth Diaries” an even bigger disappointment was that it was directed by Mary Harron, who directed the great “American Psycho.” Since then, she unfortunately hasn’t really done anything of note, a streak which continues with the latest entry in her filmography. Apparently she wanted to return to her dark roots, but this certainly wasn’t the way to do it. If the book is as bland as the film, then it should have been painfully obvious that this was a bad choice.

As far as vampires go, this film doesn’t even take advantage of the lore. It’s almost entirely bloodless aside from a nosebleed and a dream/vision where blood is pouring from the ceiling. Nor does it take the opportunity to create any suspense using the vampire, something that the film needed in order to get itself out of its sluggish pace. This is basically another vampire film that has no bite.

The film leads up to one of the most anticlimactic endings I’ve seen in quite some time. This was the filmmakers’ chance to go out with a bang and make it at least partly worth having sat through the slow, bland story up to that point. However, in another bad decision, they decided not to go that direction. There’s no struggle, no attempt to put any kind of excitement into the film, just an overly-simplified conclusion that will leave you shaking your head at the lack of thought and creativity that went into it.

“The Moth Diaries” just ends up feeling like a desperate attempt to cash in on the vampire craze created by “Twilight,” and taking a cue from how bad those films have been, they figured that the film wouldn’t even have to be good to make a decent amount of money. Apparently the studio knows they have a dud on their hands as, according to IMDb, it’s only going to be released in three countries total, two of which will be a limited run. Not surprising for a film that’s this dead.

1.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

It tells the story of several male friends, including Jeremy (Jerry Ferrara), Dominic (Michael Ealy), Michael (Terrence Jenkins), and Zeke (Romany Malco), who are attempting to start relationships with women, including Mya (Meagan Good), Candace (Regina Hall), and Lauren (Taraji P. Henson). However, the women have come across a recent book by Steve Harvey that tells all about relationships from a man’s perspective and begin to use it as a kind of guide. This merely makes it harder for the men to win them over. Things begin to change when the men discover the book for themselves and attempt to use it as a means to their own ends.

Just from that synopsis, you can probably tell that the film is overloaded with too many characters, and indeed the film begins to suffer for it. It tries to focus on all of these people as they go through their relationships, but unfortunately it never develops any of them to the point where we actually start to feel anything for them. For a movie like this to work, we have to be rooting for their relationships to succeed, but with characters as flat as these, indifference is all they receive.

What makes the lack of development even more surprising is that the film runs for two whole hours, giving the characters plenty of time to expand, but apparently it wasn’t a priority. What we end up with for those two hours is a film with an agonizingly slow pace that makes the runtime feel more like three or four hours.

Dragging it down even further is the screenplay by Keith Merryman and David A. Newman, who both helped writer “Friends with Benefits,” a comedy from last year that didn’t work very well. “Think Like a Man” is also supposed to be a comedy, but while it does have a few funny moments, none of it is of the “laugh out loud” variety, making for a film where the writers seem to think the material is funnier than it actually is.

The humor is not particularly offensive in any way, nor do I recall it sinking to the lowbrow or Sandler level. It’s just that the jokes they were trying to tell weren’t particularly funny. It’s not a good sign when I try to think back over a two hour comedy and can only come up with one instance where I smirked, in this case, a quick and amusing exchange of dialogue near the end of the film that was delivered with well-done comic timing.

Going back to the story, it all ends up falling apart in the end as it settles into a lazy predictability. Merryman and Newman basically decided to follow the old romantic-comedy formula where they make you think that things won’t work out for everyone. This is done through a couple of lazy plot twists that you instantly realize are not going to stand in the way for very long before things end as you knew they would from the start.

The film comes to us from director Tim Story, whose track record has been rather disastrous, having given us such films as “Fantastic Four,” “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer,” and “Taxi.” Turns out he has a pretty ironic name, given that all of these films lacked a good story. Now he has another one to toss on the heap. The only thing he’s successfully done with this film is publicize Steve Harvey’s book, which seems to have been the main goal all along. 1.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

“Monsieur Lazhar” begins with the sudden suicide of a teacher at a Canadian elementary school. Her co-workers knew she hadn’t been feeling particularly well, but it still comes as a shock to everyone. The news comes to the attention of Bachir Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag), who comes to the school to apply for her position. He is hired almost immediately and begins teaching his new students about the French language.

Meanwhile, we are slowly filled in on Lazhar’s backstory. He has come from Algeria to escape threats on his family due to a controversial book his wife had written. He came to Canada first to prepare the way for the rest of his family, but before they could come over, someone set fire to their apartment building, leading to their deaths. Now Lazhar not only has to deal with this tragedy and trying to gain political asylum in a foreign country, but also with a classroom full of students who have tragically lost their former teacher.

This is a rather simple, but interesting story. Lazhar already has so much going on in his life, and yet he continues to persevere when another difficult situation is added to his troubles. On top of replacing a teacher, he is also starting a job in a country that he’s not particularly familiar with and at a school where he doesn’t know all of the rules. His adjustment comes at the same time that his students have to adjust to him.

The teacher whose suicide rocked the school was liked by her students for the most part and was good friends with the staff. In order to help the children deal with the situation, the school brings in a psychologist for them to talk to. Lazhar goes along with this, but also feels that the children should be talking about it openly, whereas the school feels that it’s something that’s best hushed up and forgotten.

The school’s method does end up having some negative side effects. The lack of open communication leads to a lot of pent up emotions about the incident among the students. One of them, a student with a camera who still has a picture of the teacher, seems particularly hard-hit by the incident, something we find out a little more about as the film progresses.

As for Lezhar’s situation, he makes the best of his new life while trying to deal with his personal problems. He becomes close with the students, who, as expected, don’t become taken with him right away after having just lost their previous teacher. His first lesson doesn’t go particularly well, but it’s understandable since he tries to have them take dictation while reading to them from a work written by Balzac. His method does improve however as he eventually begins to teach them about fables, something far more suited to their level.

Lazhar is brought to life by the touching performance of Mohamed Fellag. He brings a sweet innocence to the character while mixing that with the worry of his political troubles. All of this comes together to create a very realistic character. It seems I’ve been seeing a lot of films lately where the main character has a load to carry on their shoulders and Lazhar is no exception as he tries to juggle his job at school and his personal situation.

While “Monsieur Lazhar” is a decent film, I wish it would have done more to stand out from other similar films. His personal crisis was a nice touch, but it didn’t get much attention in the film. In a sense, I was reminded of the French film “The Class,” which took home the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2008. It too was a decent film, but rather forgettable in that it just didn’t stand out very much from other school films. In the end, “Lazhar” does get a recommendation. Just don’t expect to be blown away by it.

3/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

Scott Murphy (Brian Presley) has such an event in his life that has altered it drastically. Back in high school, he was one of the greatest football players in the state, ready to go to college on a full scholarship. In 1991, he helped lead his small-town team to the championship game where his leg was twisted on the final play. His team won the championship, but Scott has been unable to play football ever since.

In present day, he’s a farmer who lives with his wife Macy (Melanie Lynskey) and two daughters in a trailer. He’s currently growing beans, but is having a lot of trouble paying the bills. He’s even taken out a loan that he can’t pay back until his crops are harvested. However, the bank has called in his loan and he finds himself without any means of harvesting his crops. This leads him to believe that suicide is his only way out, so he clogs the tailpipe of his car, hops inside, and lets it run.

He awakens to find himself back in high school before the big game in which he was injured. He is understandably shocked, but thrilled that he is able to play football again. This leads him to start questioning the choices he made back then in that final game. He hopes that things can be different if he changes a few plays, still leading the team to a victory, but avoiding his crippling injury. Meanwhile, he has to win over Macy all over again since at this time he was with another girl, but he finds that it’s not quite so easy.

“Touchback” is a film that’s peppered with sweet moments such as when Scott finally gets to play football again after 15 years. He gets so into it that he wants to keep going after the coach calls it a day and the other players are exhausted. Others include him chasing after Macy, who seems to think of him only as a big, dumb jock until he shows her that there’s more to him than that.

However, the film begins to wear a little thin once those moments of “wow, I’ve gone back in time” wear off. Strangely enough, I found myself more interested in the plight of Scott the farmer than Scott the football player since the farmer was having more of a crisis. The football player merely has to play his game and perhaps change a play or two, but by the time the game rolls around, it’s rather predictable what he’s going to do.

This lead to a rather strange ending that leaves a pretty big question unanswered. It makes it feel as though there’s a plothole that the writer, Don Handfield, just didn’t want to explain, leaving the audience to just accept that everything is fine, despite what had happened earlier. This is Handfield’s first theatrical film as a writer and as a director and it’s certainly not bad. He just needs to learn to follow through on his ideas more. Also, the film could have used another trip through the editing room as it felt far too long at nearly two hours.

Another strange instance occurs in the game itself when the moment of truth comes and Scott has to decide what final play he wants to use. His choice ends up being a rather peculiar one, even more so as he seems to think that it’s the one that will win him Macy. As I mentioned earlier, it’s rather predictable, but it still doesn’t explain why he doesn’t simply use another play to achieve the same result. The best reason seems to be so that the tail ending of the film makes sense, allowing for another sweet moment to be added before the credits.

Again, it’s not a bad film. It just needed a little trimming and a little work on the ending. The choice Scott makes is a big one. There needed to be a little more of an understanding as to why he went with the choice he did. That way we could feel for the character all the way through the end of the film, instead of just being left with a contrived ending that leaves us in the dark.

2.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The film follows five friends, Dana (Kristen Connolly), Curt (Chris Hemsworth), Jules (Anna Hutchison), Marty (Fran Kranz), and Holden (Jesse Williams), who are taking a vacation at a remote cabin. They’re there to do the things teenagers usually do when they party, mainly drink and get high. However, things don’t remain upbeat for long as they soon find themselves being attacked by creatures from the surrounding woods. Meanwhile, this story is intertwined with the mysterious Sitterson (Richard Jenkins) and Hadley (Bradley Whitford), two “controllers” who are keeping a close eye on the kids, but as to for what purpose is something that is slowly revealed.

I’ve opted to end the synopsis there and use a little discretion, something that others have decided against. This is a horror film of surprises, and not just of the “boo with a sharp musical chord” variety. I mean that in the sense that it takes you in directions that you won’t expect. If you think you know what’s coming, you’re most likely wrong. Writers Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard have taken the story you think you know and turned it on its head.

The best way to describe it without giving too much away is as a cross between “The Evil Dead” and “The Truman Show.” “The Evil Dead” is, of course, the original “cabin in the woods” story that most people are familiar with, and just from this film’s trailer, you can tell that things get a little crazy, but there are other elements that Whedon and Goddard have thrown in that make this a uniquely original and amazing tale.

One of the best features of “The Cabin in the Woods” is the storytelling technique. We are immediately introduced to the characters of Sitterson and Hadley in the first scene, but their dialogue is rather cryptic and non-revealing about what their purpose is as we’re given bits about how “Stockholm went south” and “There’s just Japan and us.” This is a technique that carries through to their next several scenes. This mystery element is what draws the audience in and keeps up engaged as we slowly learn the horrifying truth about what’s really happening.

Another great feature is Whedon’s and Goddard’s ability to throw in some well-placed humor in such a terrifying situation. Those already familiar with “The Evil Dead” trilogy will recall how Sam Raimi brilliantly changed the tone of his films from horror to comedy, striking a really good balance in the middle. Here, the writers have struck such a balance, allowing for bits of humor to come through while still maintaining the seriousness of the horror plot.

Of course, these writers aren’t unfamiliar with strange and unusual plots. Whedon is well-known for being the creator of such shows as “Firefly,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and “Angel,” while Goddard wrote several episodes of “Lost” and gave us the screenplay to “Cloverfield,” another film with an interesting mystery element that slowly unravels itself, but which is known more so for its style. These guys have fashioned an excellent screenplay that shows us something that we haven’t seen before, something that’s a treat to us horror fans as it’s hard to come up with something nowadays that is not already clichéd.

As with most horror films, “The Cabin in the Woods” is not for the squeamish. However, if you can stand the gore, you’ll be treated to a fascinating and well-told story. A horror film like this only comes along once every several years, the last time being back in 1996 when Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson brought us a great dissection of horror films called “Scream,” a film that revitalized the genre. 16 years later, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard have gone all out to revitalize it once more with their brilliant take on an old tale that proves there’s still some life in the genre yet.

3.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

It tells the story of a SWAT team, which includes Rama (Iko Uwais) and Jaka (Joe Taslim), who are tasked with raiding a building known to house criminals looking to lay low. Their key objective is to arrest the leader, Tama (Ray Sahetapy), but doing so will not be easy as almost immediately upon their arrival, residents notify the rest of the building of their presence. With the team vastly outnumbered, they must use any means necessary to accomplish their mission.

It’s really quite amazing how little plot this film had. In fact, that has to be one of the shortest, if not the shortest, synopsis I’ve ever had to write for a film. This is a film that was obviously made for fans of action, but it also becomes a kind of test to see how quickly you become bored when you realize that there’s not going to be anything else in the film, i.e., anything of substance that might give you a reason to care.

The characters here are completely flat and are merely present as fodder for the various fight scenes. They die left and right, eventually coming down to just a few, which I suppose we’re supposed to call the “main characters,” but the complete lack of development prevents us from creating any attachment to them or from caring about whether they will be the next to get killed in one gruesome fashion or another.

The film is indeed violent, but again that’s not a problem. The problem is that there’s nothing here to get the audience engaged in any way. It was only about 30 minutes in when I started checking my watch to see when this tedious film would end. It got to the point where I would just roll my eyes when yet another fight scene started, usually less than a minute after the previous one had just finished.

It even makes a rather sad attempt to throw in a bit of drama when one of the characters randomly discovers that his brother is living in the building. This came off as nothing but a desperate attempt by writer/director Gareth Evans to get the audience to feel something for them while continuing to inundate us with more and more fights. If they had tried to develop it earlier and more throughout, it might have helped, but they apparently didn’t want to take up to much time with it.

The critical reception of the film has been quite baffling and hypocritical. Like with the recent “Wrath of the Titans,” I was again reminded of the second and third Transformers films, which were critically bashed for having very little in the way of plot and containing a numbing amount of action, among other things. Yet, “The Raid: Redemption” suffers from the same problems and has been praised by a good majority of critics. Granted the action is done better, but it’s not nearly enough to cover up the complete lack of substance.

In the end, “The Raid: Redemption” will be most successful for people with A.D.D. or just generally short attention spans. Others will be able to look right through it and see it for what it really is: a film about one group of people trying to kill another group of people with a thread of a plot as an excuse for it to happen, but then again, that seems to be why certain people are enjoying it. Anyone looking for a film where the filmmakers actually took time to put together a story will just have to look elsewhere.

2/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The film opens with the precession of the current pope’s funeral. The College of Cardinals gathers to elect the next pope with certain candidates standing out as favorites, but many of them seem unsure as to how to vote. The first round of voting doesn’t produce the two-thirds majority needed to declare a winner, so a second round of voting is performed, resulting in a large majority of votes for Cardinal Melville (Michel Piccoli).

He is understandably overwhelmed as he was not one of the favorites who was thought to have a chance at election. It turns out his feelings of being overwhelmed are much worse than originally thought as right before he is to address the crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square, he proclaims that he can’t do it and rushes away to be alone. This leaves the other cardinals in a bind as to what to do, so they decide to bring in a psychoanalyst (Nanni Moretti) to try and help out. However, things become even worse when the newly-elected Pope decides to run away.

The first act of “We Have a Pope” is rather interesting in that we get to witness the process of the papal election. It can’t be an easy thing for a relatively small group of men to elect the next supreme head of the church and it shows in their difficulty in writing down their choice. Then it moves on to the fascinating scenario of the elected pope feeling that he can’t do what is required of him. This kind of scenario is one that could make for a very interesting and engaging film.

However, something very peculiar happens as the film progresses. As it proceeds into its second act where the pope runs away from the Vatican, it feels as though the film shuts down. You could even say that it goes on hold, much like the cardinals who wait for the new pope to address the crowd. During this time, Cardinal Melville roams through Rome as he tries to come to terms with having been elected, a weight he obviously finds very heavy to bear.

This is where the film began to feel rather empty. It’s trying to show us that he’s having difficulty bearing this weight, but it’s never able to portray that very well. I don’t fault Piccoli for this as his expression is the biggest hint we have during this time of wandering, but rather the writing that doesn’t give him much to say or do to express his inner turmoil.

The peculiarity continues back at the Vatican as the therapist, forced to stay within its walls due to knowing the identity of the new pope, attempts to find things to do along with the cardinals, none of whom are aware that the pope has run away. This eventually leads to the therapist organizing a volleyball tournament. It was a rather strange decision to concentrate on this bizarre event so much while the real struggle of the film is occurring with Cardinal Melville himself. Perhaps Moretti was just looking for an excuse to get himself into the film more.

The film does get around to showing us the decision that the new pope has made, but with the struggle not being shown all that well, we are still left with the sense that a lot of time was wasted between the first act and the conclusion. This is certainly a great idea for a film, it just needs better execution, less stalling for and wasting of time, and a better means of showing the difficult period that Cardinal Melville is going through, none of which can be accomplished with a cardinal volleyball tournament.

2/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The story involves David (Brian Geraghty), Corey (Josh Peck), and Emily (Alice Eve), who are all coworkers attending their office’s Christmas party. David finally gets the nerve to ask Emily out for lunch, but for the time being, he manages to talk her into letting him drive her home. However, he has also told Corey that he would drive him home as well. On the way, Corey convinces David to stop at an ATM so that he can take out some money to get some food, despite it being after midnight at this point.

On their way out of the ATM, they notice a man shrouded in a parka standing several feet away from the door. Unsure of what he wants, they stand in the ATM building guessing as to why he’s there. When a man walking his dog comes near, the stranger in the parka walks over and violently kills him, causing David, Corey, and Emily to freak out. With their only protection being that you need a bank card to get into the ATM building, these three must figure out a way to escape before the man in the parka does the same to them.

The premise here is flawed for two major reasons. First off, there’s no tension. These three are not trapped for almost the whole film and could conceivably leave whenever they want during this time. It’s not like “Phone Booth” where the victim was truly trapped because he had no idea where the killer was, but he did know that he had his sights set right on him and could finish him at any time. In “ATM,” there are several chances for the victims to get away when the killer is occupied and not watching what they’re doing.

Secondly, related to the first flaw is the second: the fact that there is an easy way out and the main characters are too dumb to take it. In this sense, it reminded me a lot of another film from just two years ago called “Frozen,” where the solution to the plight of three friends stuck on a ski lift was so painfully obvious, and yet, none of them are able to figure it out, leading to some needless deaths.

Likewise, the solution to the problem in “ATM” is painfully obvious, but the film wants us to believe that these three can’t figure it out. What makes matters worse is that one of the characters points out that there’s three of them and only one of him, and yet, this is never acted on. This would be understandable if the killer was some kind of bodybuilder or something, but no, he’s a regular sized person wearing a parka. Their inability to realize that the three of them could take one person also ends up leading to some unfortunate and needless events.

This complete lack of brainpower does exactly what it did for “Frozen” in that all the audience can do is sit back and shake their heads at the victims for not being able to see the easy solution. Because of this, there is no connection to the characters and no sympathy to be had for them. The same could be said for the first flaw. Since none of them think of trying to get away while the killer is occupied and not watching them, there’s no reason to pity them since they don’t take the chance to escape when they can.

The ending also has a pretty big flaw to it in that the screenwriter chose to add in an extremely large coincidence to allow the plot to go in the direction that he wanted. The coincidence was not believable in the least, nor did it make any sense given the circumstances. Sparling also wrote the film “Buried,” where he had a lot of trouble building any tension or suspense as well, and where he also had trouble with the ending, except in that case, it was just far too predictable to be a surprise.

Even if the ending had been fixed, it still wouldn’t have been interesting, and if the biggest flaws of the film had been dealt with, there wouldn’t have been much of a film to watch, just like if the victims of “Frozen” had figured out that they could simply form a human chain to get themselves down, the film would have wrapped up rather quickly. Some premises may seem interesting on paper, but even at the script stage, someone ought to have noticed how many holes were present in this story.

2/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

Martin David (Willem Dafoe) has been hired by a company to travel to the outback of Tasmania, Australia in order to hunt the last known Tasmanian Tiger from which he’s supposed to collect samples and then destroy the rest. While there, he stays with Lucy (Frances O’Connor) and her two kids. Lucy’s husband mysteriously disappeared in the wilderness not long before Martin’s arrival, giving him suspicions that he may have been attempting the same task.

Martin searches all throughout the outback looking for any clues of the animal’s existence, something that slowly begins to manifest itself in small ways such as the leftover carcass of an animal and a cave that Martin believes to have been used as a den. Meanwhile, as he spends more time with Lucy and her kids, he finds himself growing closer to them, which he tries not to allow to distract him from his mission.

What’s interesting about “The Hunter” is how the two stories that it’s comprised of could quite possibly make a good movie on their own, yet there’s something about this attempt to merge the two that gives the film a feeling of trying to be two movies in one. The film randomly jumps back and forth between Martin’s time with Lucy and the kids and his work in the wilderness, giving it a feeling of awkward juxtaposition as the two stories remain separated throughout almost the entire movie.

They do eventually come together near the end of the film, and pretty well too, which merely makes one wonder why they didn’t try to incorporate them into each other much earlier to allow a smoother transition and pacing from scene to scene instead of completely dropping one story and picking up the other over and over. There’s also the question of why there is a random subplot about the forest being torn down by loggers thrown in there when it ends up going nowhere and is never developed.

The hunting scenes are done quite well with Robert Humphreys’s cinematography showing off the amazing beauty of the Tasmanian outback. These scenes also hold particular interest because we get to watch as Martin forms complex traps using simple things like trees, twigs, and twine, though he also uses standard bear traps as well. Some may find these scenes slow, but for others, they will hold attention out of wonder at what Martin will find during the hunt.

On the flip side, the human elements are also done nicely. Dafoe gives a well-controlled performance that slowly shows how he is becoming affected by his time with Lucy. As the film goes on, you can see the decisions regarding his mission becoming harder and harder as he wants to spend more time with her while coming to a troubling conclusion about what the company who hired him is willing to do to get what they want.

“The Hunter” is mostly well-done, but where I would normally say “it never comes together,” I actually have to say it comes together too late. There’s a good movie in here, and I’m certainly not going to tell you to avoid it, but if the screenplay by Alice Addison and Wain Fimeri had been able to integrate these stories better, then this could have been a great film instead of just an ok film.

2.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The film starts off by introducing us to Kate (Halle Berry), an expert on sharks who also swims with them, her husband Jeff (Olivier Martinez), and the rest of their crew. They are in the middle of making a shark documentary when things go terribly wrong. The sharks viciously attack the crew while they are getting underwater footage, leaving at least one crewmember dead.

A year goes by and Kate is struggling to pay her bills by giving tours to Seal Island, an island covered in, you guessed it, baby seals, though there are also sharks around. One day, her husband, whom she hasn’t seen for quite awhile, shows up to try and convince her to meet with a man about a job offer. After some initial reluctance, she agrees. The man, Brady (Ralph Brown), wants to hire her to take him and his son, Luke (Luke Tyler), out to sea to swim with sharks outside of the cage, something that only she has done. She has several objections, but the 100,000 Euros he’s offering ends up being too much for her to pass up.

This is another film that I have to question as to why it was even made. There’s barely any story here to begin with, and that certainly doesn’t help a film that runs nearly two hours. The plot never begins to develop beyond trying to swim with sharks, turning this into a really long sit. So flimsy is the plot that you could go off and take a good 10-20 minute break at any time during the film, come back and find that still nothing has happened that affects the story in anyway.

Then there’s the big problem of the one-dimensional characters. It really tells you something about their effectiveness when you find yourself rooting for the sharks. Like the plot, they never develop either, and on top of that, they’re all dumber than rocks. Kate, although desperate for money, agrees all too easily to go on this little trip, apparently forgetting the incident at the beginning of the film, nor does she bother mentioning it to Brady and his son. Speaking of the opening sequence, it’s clear that none of the diving crew knew what they were doing. Last I checked, taunting sharks by smacking them on the head was a bad idea, a really bad idea, so why are they surprised when the sharks attack?

The idiocy of the characters continues right up through the anticlimactic final diving sequence. Kate finally decides to take Brady to a place where he can dive with big sharks, and despite obvious signs of a storm that will start any second, she proceeds with the dive, another sign of the amateurish rank of the crew, except even amateurs would probably have been able to recognize an obvious storm like this one.

Big surprise, it starts storming like crazy right after they start the dive, which leads to yet another problem for the film. With it being nighttime during this sequence, it becomes almost impossible to tell what’s going on what with water splashing around everywhere and several people in scuba gear. One character even pops up out of nowhere after it’s assumed he drowned or was dragged away by the storm. It reminded me of another awful film from a few years ago called “Whiteout” that likewise featured action scenes where it was almost impossible to tell what was happening, except in that case, it was lots and lots of snow blocking our view as well as characters covered in parkas.

What’s amazing is that it took two people, Ronnie Christensen and Amy Sorlie, to write this screenplay. Story credit goes to Sorlie, but that’s rather hard to fathom seeing as how there’s not really any story here. Director John Stockwell has no notable films in his filmography, a streak he continues with “Dark Tide.” It’ll have to remain a mystery as to why he chose this project, the same of which could be said for Academy Award winner Halle Berry. Surely she had something better to do than sign on to an obvious mess of a film, though standing around on the beach and a boat and doing a bit of swimming, while not doing much in the way of work, all while collecting what was probably a decent paycheck isn’t exactly the worst way to spend one’s time. Come to think of it, that was probably everyone’s excuse.

1/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

After the events of the first film, Perseus (Sam Worthington), a demigod and the son of Zeus (Liam Neeson), has decided to live the life of a normal man with his son, Helius (John Bell). One night, Zeus comes to visit him to warn him of a calamity that is about to occur. The people have stopped praying to the gods, which is what gives them their power. Because of this, the gods are growing weaker, which in turn means that the walls of the underworld prison containing Zeus’s evil father are deteriorating.

When Zeus visits the underworld to plead for Hades’s (Ralph Fiennes) help, Hades captures him instead. It turns out that he, along with Ares (Edgar Ramirez), plans to release Zeus’s and his father from the underworld prison. Meanwhile, Perseus, accompanied by Andromeda (Rosamund Pike) and the demigod Agenor (Toby Kebbell), sets off to seek the help of Hephaestus (Bill Nighy), the one who fashioned the weapons of the gods. With his help, they hope to break into the underworld prison, free Zeus, and stop the coming calamity.

Like the first film, three are many, many special effects, even more so than before, but instead of being exciting and entertaining, this time around they end up being dull because they make up about 90% of the film. Because of this, what little story there is feels like it was merely a minimal foundation for the effects crew to go overboard with explosions, creatures, and fights.

In a sense, I was reminded of the two most recent “Transformers” films, which did something very similar, and yet, the little bit of story here still managed to be a little more interesting, plus the film only runs around 90 minutes, though even that began to feel a little long at a certain point. The fact that it took three people to write the story and then two of them to write the screenplay is quite peculiar given that it’s a barebones plot.

“Clash” had had some interesting scenes in the way of special effects such as the battle with a giant scorpion or the battle with Medusa in her lair. The best scenes that “Wrath” has to offer are those of Perseus and his crew breaking into the underworld prison, which is a labyrinth of shifting tunnels. The climactic battle never becomes exciting because the main villain they are fighting is a giant lava creature that does nothing but wave its arms around. At the very least there are some interesting multi-armed, sword-wielding creatures that attack as well.

The film comes from director Jonathan Liebesman, whose name you may recall from the film that topped my worst of the year list for last year, “Battle: Los Angeles.” That was another film where he tried to use effects to compensate for story, but it obviously didn’t work. However, that was a film that had much more wrong with it than simply its story. “Wrath” is actually a step up in comparison.

I should point out that the film is being offered in 3-D and 2-D. As usual, I went with a 2-D showing, which presented a picture that was quite acceptable. This is another film that seems like it would be a terrible idea to present it in 3-D as much of it is incredibly dark. Even the scenes that take place outside seemed to occur in very drab settings, so if you are planning on seeing it, do yourself a favor and stick with good old fashioned 2-D. However, if you want to do yourself a bigger favor, you should just skip it altogether.

2/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The story revolves around two families. The first is a young boy, Juan (Izan Corchero), and his mother. Juan has been writing a horror story involving a creature known as Hollowface, who is attempting to steal a face for himself. Juan begins having nightmares about the character, but his mother is concerned that they may not be simple nightmares. This causes her to enlist the help of a priest, Father Antonio (Daniel Bruhl), to help purge Juan of this mysterious thing that’s troubling him.

The other story involves John Farrow (Clive Owen), his wife, Susanna (Carice van Houten), and their daughter, Mia (Ella Purnell). One day, Mia finds a small box in a tree containing a story about Hollowface. Shortly afterwards, she begins seeing him in her room at night. At first, it’s thought that these are merely nightmares, until the night her father sees him in her room as well.

The main reason “Intruders” never comes together is because of its story. It is one of the blandest stories I’ve seen in a long time, particularly for a horror film. Neither story develops very far, giving it a very stretched out feeling as it slowly makes its way towards the inevitable merging of the two. The title itself isn’t even accurate as it’s only about one creature trying to attack these two kids.

Then there’s the creature itself. This must have taken the writers all of 30 seconds to come up with: a creature that has no face that’s trying to take one from a child. This thing is always wearing a hood, making it reminiscent of the fisherman from “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” so you never get to see very much of it, but at least the fisherman had a hook to threaten with. All Hollowface has are claws that he never uses.

Hollowface just never becomes a threatening character, which is why the film is lacking any thrills. To make matters worse, several shots of him are done in laughably-bad CGI, showing that there wasn’t much room in the budget to make a more realistic and terrifying creature. If the filmmakers thought they were putting together something thrilling with this character then they were sadly mistaken.

Then there’s the completely nonsensical ending. We know early on that the stories have to eventually merge, which they do to no one’s surprise. However, what becomes of the film after that is so random that you can tell that the inexperienced writers, Nicolas Casariego and Jaime Marques, just gave up, leaving large parts of the plot unexplained.

The film comes from director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, whose previous and most widely-known project was the decent “28 Weeks Later.” With “Intruders,” he’s taken a big step down, giving us a dull film that never gets on its feet. It would be interesting to know what he originally saw in the project that attracted him to it in the first place. Perhaps he was counting on a better design for Hollowface, something that would have helped the film at least a little bit.

However, it’s doubtful that even that would have helped overcome the shortcomings of the story. The whole thing just ends up feeling like more of a straight-to-dvd release instead of a theatrical film. Perhaps that would have been the best route to take for “Intruders” as it’s doubtful that many people are going to take the time to go see the film in theaters, especially in a limited release. Its best hope is that a few people will wander into one of the few theaters where it is playing and, not knowing anything about it, randomly pick it.

1.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott) is a bouncer at a bar. He comes from a family that has all made something of themselves by becoming doctors. One night, while at a hockey game, one of the players attempts to attack his best friend Ryan (Jay Baruchel) because of his taunts, but Doug stops the player in his tracks and beats him unconscious. This captures the attention of the head coach of the Orangetown Assassins. He eventually turns Doug over to the head coach of the Halifax Highlanders, who wants to put him on the team to guard a player, Xavier Laflamme (Marc-Andre Grondin), who has lost his confidence after being hit really hard in a previous game. Doug quickly earns a reputation as a strong fighter and eventually gives his team something they’ve been dreaming of: a shot at the playoffs.

Now you’re probably asking yourself: Why would a movie like this get made? Even after the movie was over, I found myself asking that very question. What was the point of it all? Not that it has to have a message of some kind, but if the filmmakers couldn’t accomplish the basic goals they set for themselves, why bother with it?

They obviously wanted to make a film that was entertaining, but this film is about as entertaining as watching two people beat each other up, which is ironically as far as the plot ever gets. Why did the writers, Jay Burachel and Evan Goldberg, ever think that this would make for an entertaining film? If they had at least made it about the sport, perhaps it would have been more interesting, but by focusing the story on a man who just beats the snot out of people on the ice rink, they remove any entertainment and purpose from the film.

Something else the writers obviously wanted to make was a comedy. The film does have sporadically humorous moments, but nothing that was laugh out loud funny. There’s certainly not enough funny material to fill even its short runtime of about 85 minutes. Unfortunately, most of the humor they try to get away with is on the Sandler level, pertaining of references to genitals and such. Luckily, they begin to lay off the humor almost entirely throughout the second half of the film, but it’s unclear if that was their intention or not. It could have been due to the fact that most of the film simply isn’t funny.

The film leads up to a very anticlimactic ending. As mentioned before, the story concentrates on Doug as he beats up player after player in various games, so the writers decided to make the climax a big showdown between Doug and another fighter of his caliber, Ross Rhea (Liev Schreiber). This also just happens to be the game that determines whether or not the team will advance to the playoffs. So the fight and the match play out (you can probably guess what happens in each) and the film ends, leaving us to ponder what happens afterward. My guess is that most people just won’t care.

The most interesting thing about the film is Seann William Scott’s blank performance in the lead. Known mostly for the “American Pie” films, all he has to do here is play dumb and go along with what his coach tells him to do. There’s also a romance thrown in between his character and Eva (Alison Pill) that never develops and ends up being completely superfluous to the story. It was a nice try to develop the character further, but in order for that to happen, the plotline would actually have to develop too.

What we end up with is a film that just isn’t interesting, entertaining, or funny. If the writers wanted to concentrate on Doug’s story, they desperately needed to add something more to it to make it work, like they tried to do with his undeveloped relationship with Eva. Perhaps they could have tried to concentrate on the team as a whole so as to incorporate Doug’s story into theirs. At least that way the plot wouldn’t seem like it was put together by drunken hockey fans.

2/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

Starting off with a prologue, we are told that a king fell in love with and married a beautiful queen (Julia Roberts). Not long after, the king had to leave on a quest to defend his kingdom, but was never seen again, leaving the queen to rule in his stead and to look after his daughter, Snow White (Lily Collins). It is only after the king leaves that the queen shows her true cruelty. She is jealous of Snow White’s beauty and doesn’t allow her to go out. She also taxes the already destitute citizens, using the money to throw lavish parties.

Meanwhile, a prince (Armie Hammer) and his squire are on a quest to find adventure, but end up getting robbed by seven dwarves in the woods near the queen’s kingdom. When Snow White sneaks out of the castle, she happens to come across them, but they part ways soon after. However, as chance would have it, Snow White and the prince meet again at the castle and start to fall in love, something the queen finds unpleasant as she wants to marry the prince herself to obtain riches. This causes the queen to order her servant, Brighton (Nathan Lane), to take Snow White out into the woods to be killed by a monster that supposedly lives there, but Brighton, not having the heart to see it through, lets her go instead. This is where she meets the seven dwarves, but they’re not exactly the dwarves we’re familiar with from this story.

As mentioned, this take on the tale does put a bit of a twist on it, and that’s exactly what ends up making it refreshing. For instance, the seven dwarves that we remember from the old Disney film are completely different, not only in name, but in character. Here they are thieves who live in the woods after having been cast out of the village as undesirables. These characters are also the centerpiece of some fascinating fight sequences that feature the dwarves on accordion stilts.

Helping to bring this twist on the tale to life is the well-chosen cast. Roberts plays up her evil side, something we don’t ever get to see, rather well, while Collins roles along with her character’s changes quite nicely. It was good to see Collins back in a good film after having made two rather poor choices with her last two projects “Priest” and “Abduction.” Armie Hammer, of “The Social Network” fame, gives an interesting performance as the prince, who finds himself in a bizarre situation and likewise has to adapt to it as it proceeds. Nathan Lane even has a small role that helps bring out the comedic elements of the screenplay.

The film itself has pretty good pacing, thanks in part to the screenplay by newcomer Melissa Wallack and slightly-experienced Jason Keller. They’ve infused it with a good mixture of humor, action, and romance, making for a pleasant experience. However, the ending, while understandably predictable, could have benefitted from the removal of a completely pointless song and dance sequence that only served to stretch out the conclusion.

“Mirror Mirror” comes to us from director Tarsem Singh, who has only directed four films, but has already established quite a name for himself. All of his films have quite an amazing look to them. In “The Cell,” he dazzled audiences with his interpretation of what exploring dreams might look like. “In “The Fall,” his sense of style showed us how incredible the realm of the imagination is. Even in a film as bad as “Immortals,” the visual style stood out as being stunning.

In his latest film, the style is not as extraordinary as his others have been, but it is still beautiful to look at. Everything from the production design to the costumes and even the creature design are really well done, adding energy and style to a fresh take on an old story. Singh and his crew have quite a talent for capturing an audience’s attention with elegant detail in all of these elements.

While it may not be as memorable as his other good projects, Singh has delivered a film that should delight audiences of all ages because of the timelessness of the story and the spin the writers have put on it. Now to sit back and wait for the other “Snow White” film, “Snow White and the Huntsman,” to drop into theaters in a couple of months. It has a mostly-impressive cast lined up, so hopefully the next new take on this classic will be just as successful.

3/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The film begins with a prologue explaining that the 13 districts of Panem once rose up against the capital in rebellion. The rebellion was put down, but as an everlasting punishment, it was decreed that every year the 12 remaining districts must put up two tributes each, one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18, to participate in The Hunger Games, a battle in which the 24 players will have to fight each other in an arena until there is only one survivor.

In district 12, we meet Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), her sister Primrose (Willow Shields), and Katniss’s close friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth). District 12 is a poor mining town where supplies are scarce, so Katniss goes hunting a lot in order to have something to trade, which has given her some skill with a bow and arrows. The next Hunger Games is just around the corner, so everyone in the district gathers to hear the announcement of who will be chosen. The first name announced is Primrose’s, causing a shocked Katniss to volunteer in her place. The second name is a young man by the name of Peeta (Josh Hutcherson).

The two are allowed a few quick goodbyes before being shuffled off to the Capitol where they meet with their trainer, Cinna (Lenny Kravitz), and their mentor, Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson), whose job it is to give them advice on how to win. Katniss and Peeta also get a chance to meet the 22 other players that they will be going up against, as well as a chance to assess their own strengths during the training process. Cinna and Haymitch do everything they can to prepare the two for what awaits them in the arena, but once they’re out of their hands, it’s up to Katniss and Peeta to fight for their own survival in a battle to be the one winner.

One of the questions that immediately pops up, about both films actually, is what kind of society would condone such an event? In “BR,” the battle is held because adults feared the youth who were boycotting school. Here, it’s a rebellion that occurred over 70 years ago, but the government is still making the districts pay the price. What’s more is that the whole thing is televised to the masses, most of whom are tuning in to see how their tributes are doing while some are watching for the fun of it, even making bets on the outcome. Why would this be allowed to continue when most of the people responsible for the rebellion would be dead by now?

The most prominent change is indeed that it is being televised, turning it into a kind of extreme reality TV show. One of the points that Collins seems to be making with her story is that reality TV has gotten way out of hand, which is something that pretty much anyone could tell you from flipping through the cable channels, except here, it’s also being used to send a message to the masses, a reminder that treason will not be tolerated. Apparently this is something that the government still feels the need to tell them even though over 70 years have passed. If anything, you would think this would cause another uprising, but apparently not.

The film is made up of two distinct halves. The first gives us a quick introduction to the main characters that we’ll be following, along with their time in training and other preparations for the battle. This half feels like it runs a little too long. After awhile you’ll probably get the feeling that the film needs to be moving on to the game itself. That’s not to say that this section has bad pacing, just that after the intros and a bit of training, there’s not much else for them to do before entering the arena.

The second half is the game itself, which immediately starts in a chaotic manner. Now, for those thinking that this must be a particularly violent film, let me tell you now that it’s not. There are some brief flashes of fights and a small amount of blood here and there, but it’s very minimal in the amount of violence that you actually see, unlike “BR” where the madness and the horror of the violence is seen everywhere.

This is the section that begins to get thrilling. It’s not as thrilling as I was hoping for, but you still get a fair amount. We mainly follow Katniss as she attempts to survive. At first, she just tries to get away from everyone, but the powers that be can’t allow that, so they draw her back with a forest fire. This forces her to deal with a small group that has formed an alliance. How she tries to deal with them I’ll leave you to discover.

This section does begin to drag on a bit, particularly near the end when it gets down to just a few players. This is where I was hoping that they would throw in a few more thrills to liven things up a bit, but as I mentioned earlier, this is a much tamer version of the story, so we don’t really get all that much in the way of excitement, particularly because we’re following two people who don’t want to fight unless they’re forced to. However, Katniss’s and Peeta’s attempts to survive do make for an interesting time because there are other tributes who are completely willing to fight to be the last one standing.

One thing that made “BR” a masterpiece was its fascinating view of violence and the different ways that kids might react to it, particularly when they’re not prepared for it. It used violence to show those different reactions and the lengths we go to survive. “The Hunger Games,” while an entertaining tale, doesn’t get to delve into that very much because of the restricted view of following one or two people, but this at least allows us to see a couple of reactions to this scenario.

The casting here makes a big difference in helping make this a believable story. Jennifer Lawrence, recent Oscar nominee for “Winter’s Bone,” brings a great emotional quality to Katniss, a fearless character who wants to survive for her sister’s sake. There’s also some notable supporting performances strewn throughout the film including Josh Hutcherson as Peeta, Katniss’s fellow tribute, Woody Harrelson as Haymitch, Katniss’s and Peeta’s mentor, Wes Bentley as Seneca Crane, controller of the game, and Stanley Tucci as Caesar Flickerman, host of a talk show and commentator on the game.

“The Hunger Games” is an intriguing tale and a good start to what is sure to be a continuing franchise. There are two more books in the series which will hopefully take the series in a more original direction that will allow us to get to know the characters even better. Sure this entry is a ripoff of “Battle Royale,” but it’s still an entertaining ride with great casting that will more than likely please fans of the book and those who’ve never even heard of it.

3/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

Jeremy Reins (Stephen Dorff) awakens to find himself enclosed in a glass box in an unknown location. All he can see in front of him is a clock counting down over and over. The only item in the box is an old CB radio that he uses to talk to another man in the same situation as he is. We soon learn that Jeremy is a member of the secret service and that the box he is being held in is in the trunk of a car being driven by a member of a terrorist group who are attacking Washington D.C. They have taken Jeremy hostage in order to learn the location of “Roulette,” a bunker that the President is taken to when in danger. With only the radio and his sense of duty, he must resist everything that the terrorist threatens him with, including doing harm to his captured wife.

Once again we have a film shot (almost) entirely in one location that hinges upon there being plenty of suspense and a compelling performance from the lead. “Brake” does contain quite a bit of suspense with all of its twists and turns. It leaves us in the dark, quite literally, for quite a while, not letting us know what’s going on, which puts us right there with Jeremy as he tries to figure out just what the terrorists are doing.

Also upping the suspense is the mystery surrounding the characters we don’t see. Jeremy uses the CB radio to keep in touch with Henry (JR Bourne), who claims to work for the government and who’s being held captive, as is his family, until Jeremy tells the terrorists what they want to know. But how can Jeremy trust someone he’s only ever talked to on a radio, especially in such a tense situation?

However, even with all of this going on, the film begins to feel stretched out after a while despite only running about 90 minutes. The second half has Jeremy getting ahold of a cell phone in an incredibly convenient manner, which leads to multiple phone calls for the remainder of the film. This leads up to what is the film’s biggest weakness: a pair of endings that, when combined, become incredibly silly and nonsensical.

The first ending is one that you can see coming from a mile away, but at the very least, it’s a logical ending to the film, and would have been fine if the screenwriter, Timothy Mannion, had decided to leave it there. However, he chose to throw in one more surprise that throws logic out the window and leaves the film with several unanswered questions as to how it was supposed to work in the context of the first ending. This is Mannion’s first screenplay and he’s not that bad of a writer. He just needs to learn to quit while he’s ahead.

Helping to keep the film engaging is the strong performance of Stephen Dorff, who isn’t exactly known for choosing good projects, having lately starred in “Immortals,” “Bucky Larson,” and “Somewhere.” With “Brake,” he does a good job of pouring all of the anger, fear, frustration, and desperation into the character. When your film is only going to have one actor on screen for the vast majority of it, you need to make sure that that actor is up to the task of keeping the audience interested, which is something that Dorff does rather well.

For a film like this, it must be really hard to come up with something that ends up being satisfying as a whole. When a writer chooses a minimalist plot, there are usually only a few options as to the way it can turn out. It ended up hurting “Buried” because there was only one of two ways it could go, and once you ruled out the option that was too obvious, you were left with just one. “Brake” could have gone a few more directions, but Mannion also decided to go with something obvious and then ludicrous instead of trying to surprise us in a good way. Most of it is a decent film despite it being stretched out, but most of it being good just doesn’t cut it.

2.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

Henry Barthes (Adrien Brody) is a substitute teacher whose latest job has brought him to a troubled school where most of the kids just don’t seem to care about their grades or their future. He makes the best of this while trying to deal with all of the other things going on in his life including regularly checking up on his grandfather (Louis Zorich) in a nursing home and taking care of a young prostitute, Erica (Sami Gayle), he’s saved from the streets. Meanwhile, at school, his students come to accept him as someone who truly wants to help. One of his students, a young girl named Meredith (Betty Kaye), even begins to develop an obsession with him.

Just from that synopsis you can probably see the major problem that this film has. It wants to be about so many different things, trying to pull itself in so many different directions, that the movie itself becomes lost somewhere in the mix. On the one hand, it wants to be the standard “teacher helping troubled students” film, while it also wants to be about Henry’s relationship with his grandfather, his relationship with Erica, and Meredith’s obsession with him.

The storylines don’t even end there as it also attempts to encompass the troubled lives of the teachers and administration of the school. Screenwriter Carl Lund doesn’t seem to understand that, while it’s ok to have subplots, trying to make five different plots equal in a film like this is only going to lead to disaster. All it ends up doing is not allowing any of them to develop properly as it jumps back and forth between all of these stories. This is Lund’s first screenplay, but it clearly shows.

To make matters worse, the film is structured with frequent interruptions by an interview with Henry after the events of the film, which merely serve as just that, interruptions, which disrupt any flow that the movie tries to establish. This was a very strange structuring decision to make, especially since there’s already not enough time for the multiple plots, so why take up time that could be used to develop them?

The one saving grace of the film ends up being Brody’s excellent performance. He puts a lot of emotion into the material and really gives it his all, showing that struggle he is going through between wanting to help his students and all of the other difficult things going on in his life really well. It’s just a shame that the material is unworthy and unsupportive of his strong portrayal.

There are also several “why did they bother” performances from some pretty good actors like James Caan, Bryan Cranston, Marcia Gay Harden, and Lucy Liu that have you asking that very question because they are such small roles. Liu even appears to be trying to make up for the fact that her screentime is so limited by overacting quite a bit in one particular scene where she’s trying to tell a problem student about her future prospects.

If Lund had been able to narrow the focus of his screenplay to one of these plots then he might have had a decent story here. Even cutting it down to just two or three might have worked a whole lot better, but one thing’s for sure, trying to compact all of these plots into one film and expecting it to work as a whole was rather foolish. Even a talented director like Tony Kaye (“American History X”) and a great performance from Brody can’t save a mess like this.

2/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The film, based upon the 1987 TV series of the same name, revolves around two cops, Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum), who knew each other in high school and then ended up training at the police academy together. After their first attempt at an arrest goes bad, they are placed in an undercover unit with their mission being to bring down a drug ring.

Once inside, they attempt to find the source of a new synthetic drug that has already caused a student’s death. This leads them to Eric (Dave Franco), one of the distributors. As Schmidt, not used to being considered one of the cool kids, becomes good friends with Eric in order to find the supplier of the drug, Jenko goes about the mission in a different way using a wiretap provided by his new chemistry friends in an attempt to gather the needed information.

What helps make the humor work so well is the fact that the writer, Michael Bacall, makes no illusions that his screenplay is original. In fact, he takes time to poke fun at the fact that this whole film is merely recycling an idea from the 80s. He even has his characters point out how they thought there’d be more chases and explosions in their line of work as policemen, and go figure, later in the film, we get a long chase sequence with a hilarious series of near-explosions before a completely unexpected one occurs.

What also helps make it work is that it’s just plain funny. The jokes are set up really well, such as the aforementioned chase and near-explosions. There’s also a sequence of the two having to sample the drug that’s spreading around the school that leads to a series of stages that the drug takes them through with hilarious consequences.

Aside from one really crude joke near the end of the film, the level of humor manages to stay at a really good level. It would have been easy for Bacall to sink the film into Sandler humor territory, but luckily he almost entirely resists that urge. Bacall has already proven that he can be a pretty funny guy when it comes to writing, having co-written the screenplay to the great film “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.”

While the film itself was an unexpected surprise, what was perhaps an even bigger surprise was to find Channing Tatum in a good film for once. I usually find myself having to berate his “acting,” but here, he actually does quite well with the comedic material, and he even has great chemistry with recent Academy Award nominee Jonah Hill. Tatum has been in one bad movie after another, but they’ve been almost entirely romance or action. Perhaps he’s finally found what he should have been doing all along.

The film comes from directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who also teamed up for the so-so animated film “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.” That had also been their only directors credit before this, making it quite impressive that their first live-action outing turned out as well as it did. They handle the action sequences in a clear and comprehensible manner, which is something that even the most experienced directors still seem to have trouble with nowadays.

If this film is any indication, these two have a future in directing live-action, and indeed, this film does kind of leave it open for a sequel, something I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing. Because of Bacall’s skill at writing great comedic material and Lord’s and Miller’s talent behind the camera, “21 Jump Street” became more than what it originally appeared to be, which is a surprise I’m always grateful for.

3/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The film begins with a prologue explaining how there is a great power struggle taking place on Mars between two cities, Helium and Sodanga. A warlord of Sodanga has been chosen by a goddess to be the next ruler of the planet, granting him the use of a powerful weapon. This warlord, Sab Than (Dominic West), proposes that, to end hostilities and unite the cities, he should marry Princess Dejah (Lynn Collins), a prospect that doesn’t sit particularly well with her.

This is intertwined with the story of Captain John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), a cavalryman in Virginia in 1868 on the hunt for a cave full of gold. On this hunt, he gets picked up by the Army, who plan to ship him out to Arizona to fight off Indians. However, Carter escapes and coincidentally comes across a cave with gold. In this cave he also meets a strange man who doesn’t seem like he’s even from Earth, and before he knows it, Carter is transported to Mars by a medallion.

It’s not long before he comes across an alien race known as the Tharks, who are ruled by Tars Tarkus (Voice of Willem Dafoe). The Tharks are impressed by Carter’s amazing ability to jump great distances due to the lower gravity, which comes in handy when they suddenly find themselves in the middle of a shooting match between two ships. Aboard one ship is Dejah, running away from the proposed marriage, while the other ship is attempting to retrieve her. With Carter’s help, she successfully completes her escape. Eventually, the two unite on a quest to bring peace back to the war-torn planet.

“John Carter” is certainly an interesting idea for a film with a power struggle on an alien world and an outsider affecting the balance, but sadly it never ends up fully working. While it seems like it has a lot of story, most of it is merely set up to the actual plot, leading to a kind of “story deficit” for the remaining two-thirds of the film. It remains mildly intriguing throughout, but with the film being stretched out to over two hours, you begin to feel the strain rather early on.

The blending of the two genres is done rather well, allowing the audience to witness a fascinating juxtaposition to the alien world of Mars and its technology after having started on 19th century Earth. In fact, it ends up being a much more successful merger of western and sci-fi than “Cowboys & Aliens” was, particularly because the story is stronger, yet still not strong enough to save it overall.

The biggest problems occur mainly in the second act where things slow down for far too long. The first act had been quite exciting and the third act picks this up again for the most part, but that slog through the second act, which is where it feels particularly stretched out, makes it feel like a number of minutes could have been trimmed. This would have probably given the film a tighter pace and made it flow much better than it did. The filmmakers were definitely going for an epic here, but in order to warrant an epic length, you need enough story to fill that time, something that the writers tried to do through this prolonged second act and the film’s multiple action sequences.

These sequences do become a bit of a highlight for the film. They are well-done, exciting, and feature some interesting vehicles and weapons, but eventually you get the urge for the story to move on. This eventually comes down to the big finale, which oddly gave off a strange “Flash Gordon” vibe as Carter flies toward a major city to try to put an end to a wedding between a warlord and the woman he loves. All that was missing was the giant forcefield and music by Queen.

The performances are not exactly anything to rave about, but it is interesting that the studio would take such an enormous risk by casting the unknown Kitsch, whose most noted film appearance before this was probably in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” in a $250 million gamble. All eyes are going to be on the film to see how it ends up performing overall as the studio is hoping to create a new and profitable franchise out of Burroughs’s “John Carter” books.

If another film is made, hopefully they’ll take a little more time in getting the story right before making it. This first one has been in development for a long, long time, which makes it surprising that it wasn’t stronger than it was. There are certainly things to like about it such as the production design, the action sequences, and the intriguing set-up of the story, but overall, the execution of the remainder of the story and the pacing end up holding it back from becoming the rousing adventure it could have been.

2.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The couple, Jason (Adam Scott) and Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt), have been friends for ages but have never felt any attraction for each other. They’ve spent their years telling each other everything about their attempts to start a love life and spending time with the same four mutual friends, two couples who have wondered why they’ve never gotten together. Because they both want a kid, Jason and Julie come up with a plan where they will have one together, but not get married, with the idea being not to subject the child to a nasty divorce and all the pain that would bring to the three of them.

They have the baby and proceed to date other people. Jason meets Mary Jane (Megan Fox), an actress, while Julie starts seeing Kurt (Edward Burns). Everything seems to be going well for both of them as they are both very happy. However, complications begin to arise when they start to feel that there might be more to their relationship than they originally thought.

This film contains one of the most irresponsible couples ever featured in a romantic-comedy. Who in their right mind would ever conceive of such a bizarre experiment, let alone carry it out? Sure it’s merely the writer’s (Westfeldt) attempt at comedy, but it never comes off as funny because this couple is purposefully bringing a child into a loveless marriage and an already broken home, which is ironic given that their original plan was to avoid the unpleasantness of a divorce.

Their friends seem to think that this is a very bad idea, but apparently they don’t try very hard to talk them out of it. Later in the film, one of them even tells Jason straight to his face that they didn’t think their idea out very far, and indeed, they did not. You would think that, when dealing with the life of a baby, there would be considerable planning that goes into it, but the furthest that these two get is agreeing to split expenses down the middle. Obviously there would be several complications that would arise from such a disastrous experiment, and yet, they somehow never stop to think about it.

Aside from the premise being completely flawed and unbelievable, it follows the standard formula pretty much beat for beat. You have the couple that has been friends for ages, but has never gotten together, so knowing what genre you’re watching, you already know that these two are going to be together by the end of the film. However, Westfeldt decides to drag the film out to an unbearable length, not only with a bad story, but with a third act that is terribly written.

As mention earlier, the standard couple of a romantic-comedy usually just takes a little while to figure out that they love each other, or in some cases has to overcome a misunderstanding or doubt before they get together. Here, the realization is staggered so that she realizes she loves him, but he still doesn’t realize his feelings for her, and then he realizes he loves her, but she has tried to move on. This brings not only the doubt, but extreme irritation when it tries to make us believe that she’s going to reject him when he tells her he loves her after having told him not long before that she loves him.

If you’ve found any of this to be spoilerish, then you’ve obviously never seen a rom-com before. Usually they will just stick to the formula in a pain-free sort of fashion. It doesn’t make them good, in fact, it makes most of them a bit of a slog to sit through. “Friends with Kids” takes this formula and somehow finds a way to make it worse, which is a very difficult thing to do. Movies of this genre normally want you to root for the couple to end up together. All this one had me doing was hoping that someone would smack them upside the head and talk some sense into them.

1.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The film revolves around Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage), a man who made a pact with the Devil and is now inhabited by an evil demon that turns him into the vigilante Ghost Rider. Johnny makes a deal with his friend, Moreau (Idris Elba), to help protect a child, Danny (Fergus Riordan), from Carrigan (Johnny Whitworth), who has been sent by the devil, Roarke (Ciarin Hinds), to fetch him. Apparently Danny was born the son of the devil after his mother, Nadya (Violante Placido), made her own pact with him to save her life. Now Johnny, Moreau, and Nadya must prevent Roarke from using Danny as a means to obtain even greater power.

Just from that you can see how completely ridiculous this movie becomes, and because of that, it’s not hard to see why it becomes so uninvolving. It’s basically composed of a nonsensical plot and a few action scenes, again reminding me of the latest entry in the “Underworld” franchise. There are no characters to get invested in here, nor any story that even slightly begins to engage the viewer.

Its problems don’t even end there as it’s also clumsily directed. For those few action scenes where the filmmakers are trying to keep the audience awake, you can hardly tell what’s happening due to the jumpiness of the camera and the quick cutaways. Apparently the directors/writers, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, adhere to the Michael Bay style of action where shots can only last a second or two tops in fear of losing the audience’s interest, something they never had in the first place.

These are the same two who also brought us the interesting film “Crank,” which turned out to be a fun, fast-paced thrill ride. Their sequel to it attempted the same thing, but was not quite as successful. They then turned their attention to the disastrous “Gamer,” which was basically nonstop shooting and utter boredom. This brings us back to present day where “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance” clearly shows their continual decline.

It really has to be seen to be believed just how ridiculous it gets. Eventually, Carrigan, the man pursuing the child, dies, but the devil, apparently unable to do such chores himself, needs him back, so he simply brings him back to life. However, his appearance changes from his old self to that of someone who looks like a Goth rock star.

This all comes down to an ending that is so utterly lazy, silly, and just plain dumb that you can’t help but feel embarrassment for the writers. Whereas they had been so inclined to include action scenes throughout the film, suddenly they decided to cut out what could have been a fairly interesting showdown by replacing it with something beyond simplistic. Perhaps they ran out of ideas at this point. It did seem like they were reusing the same few techniques over and over (chain of fire burning people up, Ghost Rider wobbling his head back and forth at people like a bobble head doll, etc.).

Cage, who seems to make one good movie out of every ten he signs up for, does his standard crazy routine, a routine that becomes rather dull when you’ve seen it over and over again. Sometimes his craziness can be amusing even when the film is terrible (see the awful remake of “The Wicker Man” for a prime example), but here, even he seems to realize there’s not much to work with. Other notable players include Idris Elba, who has received much praise for his role on “Luther,” and Ciarin Hinds, who has starred in such popular projects as “Rome” and “There Will Be Blood.”

This is destined for a place at the bottom of the pile come the end of the year, but in all honesty, did anyone really expect anything good out of a movie about a guy with a flaming skull going around killing people? There’s got to be a more engaging story to be told with this character given that the comics have been around since the 70s. Whether the original premise was actually interesting enough to be made into a feature film in the first place is a completely different matter.

1.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

These two agents, FDR (Chris Pine) and Tuck (Tom Hardy), have worked together for a long time and have become like brothers. As the film opens, they attempt to complete a mission in which covertness is the top priority. However, things don’t go completely by the book. They complete the mission, but not before a brother of a crime lord (Til Schweiger) is killed. Their boss is obviously unhappy that this occurred, knowing that the surviving brother will try to hunt them down, so she grounds the two agents, keeping them close to home to work on the case.

In the meantime, Tuck has decided to find a girlfriend by hooking up on an online dating service. He meets Lauren (Reese Witherspoon), a product tester, and they end up hitting it off. Not long after their date, FDR just happens to run into her nearby and also falls for her, which eventually leads to them dating. Lauren, with the help of her friend Trish (Chelsea Handler), attempts to juggle both men at once while trying to decide which one is best for her. Meanwhile, Tuck and FDR have figured out that they have both fallen for the same woman, which puts a strain on their relationship as they both try their best to win her over.

Just from looking at those two paragraphs of synopsis, you’d probably think that they’re not even talking about the same movie, and indeed that’s just how it feels when the film tries to combine the two different plotlines. We’re expected to believe that these two agents in the CIA have nothing better to do than to spend all their time fighting over the same woman. If that’s the case, then you may ask, why bother with the other storyline? Well, because there obviously has to be some kind of danger that the girl can get into so that they can save her.

However, what would have probably been the better route would have been to try and make this a straight up romantic-comedy instead of trying to merge two completely different storylines into one awkward film, though that probably wouldn’t have worked particularly well either. I suppose they wanted to try and appeal to men as well, so they figured they would add in a few unnecessary plot points and try to make it work despite the fact that they don’t mix very well.

It’s interesting how FDR and Tuck are able to divert several CIA resources towards their personal activities. They put several agents on tasks like finding out what Lauren likes and what she does 24/7. They even keep tabs on each other when they go on dates with her. How is it that none of their superiors notices that this has nothing to do with their mission at hand or that they haven’t even been working on finding their actual target? Their underlings begin to ask questions, but all they have to say are that it’s classified. However, you would think that at the point they start keeping tabs on their dates, more suspicions would arise, leading them to bring it to the attention of those higher up in the chain of command.

The film comes from director McG, whose filmography includes some other works of this level such as “Charlie’s Angels,” “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle,” and “Terminator: Salvation.” The screenplay was written by Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg, an interesting combination given that Dowling has helped give us the awful Adam Sandler movie “Just Go with It,” while Kinberg has worked on a handful of decent projects like “Sherlock Holmes” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” It’s unclear what they were all thinking when trying to put this mess together. Perhaps they were merely hoping that people could have an enormous suspension of disbelief and just allow themselves to think that this could really happen to a pair of CIA agents.

Pine, Hardy, and Witherspoon try their best, but they just don’t have much to work with here, especially since their characters never develop. It’s unfortunate that they had to get mixed up in a mish-mash of a film that never comes together. Being a little absurd is acceptable, but completely throwing reality out the window in a film that tries to ground itself in it is pushing it too much. If people like this were really allowed to be CIA agents, there would be much bigger problems to worry about than trying to decide which one of them is going to end up with a woman they both like.

2/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The film begins with a married couple, Leo (Channing Tatum) and Paige (Rachel McAdams), who are deeply in love. On their way home, a truck crashes into the back of their car, putting them both in the hospital. In no time, Leo is back on his feet while Paige has been placed in a coma to allow her brain time to heal and for the swelling to go down. When she awakens, she can’t remember who Leo is or what has happened for the last few years.

Paige’s parents (Sam Neill and Jessica Lange), whom she hasn’t spoken to in some time, arrive at the hospital and want to take her home with them, but Leo objects, thinking that it would be best to take her home with him so that she can try to remember their life together. Paige eventually decides to go home with Leo to see what her recent life has been like. Leo does everything he can to remind her of how they met and fell in love, but trying to fill in all the missing pieces of the last few years proves extremely difficult, which puts a strain on their relationship.

What ends up being most detrimental to “The Vow” is the way the beginnings of the relationship are skimmed over. Here was the filmmakers chance to get us involved with the characters, to let us know exactly how they fell in love so that we could feel something for them as we watch them drift together and apart throughout the film as their second relationship goes through its ups and downs.

Instead, they chose to gloss over this section and then throw us right into the situation without giving us the chance to get to know who these people are and why we should care about them. It’s true that the film is sweet about the whole situation as Leo attempts to show that they really do love each other very much, but without that attachment to the characters, we never end up feeling much for them.

It certainly doesn’t help that a large error in casting was made. If you want an audience to feel emotion for your character, it’s never a good idea to cast the expressionless Channing Tatum, who has started to remind me of an older Taylor Lautner, not in looks, but in how they are both emotionless and lack the talent necessary for acting. You would think that after witnessing his attempts in films like “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” “Dear John,” “The Eagle,” and “The Son of No One,” that he would be out of a job very quickly, but like Lautner, he just keeps inexplicably popping up again and again.

The rest of the cast is admirable in their attempts to bring the story to life. McAdams, who has done good work in the past in films like the first “Sherlock Holmes” and “Midnight in Paris,” doesn’t have to do much here besides act like she can’t remember anything. Neill comes off as a bit of a slimy villain as he attempts to set things up the way he wants them now that his daughter can’t remember the last few years. Lange’s talent seems wasted here because other than one revelatory scene near the end of the film, she isn’t given much to do.

The third act also leaves a lot to be desired as it introduces an extremely contrived plot point that leads it to its predictable conclusion. Not only is it predictable, but it ended up feeling quite random how the events came to be, as though the four writers (yes, it took four writers to put this together) just got lazy near the end of the writing phase and just decided that the ending that we know is coming will pop up whether it makes any sense or not.

“The Vow” might have been a decent film had the filmmakers taken the time to allow the characters to develop, or perhaps even if a better actor was cast in the lead, but the way they end up handling the material here doesn’t do it any favors as all it ends up being is a foundation of an interesting topic with no way to get attached to it. It’s interesting to have to say that the same basic premise was handled much better in an episode of “Star Trek: Voyager” than it was in a big budget theatrical film.

2/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

Shawn (Voice of David Henrie), a sickly young boy, has come to live with his Aunt (Voice of Gracle Poletti) and their housekeeper, Hara (Voice of Carol Burnett), in a house in the country in order to get some rest before an operation. Living in this same house is a group of little people known as “Borrowers” because they borrow things from the family living there, things that they won’t miss. This little family consists of Arrietty (Voice of Bridgit Mendler), a young girl who is just starting the process of borrowing, her mother (Voice of Amy Poehler), and father (Voice of Will Arnett).

There have been rumors going around Shawn’s family of the little people living there, but on his first day there, he catches a glimpse of Arrietty. Later on, when Arrietty is on her first borrowing mission with her father, Shawn spots her again. The two of them eventually strike up a friendship despite her parents constantly telling her that they must not be seen or else they will have to find a new place to live. Meanwhile, Hara becomes suspicious that the rumors about the little people are true and upon accidentally discovering their home, she decides to do something about them.

“Arrietty” features a screenplay co-written by Miyazaki and the less-experienced Keiko Niwa (based on the book “The Borrowers” by Mary Norton), but with the former being a part of the project, you know you’re going to be in for a good story. It is told rather well, giving us time to get to know the personalities of the main players so that when the relationship between Shawn and Arrietty slowly begins to form, the audience is actually able to connect with them. These characters may not be as particularly memorable as those we’ve seen in past films from this studio, but they are still engaging.

What also makes the film engaging is the same high-quality level of animation we’ve seen in past Ghibli releases. As mentioned earlier, the imagination of the filmmakers tends to run wild for these films, allowing them to create some of the most interesting locations ever used in animation. What’s interesting about “Arrietty” are not the locations themselves, but the major difference in a seemingly normal location from a different point of view.

Take for instance Arrietty going on her first borrowing mission with her father. We watch as they navigate through the walls, using nails as steps and staples as ladders, and climbing cabinets and tables using hooks and ropes. There are also scenes of Arrietty interacting with large insects, running through tall grass, and trying to avoid being caught by an enormous cat. Seemingly normal locations like this have a whole new look when you see it through the eyes of someone only a few inches tall.

This project was brought together under the direction of Hiromasa Yonebayashi, a frequent collaborator of Miyazaki’s on films like “Howl’s Moving Castle” and “Ponyo.” He has put together an interesting film here and has done surprisingly well given that it’s his first attempt at directing. His 15 years of experience in the field of animation makes him a great choice to take on a project like this and with its critical and financial success (it’s been around since 2010 and is just now making its way to US theaters), it seems he has a future in direction.

It’s not quite on the level of some of the studio’s other works, but “Arrietty” is still fascinating to watch for its beautiful animation, interesting characters, and the heartwarming relationship between Shawn and Arrietty. Like those other works, it’s fun family entertainment that doesn’t pander to one particular age group. They are made so that anyone of any age can enjoy them, which is merely another part of their magical storytelling.

3/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

Beginning in the present day, we meet Eva (Tilda Swinton), who leads a dreary life, seemingly detached from all outside contact. Her small house has been splattered with red paint, but for what reason we’re unsure. Whenever she does go out, she gets the most peculiar of stares and goes out of her way to avoid particular people. Another woman even gives her a slap on the cheek when she encounters her. Every so often, she visits her teenage son, Kevin (Ezra Miller), in prison, but not much is said. The answers to the mysteries all lie in the past.

Flashbacks inform us that Eva was once happy, living with her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) and awaiting the arrival of her first born. Once Kevin arrives, things begin to get more difficult as he is a rather hard child to deal with. Right away, he seems not to want to listen to his mother or even talk to her. This evolves into more troublesome behavior such as ruining Eva’s bedroom decorations and being constantly rude. When Kevin grows older, this behavior eventually culminates in tragedy as the pieces of the puzzle slowly fall into place.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” is a fascinating character study of a broken woman trying to get on with her life after terrible tragedy as well as her dealing with her son as he grows up. It’s hard to put a finger on just one thing that went wrong in his childhood that made him act the way he did. Eva tries to be a good mother from the very start, but begins to get fed up with Kevin’s behavior early on, even going so far as to tell baby Kevin that she was happy before he came along.

Even with his early behavioral issues, there didn’t seem to be much disciplining going on. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any going on at all. This only makes it seem to Kevin like this behavior is acceptable. To top this off, his father is in complete denial about Kevin’s problems, not wanting to accept that he is not a good kid, even after several events that prove otherwise. He even goes so far as to get his troubled teen a real bow and arrows after a childhood fascination with Robin Hood and archery. This, as you probably could have guessed, was not a smart thing to do.

There is also the way Kevin behaves around his parents to consider. Around his father, Kevin is usually well-behaved, yet around his mother, he always seems to have a snide remark to make. A dinner scene between Kevin and Eva is particularly telling of this as he sarcastically predicts the everyday topics his mother is going to want to talk about like school, girls, and drugs.

One incident begins to explain how he acts towards his mother. Early on, when she gets slightly angry at his deliberately bad behavior, she is a little rough with him, causing him to break his arm, leaving him with a small scar. He’s young at the time, but even then, he still gets it into his head that this could be used for blackmailing Eva into doing what he wants.

All of these things are possible explanations for the way Kevin turned out, but then again, he could have been naturally born this way with his parents only serving to compound his behavior through theirs and their lack of discipline. The film doesn’t provide any easy answers for this, but we do know that his childhood certainly didn’t help alleviate any of his problems.

It becomes ironic that in a movie called “We Need to Talk About Kevin” no one actually does just that. Kevin is obviously a very troubled kid, but with a father that’s in such bad denial and a mother that doesn’t seem intent on punishing anything he does, nothing is ever done. You would think that, at the very least, Eva would get the boy some psychiatric counseling or consider military school to make up for their lack of discipline, but these things never happen either, adding complacency to their list of problems. By the time the film gets around to showing us the tragedy that made Eva’s life the way it currently is, we are not surprised in the least after witnessing all that came before.

Eva is such a fascinating character to watch as everything unfolds. This could not have been an easy role, but Tilda Swinton pulls it off brilliantly. Somehow she is able to portray all of the frustration, anger, fear, and more to deliver an incredibly captivating performance. In the present day scenes, she doesn’t speak very much, but her face is an open book that tells us all we need to know about how she is feeling, even when we don’t know what it is she’s gone through yet. In the past, we see her slowly sink into her complacent ways while trying to make some kind of connection with Kevin, but not making any headway. All of this comes together to form a character that you won’t want to look away from.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” been winning much acclaim as it makes its way around the festival circuit. Especially for Swinton’s performance, and though it’s only in a limited release, it is well worth going out of your way to find it. It may not be a crowd-pleaser, but it’s not every day we get an emotional powerhouse of a film done this well.

3.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

Mallory (Gina Carano) is an agent for a private security company who is on the run after a job during which she was betrayed. We flash back to a previous job in Barcelona where we learn that she and her team rescued someone being held hostage. After this, her boss, Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), immediately asks her to do another job in Dublin with Paul (Michael Fassbender). Things don’t go quite as expected, especially when Paul attempts to kill her. A phone call to Kenneth from Paul’s phone confirms that she’s been betrayed. Now on the run, she has to discover the truth behind why she was set up.

The structure of “Haywire” was indeed a very odd storytelling technique. In fact, the only discernable reason for even starting it off in the present and then flashing back is to let us know that something does eventually happen plotwise, but even then, by the halfway point, all we know is that she’s been betrayed by her own company. We spend the remainder of this brief film wondering about this, only to have to wait until the last few minutes where a very convoluted plot is attached to explain the situation.

The problem with doing this is that there’s not really anything attaching us to Mallory to get us to care about what’s happening to her. We know something’s wrong, but without the smallest details of what the significance of the jobs in Barcelona and Dublin are, or why she would have been betrayed, we’re merely watching her run around without the faintest idea of what’s happening.

The funny thing about the film is that it ends up being most affective when there’s nothing being said at all. There are two sequences that stand out from the rest of the film that show a really good filmmaker at work, and indeed the film was directed by Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh. The first sequence is the job in Barcelona where we watch as they execute their mission. Things don’t go quite as smoothly as they would have liked, leading Mallory to have to chase down one of the guards. With merely a background score playing, we see just how affective the visuals can be on their own.

The second sequence is a footchase lasting about ten minutes that again requires no dialogue to get the intensity of the scenes across. We watch as Mallory rushes down back alleys, through buildings, and across roofs in an attempt to avoid the police. Soderbergh manages to keep the effectiveness of this sequence going for the full ten minutes, again on visuals alone. These two sequences earn the movie a lot of style points, but sadly they don’t manage to overcome the overarching problems with the story.

Another strange thing about the film is that a number of well-known actors were brought in to play an assortment of supporting characters with small roles including Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas, and Bill Paxton. It’s odd to see so many good actors playing these small, thankless parts, pretty much the kind we only expect to see Robert De Niro in nowadays. It would be very interesting to know what attracted them all to this material.

Soderbergh shows talent for a movie like this, he just needs to learn to pick better material for a film of this nature. The screenplay was written by Lem Dobbs, who also co-wrote the interesting “Dark City,” so they shouldn’t have had much trouble doing a film like this, but when you choose to structure a film in a strange fashion like he did here, problems are bound to pop up. The film does have style, but unfortunately the focus on that element seems to have come at too much of a cost.

2.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) is an ex-smuggler who now sells security systems for a living. When his wife’s (Kate Beckinsale) brother, Andy (Caleb Landry Jones), is forced to dump a smuggled shipment, Chris is forced to step in to correct the situation by taking on another smuggling job so that a crime lord, Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), won’t harm his family. Since Chris refuses to deal with drugs, he decides to smuggle several counterfeit bills from Panama on board a ship run by Captain Camp (J.K. Simmons).

The job will require precise timing, help from some of the crew, and a stealthy way to get the money on board and off again. Meanwhile, Briggs continues to threaten Chris’s family, instigating a second deal that Andy will have to carry out, leading to complications with Chris’s deal. It becomes a race against time for Chris and his crew to pull off their complicated operation in order to ensure the safety of his wife and kids.

This was a pretty good antidote to the fleeting blandness of “Underworld: Awakening,” which attempted to string action sequences together with a thread of a story while trying to call itself a movie. “Contraband” has a few good action sequences, but it also has a story for the audience to get invested in instead of turning off their brain and hoping for the best, a practice I’ve never seen the point of. Why would a movie be worth watching if you had to turn your brain off to enjoy it?

Why the story works here is because of how engaging it becomes. We’ve seen movies like this before, where a heist is supposedly planned out perfectly, but, of course, something has to go wrong, because there usually isn’t much fun in watching a perfectly executed heist. There are obviously rare exceptions to this, “Ocean’s 11” come to mind, but that worked so well because of the convoluted events going on behind the scenes. For the most part, a kink in the chain is needed to shake things up a bit.

Here, we’re with the crew every step of the way as they attempt to carry out their plan. Things go wrong when Andy is forced to take action by carrying out a second deal involving smuggling drugs in order to protect Chris’s kids. This leads to a change in plans for Chris’s crew, who suddenly find themselves having to take on another job in the middle of the one they are already trying to carry out.

It’s these kinks, the twists and turns in the plot, that keep it moving along at a good pace. As the smuggling operation continues, you begin to wonder what will get in the way of completing it next. These twists are provided by Aaron Guzikowski, who wrote the screenplay, based on Reykjavik-Rotterdam, a 2008 film from Iceland. Surprisingly, this was their first produced work. Not a bad start for a rookie screenwriter.

It may not exactly be an original story, but when a little effort is put into a film like this, it can be done pretty well. It’s becoming tiresome to see movies where filmmakers think action movies have to be nothing but action scenes strung together. Sometimes all it takes to entertain an audience is an involving scenario with a slick pacing, and that’s something you won’t have to turn your brain off to enjoy.

3/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The film opens as a vast manhunt for lycans and vampires is underway. While trying to reunite with her lover, Selene (Kate Beckinsale), a vampire, is captured and taken to a research facility where a team of scientists is studying lycans. Selene escapes and eventually meets up with another vampire, David (Theo James), who is also fighting against the humans. She also meets up with her daughter, Eve (India Eisley), whom she had with her lycan lover, making her a hybrid of the two races. After a lycan attack on their vampire base, Eve is taken and brought to the research facility where it appears that there is more going on than the simple study of lycans.

The main reason that “Underworld: Awakening” felt like it had such a vapid, ephemeral existence was that it only consisted of a thread of a story that seemed like it was only there to act as a conduit for the non-stop, mind-numbing action sequences. It’s amazing to discover that it took a total of four people to write this screenplay, and among them the great J. Michael Straczynski, creator of one of the greatest sci-fi shows of all time, “Babylon 5.” Apparently even he has his bad days, just look at “Ninja Assassin.”

There is absolutely no reason that this screenplay should have taken more than one person to write, especially since there’s barely any story to begin with. Being the fourth entry in a mostly forgettable series, it merely continues the story from the other films: lycans hate and want to kill vampires and vice-versa. This entry merely adds the lycans trying to get stronger through research, but even that’s not particularly new.

However, it’s clear the film was not made on the merit of its story. It was made to try and showcase multiple stunts: explosions, gunfire, throats being ripped out, and so on and so forth. Many of these stunts feature Kate Beckinsale jumping off walls, slashing through opponents, and throwing weapons at them, making these sequences extremely repetitive, dull, and as mentioned before, mind-numbing.

Speaking of Beckinsale, her character remains as one-note as ever. It’s amusing to hear her character say at one point, “I’m not good with emotions,” which is certainly true in the case of this film. Her character never comes to life, no pun intended, nor do we ever care about what happens to her, her daughter, or any of the characters since they are as flat and soulless as the film.

“Underworld: Awakening” is the fourth entry in a series that started off as goofy fun and was silly entertainment for the first movie or two, not particularly good, but alright for a rainy night movie when you’re low on options. However, it’s now overstayed its welcome for far too long and I couldn’t even begin to recommend this one, even when there’s nothing else to watch.

Sadly, we can expect the saga to continue as this entry clearly leaves it open for yet another sequel where undoubtedly we will see vampires battle lycans once more in a series of endless action sequences. Perhaps this time they’ll at least try to come up with a story that will slightly engage the audience, but based on how hard they’ve tried lately with this series, I wouldn’t count on that happening.

1.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The film begins with Thatcher’s (Meryl Streep) post-political life, showing us that she has not been quite right since her husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent), passed away. In fact, she still sees him quite often and holds conversations with him. Eventually we begin to flash back to how she became involved with politics. Even though she is merely a shopkeeper, she decides to run for parliament. It is during this period that she meets Denis and gets married, eventually winning the position of Education Secretary.

Thatcher sees that there are many problems with the country that she simply cannot fix from her current position, which leads her to run for Prime Minister. Amazingly, she wins, making history as the first woman to hold the office. From here, we witness the hardship of her time as PM by seeing glimpses of some of the events of her terms, with the most focus going to the invasion of the Falkland Islands and the struggle to get them back.

Sadly, “The Iron Lady” is a missed opportunity to tell an important story. It’s a shame to see Thatcher’s life reduced to a meandering mess of a narrative and montage, and indeed, these were the two biggest problems of the film. From the beginning of the film, you might think they were going to show a little of her life after her time as PM and then go back and tell the whole story, but it ends up wasting far too much time on this section not only here, but throughout the film as it keeps coming back to it.

This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it was going to fill us in on what she’s done during this period, but alas, we don’t get anything about her accept that she’s apparently becoming senile and seeing and conversing with her deceased husband. This was a bizarre choice in structure for the filmmakers to make as it adds nothing to the story, which should be focusing on her rise to power and her time in office.

When we do finally get to see how she rose to power, it is in incredibly brief glimpses. It seems like before you can even blink she’s achieved victory in becoming Education Secretary, and again when she becomes PM. How did she manage to get so much support? What were her stances that attracted the people to vote for her? All of this is glossed over as the film jumps ahead, leaving those who don’t know much of anything about her in the dust.

I myself don’t know much about how she achieved these things or about her time in office, which is why I was really looking forward to seeing the film, but unfortunately there is nothing to be learned here. When it does get to her time as PM, the remainder of the film, when it’s not pointlessly flashing forward, is reduced to a montage of what she did in office. As PM, she believed in action, which she took when the Falkland Islands were invaded by Argentina. Since the film spends the most time on this incident, supposedly they see this as her most important accomplishment. The rest of her accomplishments I suppose you’ll have to learn about elsewhere.

If there’s one good thing to come out of the film, it’s Meryl Streep’s brilliant portrayal of Thatcher. She disappears completely into this character, becoming her, and making us forget that we’re only watching a performance. She may indeed win her third Oscar for it, and it would be well-deserved, but it’s just a shame her incredible work couldn’t have been in a film more worthy of it.

This really could have been something had the filmmakers taken the time to focus on her incredible career instead of wasting time with the uninformative, post-political period. It would have been wonderful to learn all about her and her achievements rather than merely getting a bland overview. There’s a great story to be told about the life of Margaret Thatcher. Unfortunately, this is not it.

2/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

However, we quickly see that something is not quite right here. From early on, we see that even simple word choice comes under scrutiny (Alan objects to Penelope saying that his son was “armed” with a stick). The meeting begins in a civil manner, but we slowly begin to realize that these characters are merely putting on facades, hiding their true feelings regarding the situation, which are hinted at as Penelope snaps how she wishes her son wouldn’t have had to lose two teeth in order for them to meet.

In a sense, “Carnage” is a study of the breakdown of these characters’ facades over the course of having to put up with each other. The situation is awkward from the start since none of them wants to be placed in that position of having to admit their kid did something wrong or having to deal with the parents of a kid who did something wrong. The one who begins to show his true feelings earliest is Alan, who, as an attorney, is a very busy man, constantly whipping out his cell phone to deal with a client. He appears detached from the situation from pretty much the very start.

This, in turn, starts annoying everyone else who appears to want to take the situation seriously, especially Nancy, who wants to try to pin blame not only on her son, but on Penelope’s and Michael’s as well because their son called their son a snitch and is also the leader of a gang. So, from Alan’s seeming lack of interest in the situation, a breakdown of morals begins to occur as the characters begin to say what they really feel.

The film becomes an interesting character study that shows that when parents are trying to deal with their kids, they can end up behaving like kids themselves, attempting to shift blame from themselves to others. The conversation kind of goes all over the place and ends up ranging from interesting to less interesting. It’s most compelling when their dealing with the issue at hand, but less so when it takes a detour into other areas that make the film feel like it goes on hold for a few minutes.

For instance, early on, when Nancy’s nerves get riled up too much, she vomits onto some of Penelope’s art books. The film pauses for a little while so that everything and everyone can get cleaned up, though it does throw in a scene or two of the couples talking about each other, revealing what they really think of them, not that we can’t already tell that these couples don’t think too much of each other.

This is clearly shown as the day continues and the conversation becomes more and more hostile. We eventually learn that Michael didn’t really want to have this meeting either. Later on, when he finds his own nerves rattled, he pulls out a bottle of whiskey and offers some to Alan, who is only too willing to accept what with his shared lack of enthusiasm. The film probably would have been a little more effective had the writers, Yasmina Reza and Roman Polanski (who adapted the screenplay form Reza’s play “God of Carnage”), not chosen to go the route of having the characters drink in order to become more open with each other, but instead had the characters come to a natural catharsis on their own. As mentioned, the conversation does kind of go all over the place, but even more so when they begin drinking the whiskey. However, it does stay focused enough to remain quite engaging.

The highlights of “Carnage” are the wonderful performances from the entire four-person cast, all of them Oscar nominees, three of them winners. This seems like a very strange role for Reilly, but he does quite well with it nonetheless. Waltz is effective at playing a man somewhat detached from the situation with seemingly more important things to him on his mind. Foster and Winslet bring the most emotion to the film as their characters are the ones actually trying to solve the problem, but not really getting anywhere with it what with their building hatred of each other and the unwillingness of anyone to accept the blame.

“Carnage” comes from famed, Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski, who has brought us such memorable films as “The Pianist” and “Chinatown.” Here he has crafted a bizarre little film that runs only about 75 minutes, uses one location, and only four characters who spend most of the film sitting/standing around talking or shouting at each other. Yet the film is engaging and entertaining to watch as these excellent performers show us that even the seemingly-nicest of people can show their true colors when pushed too far. Unlike “A Dangerous Method” (based on the play “The Talking Cure”), this play has adapted rather well to film, showing us that sometimes all it takes is some interesting dialogue and great performers to immerse the audience in the experience.

3/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The story begins as Control (John Hurt), head of British Intelligence, sends Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) on a mission to Hungary to try and attempt to bring a possible defector to their side who supposedly knows the identity of a mole at MI6. However, the mission goes wrong, resulting in Control and one of his agents, George Smiley (Gary Oldman), being removed from service. However, when Jim fills George in on Control’s suspicions of a mole, George sets out to discover their identity.

Based on the intelligence leaked, Control believed the mole was someone at the very top, someone in his personal circle, which includes Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds), Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), and George. It’s up to George to find out which one of these men is responsible, but having been forced into retirement doesn’t make this an easy task, causing him to recruit another agent, Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), to assist in the investigation.

To put it simply, “Tinker Tailor Solder Spy” has a good story in it somewhere, but you wouldn’t really know that from its poor execution here. The structure of it is quite strange. This is a film where not much happens, and yet you have to be particularly observant when it comes to even the most mundane event or the passing mention of a character because it may become important later.

Most of the runtime of the film is spent on events that have little to do with George’s investigation. There’s even a good deal of the first half spent listening to the story of a disgraced agent, Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy), that has practically nothing to do with it at all. All of these events lead up to an ending that feels incredibly rushed. In a bizarre choice, the filmmakers opted to squeeze the majority of the actual plot into the last 20 or so minutes.

One of the major problems with this is that they haven’t bothered to develop the suspects with all of the time wasted away on those events which didn’t add much, if anything, to the story, so by the time we get around to who was responsible, it feels random and even a bit lazy. You’ll also probably be asking yourself, if it was that easy to find out who did it, why didn’t George just do that sooner?

There are parts that are hard to follow, but as mentioned earlier, the audience is hardly to be blamed for this. To be asked to put together a puzzle when pieces are missing or not explained very well can be hard to do. I got most of the plot, but even after perusing the screenplay, parts of the conclusion I had to put together based on guesses due to the lack of explanation and plot points.

It’s a shame that so many of the characters are left undeveloped because there’s such a great cast here including Gary Oldman, John Hurt, and Colin Firth. Oldman is a particular oddity here. Usually he plays much more eccentric characters, but here he’s very subdued, speaking softly and never in a rush to get anything done. You could even go so far as to say that he’s pretty bland. Here’s the performance that we’ve been hearing so much about, one that could possibly get him an Oscar nomination, and it turns out that it’s a pretty forgettable one.

The film comes to us from director Tomas Alfredson, who brought us the excellent vampire film “Let the Right One In.” That was a film where slow pacing and dark mood helped out quite a bit because the time was spent allowing us to get to know the characters and allowing us to connect and care about them. The slow pacing of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” is merely squandered on several unimportant events instead of important character and plot development, so that when it comes to the sped up pacing of those last 20 minutes, you’re left wondering why you should care about who was responsible.

From watching the film, it ends up feeling like maybe reading the book should be a prerequisite, or perhaps viewing the five-hour miniseries would be a good idea. Perhaps with all that extra time, the story is fully explained and the characters are allowed to develop to the point where we know who they are. By the end of this version, you may know the basic plot, but questions will arise that you’ll wish they took the time to answer.

2.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

This is also the first year I can recall there not being a clear choice as the best film of the year. Usually, there is one that stands above the rest and is the clear, deserving choice of the title, such as my choices for the last few years: “Inception,” “Inglourious Basterds,” and “The Dark Knight.” This year, there have been several films that have been quite good, but not any that really stand out from the rest as being the clear choice, so this year I am kind of taking a page from the Book of Ebert and ranking them in order of approximate preference since, really, arguments can be made as to why each one is deserving of having a high spot on the list.

Before I begin the countdown of the best films of the year, I have to mention that, due to poor distribution on the part of the respective studios, there were some films that I did not get a chance to see such as “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “Coriolanus,” and “Shame.” Also, “Take Shelter” played here briefly, but I did not have the opportunity to go see it. If any changes are needed to the list upon seeing them, I will make the necessary amendments, or at the very least, make a special commendation for them.

Honorable Mentions:

The Adjustment Bureau – A fascinating story of trying to control one’s fate.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol – Thrills galore are featured in this excellent addition to the franchise.

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil – One of the best comedies I’ve seen in a long time.

The Artist – Michel Hazanavicius’s amazing recreation of a silent film is delightful, emotional, and quite enjoyable. It’s also the frontfunner for this year’s Best Picture Oscar.

10. Drive – This bizarre film noir is somewhat reminiscent of Melville’s classic “Le Samourai.” Ryan Gosling delivers a very subdued performance as a driver for hire for criminals at night and a stunt driver by day. The excellent supporting cast includes Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, and Carey Mulligan. Features some amazing action sequences punctuated with a touching story of the Driver forming a relationship with his neighbor and her son. Wonderfully directed by Nicolas Winding Refn.

9. The Adventures of Tintin – A throwback to the great adventures of cinema such as “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Speaking of which, Tintin was brought to us by the great Steven Spielberg as his first animated film, and what an amazing job he does. Featuring incredibly lifelike animation and a story that sends our heroes, an investigative journalist and his dog, around the world. The great voice cast includes Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis (who also does more of his amazing motion capture work), Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost. The best animated film of the year by far.

8. Anonymous – Sadly, this is one that the other critics didn’t take to despite it being one of the best films of the year. It tells an intriguing tale of how Shakespeare was not the actual author of the plays accredited to him, but rather that that they were written by the Earl of Oxford, who didn’t believe that people of his station did such things. Couple this with a good amount of political intrigue from a rebellion against the throne and you have quite an interesting story, particularly for those interested in the conspiracy theory revolving around Shakespeare, or even for those who are just fans of his work, such as myself.

7. Moneyball – A movie about baseball that is not so much about baseball but rather the people and effort behind making a team work. Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill give excellent performances as two guys trying to put together a championship team for Oakland. Their theory is that a team needs to buy runs, not expensive players who are only good for one position. One of the biggest highlights of the film is the great screenplay by Oscar winners Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. The latter’s contributions to the script are clearly heard in all the fast-paced, engrossing dialogue where, even for a scene that involves Pitt and Hill sitting around trading players, the audience is hanging on every word. One of the rare sports movies that’s for everyone.

6. Hugo – Martin Scorsese ventures into the realm of family film with this incredible film about a young boy and girl who work together to unlock a mystery involving a great filmmaker thought to be forgotten. It starts off a little slow, but the story that unfolds in the second half is a film-lovers delight that even dares to teach the audience a little bit of film history. While labeled as a family film, kids might not take to it quite as much as an older audience, particularly in the section that tells us a little about the beginnings of silent cinema, though they will probably enjoy the kids’ adventure. This is a film that any fan of film can enjoy.

5. Win Win – A sweet, touching story about a struggling lawyer, played by Paul Giamatti, who decides to get some income by becoming the guardian of an elderly man whom he sticks in a nursing home. When the elderly man’s grandson comes to live with him, things become more complicated, causing Giamatti’s family to take him in. Turns out the kid is pretty good at wrestling and the struggling lawyer just happens to be a wrestling coach as well. Win Win comes to us from Tom McCarthy, who has a great gift for bringing us stories with wonderful, unforgettable characters such as those in his previous film, “The Visitor.” A delightful film that’s a great mix of drama and comedy.

4. 13 Assassins – Director Takashi Miike keeps the spirit of the samurai alive in his ambitious, stylish, and spectacular “13 Assassins.” With this film, Miike continues the tradition of great samurai films such as Hiroshi Inagaki’s “Samurai Trilogy” and Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” the latter of which seems to have somewhat acted as a template for this film. The story tells of a madman about to be appointed to the Shogun’s council in feudal Japan. If this should happen, it would mean disaster for the country, so a group of 12 assassins (plus one they meet on their journey) is formed to kill him.

The first half of the story may move a little slow for some, but the second half is well-worth waiting for. It features one of the most unforgettable battle sequences in cinematic history that includes bows, arrows, spears, swords, slingshots, dynamite, and flaming bulls. Miike somehow has this last for an incredibly exciting and engaging, non-stop 45 minutes, but the difference here is that, unlike many action films nowadays, you can tell what’s happening thanks to skilled editing. Usually one has to turn to the old maters for such a film, but Miike has pulled it off marvelously.

3. We Need to Talk About Kevin – The story of a woman who has to deal with the fact that her son is a monster. It jumps between present day and several years earlier when the son, Kevin, was born. We slowly see the events that lead to the way Kevin and his mother are in present day in a film that can be very uncomfortable to watch as you notice several things going wrong. Features a performance by Tilda Swinton that is the best performance by an actress I’ve seen all year. The film doesn’t go into wider distribution until January and February, but when it does, I highly recommend checking it out.

2. Midnight in Paris – Woody Allen returns to top form with his latest film, “Midnight in Paris.” It tells the story of a writer, Gil, who is visiting Paris with his fiancée. His belief is that the best era to have lived was Paris in the 1920s where several of the greatest artistic minds existed. When out on a walk one night, he is picked up by a mysterious car that transports him back to the 20s where he meets such people as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and Gertrude Stein. The joy of watching this film is in the artistic grab bag of personalities that Allen incorporates into his screenplay. You never know who you’re going to see pop up next. It’s a wonderful mixture of charm, magic, and wit that should not be missed.

1. X-Men: First Class – I know, I know, I’m just as shocked as you that this hit the number one spot. It was an incredibly close call as both this and “Midnight in Paris” were my favorite films of the year, so it all came down to the second viewing test. While “Midnight in Paris” was still quite good, I found that “X-Men: First Class” held up a little better, being just as entertaining, engaging, and delightful as it was on the first viewing, if not more so.

The story is just what the title implies. This is the first group of mutants gathered at Charles Xavier’s school to stop an imminent threat. Sebastian Shaw, a mutant with the power to absorb energy, is bent on creating nuclear war by forcing the Americans to place missiles in Turkey and the Russians to place missiles in, you guessed it, Cuba. The film features a fascinating double-use of history in that not only are we getting the fictional history of one of the most famous groups of superheroes ever created, but also the incorporation of the Cuban Missile Crisis in which the United States and Russia were actually incredibly close to nuclear war.

Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy are excellent as the young versions of Erik (later Magneto) and Professor Xavier, respectively. The younger actors playing the newly-recruited mutants are quite good as well. After a first viewing, I complained that Kevin Bacon is not particularly effective as the villain because he’s not exactly threatening (he’s not the first name that comes to mind when thinking of someone who’d make a good villain), but on the second viewing, I enjoyed his performance a lot more, finding him to be more delightful than threatening.

Now, does having this film at number one mean that it was just a really good film, or is it a sign that this year was rather weak? I think it’s a little bit of both actually. I’ve already mentioned how there weren’t any films that blew me away completely for a four-star rating, but “X-Men: First Class” is quite a good film and will be remembered for being such. If Christopher Nolan set the mark for how good a realistic superhero movie can be with his “Batman” films, then Matthew Vaughn has set the mark for how good a superhero movie can be even when dealing with the most absurd and unbelievable material.

I’ve also already mentioned how you can pretty much make a case for any of these films as being the best of the year. “X-Men: First Class” was lots of fun and shows that even absurd comic book material can be made into a great movie. “Midnight in Paris” delighted me with its excellent screenplay and fascinating personalities and characterizations. “We Need to Talk About Kevin” was somewhat disturbing, but utterly absorbing. For all I know, one of the films I haven’t gotten to see yet was a solid four-star champion, which would indeed change this list.

Next year sees the release of two films that will undoubtedly be great (“The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” and “The Dark Knight Rises”), so it seems I’ll just have to wait until then to be completely blown away again into the four-star realm.

The Worst Films of 2011

As per usual, the year brought us many stinkers that we as film critics were forced to sit through, so once again, it’s time to air out the dirty laundry to bring you some of the very worst films that the year had to offer.

Before I begin this countdown, it should be noted that I did not see several films that would have undoubtedly made this list such as Jack and Jill, Bucky Larson, The Human Centipede 2, and the latest Big Mama film, so if there’s a really awful film missing from the list, there’s a good chance that I just didn’t waste the time to see it.

Dishonorable Mentions: Season of the Witch, 11-11-11, Dream House

10. The Green Hornet – This is one that I’d completely forgotten about until I was preparing this list by combing over all the films of the year. This was supposed to be a fun adaptation of the Radio show turned TV series, but instead, what we get is a complete mess of badly shot action sequences and an extremely annoying lead character played by a motor-mouthed Seth Rogan. On top of that, we get the pointless inclusion of 3D and Christoph Waltz, who isn’t given much of anything to do throughout the film. It’s no wonder I forgot about it.

9. Paranormal Activity 3 – This is a series that should have died before it was even allowed to start. The first film was an exceedingly dull, slow, and tedious experience, which has since been replicated twice for the two sequels. Unfortunately, these films are becoming as parasitic as the Saw films, though not as bad, but since they cost such a small amount to make, if only a few people go to see it, it’s considered successful, and therefore the studio has enough funds to finance more of them. However, just like with the Saw films, the quality of the final products don’t seem to matter at all as long as it makes money.

8. Drive Angry 3D – I’m still baffled as to how these guys managed to turn what sounded like an interesting premise of a man coming back from hell for revenge into such a bore of a film. It starts off promising, but quickly loses its way as it becomes a mess of a story involving a satanic cult. Throw in some badly shot and badly edited action sequences as well as 3D that stopped being noticeable in record time and you’ve got yourself one of the worst films of the year.

7. Priest – Numbers 7 and 6 actually kind of go together. Once again we have a complete mess of a story, this time involving a priest played by Paul Bettany trying to rescue a girl from vampires. This one was supposed to be in 3-D, but luckily I was able to see it in 2D, though it didn’t help make the film any better. Much of it occurs in dark locations where it’s hard to tell what’s going on, not that the audience ends up caring since there’s zero plot and character development. What a waste of Bettany’s talent.

6. Sanctum – Here we have another movie that takes place in very dark locations, but this time, it’s for almost the entire film. This one was also supposed to be in 3D, but I caught it in 2D instead, and I’m glad I did, because like “Priest,” I can’t imagine how dark the film would have looked having to watch it in 3D when the film is already occurring in a very dark setting. On top of that, the entire film is simply about a group of people trying to find their way out of a cave after trying to find where water is being released from it into a nearby sea. Why they would risk their lives for this is inexplicable.

5. The Twilight Saga : Breaking Dawn – Part 1 – The Twilight Saga is a soap opera that somehow continues to get worse as it goes along. The three leads, Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, and Taylor Lautner, give their usual stiff, wooden performances which merely prove that they have no business being anywhere near the occupation of acting. The story here is even worse and more melodramatic than usual and involves Edward and Bella finally getting married and going off on their honeymoon. This takes up the first half of the film and eventually gets around to Bella getting pregnant. Meanwhile, we get little hints that there’s finally going to be a fight between the vampires and werewolves, but when we do, it lasts no more than two minutes, leaving the audience wondering what they’ve just sat through a bloated two hour soap opera for. Luckily there’s only one more film to go before we say good riddance to this awful series.

4. Transformers: Dark of the Moon – See Optimus Prime take on his most challenging enemy yet: Steel Cables! Yes, the film actually features a scene where the great Optimus Prime gets tangles in steel cables for several minutes while the never-ending climactic action sequence continues on and on. Apparently Michael Bay learned absolutely nothing from the previous film where one of the main complaints was the never-ending battle sequence at the end of that film. Once again we get an overly-long (154 minutes!!!) bore of an action film with no character development, no plot, bland CGI, and editing based on Bay’s belief that everyone has an attention span of approximately half a second. This is yet another series that simply needs to die.

3. Conan the Barbarian – Speaking of films I had completely forgotten about, here we have Conan the Barbarian, a completely mindless, pointless mess of a film. The film is loaded with problems from the nonsensical plot to Jason Momoa’s terrible performance (who thought someone could make Schwarzenegger look good?). The biggest question I was left with after it was over was how in the world they managed to get Morgan Freeman to narrate this travesty of a film. That must’ve been some paycheck. Luckily this bombed at the box office, so that supposed sequel that Momoa wrote will never see the light of day. Thank goodness for small favors.

2. Your Highness – You know those films that make you squirm in your seat just for how bad they are? Well this is one of them. Here we have a film that was written by a pair of prepubescent kids, Danny McBride and Ben Best, whose main goal was to try and fit as many sex jokes into 100 minutes as they could. The result is an embarrassingly unfunny film that will have you squirming a hole right into your seat. It seems almost impossible to believe that James Franco and Natalie Portman, both Oscar nominees earlier this year, would go anywhere near this terrible material. It’s also quite hard to believe that the director, David Gordon Green, is the same man who brought us the excellent film “Snow Angels,” one of the best films of 2008. Such an incredible waste of talent.

1. Battle: Los Angeles – Here’s an example of where just about everything that can go wrong with a film did. There are so many aspects of “Battle: Los Angeles” that are so incompetently done, it’s amazing that the film was ever released. This film’s long list of problems include a terrible story and screenplay, as well as incomprehensible editing and every alien movie cliché you can think of, including a rousing speech to raise the troops’ morale (which got a pretty good laugh at my screening as I recall). All this film made me want to do is rewatch “Independence Day,” which, when compared with this film, looks like a masterpiece. Back in March when I reviewed the film, I predicted that this would be the worst film I would see all year because I couldn’t imagine that anything else coming up this year could be worse. But who knows, perhaps one of the films I skipped was even worse, and if that’s true, I shudder to think about it.

Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan), his wife Rose (Emily Watson), and their son Albert (Jeremy Irvine) live on a farm in England where they struggle just to be able to pay the rent. One day, Ted goes off to an auction in order to purchase a horse for plowing one of their fields, except that, instead of a plowing horse, he decides to wage a bidding war against his landlord for a young horse that has no experience. His wife is quite mad with him for spending their rent money on the horse, but she decides to give him a chance, with Albert, who’s admired the horse from its birth, training it.

Things eventually start going well, but due to a flood, Ted is forced to sell the horse, now named Joey, to the military for use in the recently-declared war with Germany. From here, we watch as Joey switches hands among several owners on both sides of the war from the English soldier who buys him from Ted to a young girl and her grandfather to a pair of German deserters and more. Meanwhile, having formed a special bond with Joey, Albert joins the war effort when he’s old enough in hopes of being reunited with his friend.

The first act of “War Horse” is a marvelous experience. We get to witness the special bond forming between Albert and Joey throughout their training sessions. Joey slowly comes to see Albert as his friend and master as he begins to obey commands such as being called by a special whistling noise that Albert makes with his hands. Within a few minutes, you’ll find yourself rooting for Albert to get Joey to plow the field in order to get the money they need to keep the farm.

This is the special gift that Spielberg has. He builds this touching relationship between Albert and Joey so quickly that you immediately begin to care about the characters, and when they’re separated at the outbreak of World War I, you want them to find their way back to each other as soon as possible.

This is what makes act two such an odd addition to the film. While we do care about what happens to Joey, this act of the film becomes a little slower and less interesting than the film had been, though it is still engaging. The problem here is that the characters that Joey is passed to are not fleshed out very well, nor are they themselves particularly interesting. On top of this, Albert is left out of the picture for what felt like a good 45 minutes.

It’s only when we jump forward four years for the final act that we find out that Albert has joined the Army and is still looking for Joey. This is also where things begin to pick up again as we now get to follow what both of the main characters are doing. It is also here where we are treated to some amazing battle sequences, but, of course, we should expect no less from the man who directed the greatest battle sequence in cinematic history, featured in “Saving Private Ryan.”

That brings us to another point, the look of the film is absolutely gorgeous. From the opening shots of the Narracott’s home to Germany to the battlefield and back again, the cinematography from two-time Oscar winner Janusz Kaminski (“Schindler’s List,” “Saving Private Ryan”) is jaw-dropping. The final scene is particularly interesting, having a tone that looks like it’s right out of “Gone with the Wind.” You can bet there’ll be another Oscar nomination in it for him for his incredible work here.

It’s very surprising to learn that this is Jeremy Irvine’s first role in a feature film, having only worked on one TV show before. He does a great job at playing Albert. It can’t be easy playing a role where your main co-star is a horse, but he brings all the necessary emotion to the part and helps bring that bond to life.

“War Horse” is quite an enjoyable experience, though I wish it had been able to maintain the greatness of the first act. However, thanks to Spielberg’s excellent direction in developing the relationship between the leads, as well as beautiful cinematography and production design, this touching film is definitely worth a look. 3/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

“The Artist” tells the story of George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a big, successful silent film star, whose films play to packed theaters and much applause. The year is 1927 and a new form of cinema is beginning to emerge: the talkie. Upon sampling this new phenomenon, George merely laughs it off, thinking that people won’t go for it. However, the studio he works for eventually decides to end production on silent films altogether, focusing on the rising trend of talking pictures. With George’s refusal to adapt to this new trend, he’s left without a job, which becomes increasingly hard on him with his marital troubles and the infamous stock market crash of 1929.

Tied into George’s story is that of Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), who quite literally bumps into George after one of his premieres. Peppy’s ambition is to become an actress, which leads her to audition for a small part as an extra in a film. She lands a role as a dancer in a film that George just happens to be in, and from there, she continues to get bigger and bigger parts until she becomes quite famous. While George’s stardom has fallen as a relic of the past, Peppy’s is on the rise as a new breakout sensation.

Hazanavicius has perfectly captured the look and feel of the silent era with “The Artist.” Everything from the emotional, and sometimes toe-tapping, score by Ludovic Bource to the amazing production design by Laurence Bennett gives you the experience of what it must have been like going to the theater back during the silent age.

The real highlights of the film though are the excellent performances from Dujardin and Bejo. As a silent film, the roles require actors who are able to display all emotions with their face and body language, overemphasizing in places to get their point across. Dujardin, who won Best Actor earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, shows his excellent comic timing as well as his soft, vulnerable side using only these to great effect. Likewise, Bejo brings out her character’s determination and sympathetic nature quite well, particularly with her eyes.

The story is an interesting one that feels somewhat similar to “Singin’ in the Rain,” except this time around we have a character who doesn’t even want to try this new method of filmmaking. It’s interesting to compare the two, particularly in scenes where the new technology is first being used. When George sees it for the first time, he’s the only one laughing in a room of studio execs who want to pursue it. He laughs because he finds it silly, whereas in “Rain,” everyone laughs at Gene Kelly and co.’s attempt at it because they haven’t gotten it quite right yet, leading to hilarious results.

The few minor complaints I have about it are that the story feels somewhat stretched out over its 100-minute runtime and you can tell exactly where it’s going from pretty early on, especially if you’ve seen the trailer. However, this doesn’t detract too much from simply enjoying the amazing experience. There’s a lot to enjoy here that makes up for the simplified nature of the story, such as the performances already mentioned above and an intriguing main character.

George is a fascinating character mainly because of this rigid determination to keep things the way they are without even giving the talkies a shot. He believes that people come to see his pictures to see him, not to hear him speak. He’s unable to accept change, whereas everyone around him is welcoming this wonderful new invention, including the public, who form long lines to see the latest Peppy Miller talkie. Meanwhile, a film he has written, directed, produced and starred in in an attempt to show his old bosses that the public still wants silent pictures has a dismal number of attendees.

The film has a decent mixture of drama and comedy. It’s even been nominated for the Best Comedy/Musical Golden Globe, though it seems to be much more of a drama than a comedy, especially since it deals with a star trying to get by in an era of change where he’s faced with emotional and financial depression. There are a few light comedic moments however, particularly involving George’s well-trained dog/ co-star.

As far as getting that Best Picture Oscar, it may well happen and it wouldn’t be a bad choice to represent the year, though I have to say that I’ve seen a few better films this year. It would be the first time a silent feature took the top prize since the Oscars began back in 1929 where “Wings” took home top honors. Aside from being a pretty good film, it reminds us just how far we’ve come in cinema since those early days, and how the technology is always developing further. Silent to sound was just the first of many upgrades and even now there are more than likely many more still to come.

3.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

It all begins with a model ship that Tintin (Voice of Jamie Bell) purchases. Immediately upon doing so, he is confronted by a man, Barnaby (Voice of Joe Starr), who first tries to buy the ship from him, but then warns him to get rid of it before running away. Another man, Sakharine (Voice of Daniel Craig), also wants to buy the ship, but after explaining that it’s not for sale, Tintin returns home. Back at home, Tintin displays the ship on his desk, but thanks to his loyal dog Snowy, it gets knocked over and broken.

Not long after, the model is stolen and Tintin’s home ransacked, but again, thanks to Snowy, he discovers that there was something hidden in the ship that came out when it broke, a small metallic pipe containing a scroll with a poem on it. This sets Tintin off on an adventure that puts him on a ship bound for Africa where he meets Captain Haddock (Voice of Andy Serkis), the last of a famous family of seamen. Together they must retrieve scrolls like the one Tintin already has and solve their mystery before Sakharine does.

What immediately jumps out about “The Adventures of Tintin” is just how amazing the animation is. Apparently Spielberg originally wanted to do a live-action version of the film, but producer Peter Jackson convinced him that live-action wouldn’t do justice to the comics, suggesting that he use motion capture instead. The result is some of the most lifelike animation I’ve ever seen put to film.

The story is apparently a mixture of different tales from the comics, but they blend quite well into a very engaging adventure. Very superficially, it may even remind some of Spielberg’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The film wastes no time in getting right into the story by presenting a thrilling first act. The film does slow down a bit for its second act to allow for some character and story developments, but picks right back up for an exciting conclusion.

Another great feature of “Tintin” is the excellent action sequences that are strewn throughout the film. In the first act, there’s a notable chase sequence where Snowy is trying to get to Tintin, who’s been kidnapped. In the second half of the film, there’s an extraordinary sequence that is animated as one continuous scene in which Tintin and Sakharine are trying to steal the scrolls from each other. This scene continues for several minutes and continually has characters popping into and out of frame as they attempt to possess the scrolls.

The voice acting is top-notch and includes such voices as Jamie Bell, Daniel Craig, Andy Serkis, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost. While Bell is not particularly well-know, he does a great job with the lead role, giving the character just the right attitude and inflections. Craig likewise does a wonderful job as the villain, providing a nice creepiness to his character.

Serkis, whom most people know as a motion capture extraordinaire from films like “The Lord of the Rings,” “King Kong,” and “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” once again brings his excellent vocal work and magical sense of movement to the screen. His Captain Haddock, sounding like a spot-on impersonation of Gerard Butler, is perhaps the most memorable character of the bunch what with his shifts in personality, depending on whether he’s drunk or sober, as he tries to remember the story of the ship.

It was a rather strange decision to hold the film’s release off until late December, especially since it’s been playing in most of the world for over a month now. The studio probably feels this has a good shot at a few awards and decided to line it up accordingly. At this point, it seems a very strong contender for Best Animated Feature as it’s certainly the best animated film I’ve seen this year. It’s a fun, engaging, and very entertaining adventure that leaves you yearning for the already-planned sequel, something we can look forward to in the coming years.

3.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The story follows Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), who has just wrapped up a lawsuit placed against him for libel against a businessman. While celebrating the holidays with his family and friends, he gets a phone call from the lawyer of Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), informing Mikael that Henrik would like to see him right away. Having left the magazine he helped run, Mikael meets with Henrik who has a job to offer him. He wants Mikael to investigate the disappearance and assumed murder of his niece, Harriet, from 40 years ago, a case that was never solved. After some skepticism about being able to help, Mikael takes the case and begins the investigation that includes a large family tree of suspects who were all present on the island where the incident occurred so many years ago.

Intertwined with Mikael’s story is that of Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a hacking expert who was hired by Henrik’s lawyer to do a complete background check on Mikael. Lisbeth is a troubled, antisocial youth who is in the care of the state and must meet with a guardian who controls her bank account and assesses how she is getting along. When her current guardian becomes incapacitated, she is forced to meet with a new one, except this one requires her to do more than just meet with him in order to get money she needs for a new computer. Eventually she must take matters into her own hands to deal with the situation. Not long after, to her surprise, Mikael comes knocking on her door, requesting her help on the case. Together they try to piece together exactly what happened on that fateful day and who was responsible for Harriet’s death.

Right away, I should state that this is not as good as the original film, but that’s not to say it’s not a good version in its own right. This is a decent telling of the same events, but with a few very small differences, mainly having to do with minor plot points. For instance, in the original film, when the two start investigating a series of murders that are somehow connected to Harriet’s disappearance, the two spend a lot of time together, allowing the characters to become closer as they work together. However, this version has Lisbeth doing this part of the investigation on her own, and in a much shorter time. This ends up making the characters spend more time apart, which makes their eventual relationship seem stranger and more random than it did in the original film.

This version also seemed to be lacking some of the intensity that was ever-present in the original film, partly because of the rushed section mentioned above. It’s rather hard to judge whether the suspense was at the same level, knowing who was responsible and what happened to Harriet even before entering the theater, but I can say that the web of suspects is weaved very well. One of the more difficult things about this story is the number of family members in the Vanger clan and trying to keep them all straight. Seeing this version after having seen the original twice certainly helped in that respect.

While this is a decent version of the events, it’s easy to see where it would not be particularly exciting for those who have already seen the previous film, especially given that the film was just out last year. It seems a more prudent thing to have done would have been to wait a few more years instead of jumping into this new version right away. It would have been more understandable if Fincher and crew were doing something significantly new with the material, but not much is changed here at all, basically making it feel like watching the same film over again, but, as mentioned before, with less intensity, and less anticipation when you realize that nothing new is being done.

That being said, if anyone was to do a remake/new adaptation of the material, Fincher was the right man for the job, given that he’s familiar with similar dark material having directed films like “Seven” and “Zodiac.” He knows how to handle such a tone, and once again does a great job with it, showing his ability to delve into the darker side of human nature.

The leads were also well chosen. Daniel Craig brings a great amount of determination to the role as he twists and turns through the web of suspects, but even more impressive is Rooney Mara in the difficult role of Lisbeth Salander. In the role originally played exquisitely by Noomi Rapace, she brings out the reclusiveness of the character quite well. The character is quite fascinating. She’s a strong-willed woman with her own fair amount of determination when it comes to asserting herself with her new guardian as well as with the 40-year-old case. Her interesting nature has made her one of the most talked about literary/cinematic characters of the last couple of years.

Overall, if you haven’t seen the original Swedish film (which is highly recommended), this new version is good enough to recommend as a fair telling of the story with some really good performances and direction. However, if you’ve already seen the previous film, the most interest this version will probably hold is as a comparison to it, with different talent involved, or to Larsson’s novel. Either way, it’s worth seeing, and depending on how well it does at the box office, we can probably expect a new adaptation of “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” the second book in the trilogy, very soon.

3/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The story revolves around Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), an author of a young adult book series that is coming to an end. One day, she receives an announcement from an old flame of hers, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), that he and his wife, Beth (Elizabeth Reaser), have had a baby. Mavis suddenly decides to pack up and head back to her old hometown of Mercury, where Buddy still lives, with the sole purpose of stealing him away from Beth.

While in town, Mavis runs into a few friends she knew from high school including Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), who is now a bookkeeper at a local restaurant. While they catch up, Mavis reveals her plan, which isn’t much of a plan at all. She’s convinced that Buddy is not happy in his marriage and that he will more than likely come around to be with her. Matt tries to tell her that this is nonsense, as Buddy seems quite happy with his wife and new baby, but Mavis is quite set in her determination.

If that quick summary seemed to end rather abruptly, it’s because that’s pretty much the entire story, and indeed the biggest weakness of “Young Adult” ends up being its story. Watching the film felt like 90 minutes of waiting for the story to pick up and take off, but sadly this never happens. Instead, it stays at the same level for the entire runtime, not wanting to take any risks with the characters or do anything that might advance the story in any way.

The film is a pretty big disappointment because Reitman is known for working with very eccentric characters. You may recall the fast-talking, cigarette PR man Nick Naylor of “Thank You for Smoking,” the wise-cracking, pregnant teen Juno in “Juno,” or the smooth job terminator Ryan Bingham in “Up in the Air.” These were all fascinating characters with fully-developed personalities that an audience could form an emotional attachment too.

Sadly, the character of Mavis Gary doesn’t fall into any of these categories. She’s a single-minded character whom the audience is asked to feel for despite her one objective being to break up a happy marriage just so she can try to rekindle an old relationship. As you can probably guess, her character doesn’t develop much beyond this single desire, so we never end up feeling much of anything for her.

Like Reitman’s previous films, “Young Adult” has a blend of drama and comedy, though this time around, there’s much less comedy to be had, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but when the story’s not going anywhere, you begin to hope for more laughs as the film goes on. The film is being marketed as a comedy, which is merely another example of false advertising as the film is most definitely a drama, and indeed, the number one complaint from the audience at this screening was that they were expecting a comedy, but apparently the studio thought it would be easier to sell a comedy rather than a drama with a directionless story.

The best that “Young Adult” has to offer are the performances. Theron does an admirable job of portraying Mavis, despite there not being very much to the character. She gives it her all and really brings out the desperation and loneliness that her character is going through. The best performance of the lot comes from comedian Patton Oswalt as Matt, a character who has had some rough times in his past that have left him handicapped. He does a great job of attempting to be the voice of reason during Mavis’s crazy plot.

The screenplay was written by Diablo Cody, who won an Oscar for writing “Juno.” Unfortunately, lighting has not struck for her film career since her 2007 breakout. She followed up her Oscar-winning script with writing the terrible “Jennifer’s Body,” and now this. Hopefully one of these days she’ll bring us something great again. One of the projects she’s currently working on is the remake of “The Evil Dead,” which she may be able to bring something interesting to, but if her previous horror work is any indication, it could turn out to be disastrous as well.

Hopefully Reitman will be able to return to greatness too with whatever his next project is going to be. His three great films showed that he was a director to keep an eye on, but even the very best have one or two films on their resumes that don’t show their talent in the best light. “Young Adult” is not a terrible film, just one that was not thought out very well. There are some good performances here, but too many problems to be able to recommend it.

2.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The film opens as Agents Benji (Simon Pegg) and Jane (Paula Patton) break Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) out of a Russian prison in order to go on an important mission. A Russian by the name of Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist) is planning to acquire the means to launch a nuclear warhead, but first, he must erase all traces of his identity from the Kremlin archive. The IMF team’s mission is to break in and discover his identity before he is able to erase it, but during the mission, things go terribly wrong when a bomb goes off, destroying a large part of the Kremlin, with the blame falling on the IMF.

The IMF secretary (Tom Wilkinson) informs Ethan that, due to the Kremlin disaster, ghost protocol has been initiated, meaning the entire IMF has become disavowed. Now Ethan, along with Benji, Jane, and an analyst, Brandt (Jeremy Renner), must go around the world, attempting to prevent Hendricks from obtaining the launch codes necessary to start a nuclear war.

The action sequences in the previous “Mission: Impossible” films were very exciting. Who could forget Ethan breaking into CIA headquarters to steal the NOC list, having to perform an amazing acrobatic act to obtain it? Or sliding along a slanted glass roof several stories up a high rise building? “Ghost Protocol” takes it up a notch as it features a sequence in which Ethan climbs a 100+-story hotel by using special adhesive gloves that had me gasping more than once.

It should be noted that the film was screened in IMAX, which made the experience even more incredible to watch. When they show you the view from 100 stories up, the larger screen format gives you the sensation of actually being there. It’s being reported that Tom Cruise insisted on doing his own stunts. I can’t imagine many stunt people having the nerve to do a stunt as dangerous as that, let alone a big star like Cruise, but he pulls it off marvelously.

Other notable sequences include a foot chase/car chase through a sandstorm and the incredible final confrontation at a parking garage. With all of these amazing action sequences, there may be some concern that there isn’t much of a plot, something that I’ve been known to complain about myself with some action films. However, the plot is well-developed and the action sequences are so well done that you can tell every little detail of what’s going on, as opposed to some films that leave such sequences in a confusing blur.

This is probably the fastest two hours I’ve spent in a theater in quite some time. The film is so entertaining and has such a great pacing to it that it just flies by. It hardly stops for an entire five minutes, and even then, it’s just to fill us in on more of the plot. The pacing is also helped along by a good dose of humor, most of which is provided by comedian Simon Pegg, well-known for his hilarious roles in “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz.”

Throughout the four films in the franchise, a new director has come to the helm each time. It started with Brian De Palma, whose film had a great mix of complicated story and action, then moved on with John Woo and J.J. Abrams taking the 2nd and 3rd films respectively, where the films started to concentrate more on the action. This fourth outing has been directed by Brad Bird, whose name you may recognize from having directed the animated films “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille.” In fact, this is the first live action film he’s directed, and he’s done an amazing job at handling such complicated and suspenseful action sequences that you would swear he must’ve done such scenes several times already in his career.

“Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” is the best film in the series since the original. It’s a fast-paced thrillride that’ll keep you thoroughly engaged as it hops from one amazing sequence to the next. If you get the chance to see it in IMAX, it’s recommended as it provides some breathtaking shots that only add to the thrills, though seeing it on a regular screen should be just fine as well. It’s rare to get an action film that’s done this well, where the action doesn’t turn into a monotonous bore. We can only hope that the next inevitable sequel will be just as good.

3.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

Matt King (George Clooney) has recently gone through tragedy that has left his wife, Elizabeth, in a coma. For the first time, he finds himself taking care of their young daughter, Scottie (Amara Miller), something he doesn’t really know much about doing. At the same time, as trustee and part-owner of a large amount of land, he’s involved in a large real estate deal that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He eventually gets the news that his wife is not going to recover, and since he needs help with taking care of Scottie, he travels with her to retrieve her sister, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley).

Not long after bringing her home, he breaks the news to her that her mother is not going to be alive much longer. However, she also breaks news to him that Elizabeth was cheating on him. This comes as a complete shock to Matt who immediately takes it upon himself to find out who she was having an affair with. This leads all of them on a trip to hunt down the man that Elizabeth was seeing so that Matt can confront him about Elizabeth’s condition and what occurred between them.

Thus far, “The Descendants” has been receiving rave reviews, which makes it all the more disappointing that it’s not nearly as good as its reputation is being made out to be. The problem can be traced directly to the story, or the somewhat lack thereof. There certainly is a story here, just not much of one, and the effect can be felt over the nearly two-hour runtime. There was also the seemingly pointless nature of the real estate subplot which didn’t really mesh at all with the main story, making it rather superfluous.

Because of the stretched out feeling of the film, it doesn’t end up delivering the emotional impact that it’s clearly going for. You care slightly for the characters, but you wait so long for developments to occur that that caring is strained by the time you get to the emotional climax. The characters themselves are enjoyable and somewhat interesting to watch, it’s just that they’re not given much to work with. At times, it even feels like they’re waiting for the plot to move forward.

Clooney delivers a pretty good performance as a man who’s trying to pick up the pieces of his broken life after a pair of shattering events. Everything appeared to be going so well for him, but once his wife’s accident occurs, he is forced to deal with things he never thought he’d have to, such as caring for his young daughter. Clooney is able to make Matt a realistic, down-to-Earth character with a performance that is one of the film’s highlights.

The screenplay, adapted by Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, has some good moments that feature some good dialogue, and had it been trimmed down a bit, there might have been a great movie here. There are a few comedic moments spread throughout the film, most of which revolve around Alexandra’s friend Sid (Nick Krause), who’s really just around to support her. There’s nothing laugh-out-loud funny, but rather a much lighter comedy that the film could have used a lot more of.

Faxon and Rash both have very little experience with writing, but Payne has achieved quite a bit with it, winning an Oscar for co-writing “Sideways.” What had made that screenplay so successful was not only because it was a better mixture of drama and comedy, but also because the story was much stronger, making it much easier to care about the characters as they went on their wacky wine tour, and despite it being longer than “The Descendants,” it never felt stretched.

Each year there are usually one or two films that don’t deserve all of the insane praise they get (last year’s “The Fighter” is a prime example) and it looks like “The Descendants” is one for this year. That’s not to say it’s a bad film. It has a few things to like about it including Clooney’s performance (currently the frontrunner for the Best Actor Oscar), the characters, and a few funny moments, but overall, it’s the story that keeps it from being as good as it could be. If a good half-hour of fluff (such as the real estate subplot) had been cut, the pacing would be much tighter, allowing for that important emotional connection with the characters. It’s a shame to have to say it, but “The Descendants” disappoints.

2.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

“A Dangerous Method” explores the early days of psychoanalysis through the eyes of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) as he attempts a new method developed by Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). This method simply calls for the doctor to talk to the patient, in this case, a disturbed young woman named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), in order to cure them. However, thanks to a few discussions with another psychoanalyst, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassell), Jung is encouraged to act out his impulses, revealing that he has feelings for Sabina, as she does for him. Meanwhile, the relationship between Jung and Freud is also explored as they persevere to further their field of expertise.

Unfortunately, while I do always appreciate when a director tries something completely different, “A Dangerous Method” represents another misstep in Cronenberg’s career. To put it simply, the film feels like it goes absolutely nowhere despite having two fascinating characters in Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. There could have been a great film here about the beginnings of psychoanalysis, how it came to be, and how it was used, but alas, it was not to be.

One of the film’s biggest weaknesses is that it is extremely verbose, which is not always a bad thing, but when the conversation isn’t leading anywhere, developing the plot, or at least interesting in some way to the audience, then you’re just left listening to characters drone on and on. It becomes no surprise that the screenplay by Christopher Hampton is based on his own play, which he based off a book by John Kerr. The film has a very theatrical feeling, like it would be much better suited for the stage instead of a motion picture, but even then it doesn’t seem like it would be particularly engaging.

Another big flaw is the film’s structure, which starts out fine as the story begins to unfold, but then quickly becomes unhinged. We are first introduced to Jung and Sabina and slowly watch them fall in love, but then, partway into the film, it begins to jump forward in time, sometimes by a few years. This leaves the structure with a very disjointed feeling as we try to figure out what has happened during this time we have missed.

In these leaps of time, apparently some major things happened that are left completely undeveloped, such as when Jung and Freud go to America. After a jump, we are suddenly back in Europe where Sabina has furthered her knowledge of psychoanalysis and wants to start working on a paper. Another jump or two later finds her becoming closer to Dr. Freud, who decides to let her treat some of his patients. However, after such little development and so many leaps during the story, there’s little connection to be had to the characters and what they become.

The high point of “A Dangerous Method” comes in the performances of the two main actors, but not so much from the third. Knightley has been receiving some praise for her portrayal of Sabina, but her performance was the strangest and weakest of the three leads. Early on in the film, as she is trying to play a mad woman, Knightley goes over-the-top far too often to make it believable, in a sense, reminding us that we are watching a performance. There is also the mystery of her bizarre disappearing and reappearing Russian accent from the second half of the film that further separated her from the role.

Mortensen does a fine job with the role of Freud, providing a believable accent and mannerisms. He doesn’t appear in the film as much as the others, but he’s around long enough to make an impact. Fassbender is an actor that has been breaking out recently, playing in everything from “X-Men: First Class” to “Jane Eyre.” He plays Jung in a very straightforward manner as a man who at first has no problem with being with Sabina, but quickly realizes that there are complications that force him to rethink their relationship.

Aside from the two lead performances, the production design also stands out, helping to evoke the period of the early 20th century. If only it had been used for a better story. Hopefully, this misstep won’t deter Cronenberg from trying new areas. He just needs to make sure the screenplay he’s working with is solid and captivating instead of disjointed and dull. There are some plays that are meant to remain on the stage. This is one of them.

2/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones) meet in a college class and begin dating. As first dates often go, it begins awkwardly with neither of the two having very much to say. However, they find that they have a strong bond between them which leads to their continued relationship. Anna is a British citizen visiting the US on a student visa, which means she will have to leave when it expires, but because of her feelings for Jacob, she decides to stay.

This leads to big problems later when she attempts to reenter the US after a trip. She is detained and immediately put back on a plane for the UK. It seems like their relationship is doomed, but in an effort to keep it going, Jacob visits her at her home. However, we discover that their relationship may not be as firm as it once appeared as more troubles arise when they try to get her another visa and questions of infidelity on both sides come to light.

While “Like Crazy” does attempt to show us a real first love scenario, its flaws end up making it a rather unbelievable situation where by the end, we hardly care whether the couple ends up together or not. For starters, the whole plot is based on an extremely poor decision by not one, but both of the main characters.

Anna wants to stay despite the fact that her visa is going to run out. She knows this will really mess things up for her and Jacob later on, because she will inevitably be found out and deported. This obviously doesn’t concern her very much as she doesn’t put much thought into her decision at all when she announces it to Jacob.

When Anna tells Jacob of her decision, he spends an entire two seconds trying to talk her out of it before giving up. This obviously leads to problems later on when Anna returns to the US after attending a wedding, and what’s more, she seems rather surprised when she is held up at customs for having overstayed the visa. It would have been much simpler if she had followed through on her plan of returning home and then returning on a work visa. An exceedingly bad decision like this from both of the main characters is not exactly going to make an audience feel sympathetic for them when things start going wrong.

Things do indeed start going even more wrong with their relationship, causing them to part and get back together multiple times. It is this repetitiveness that ends up being another major flaw in the film. These two don’t really seem to be right for each other what with the awkward air between them whenever they get together, yet they continually try to get back together, even after having seen other people for awhile.

By the end of the film, they’ve split up and rejoined so many times that you just don’t care whether they’re able to work things out or not. This is not helped by the fact that they landed themselves in this predicament in the first place by deciding to ignore the expiration of Anna’s student visa. Apparently the writers, Drake Doremus and Ben York Jones, didn’t really care either as they leave us with an ending that’s abrupt, flat, and ambiguous, leaving the relationship in question, though, if a guess were required, it would be that after the film ends, they split up and got back together again.

The performances from Yelchin and Jones are admirable, but they just don’t have much to work with as their characters are underwritten and underdeveloped. If the writers had concentrated on the actual problems this relationship was having instead of making it about how it’s on again/off again, then perhaps there would have been something there to engage the audience, but instead, the film remains unfocused as it drifts through these characters’ lives. The only thing that it will leave you with is the thought that sometimes young people in love can do some pretty dumb things.

2/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

It tells the story of how Santa (Voice of Jim Broadbent) is able to deliver presents to everyone in the world in one night with the help of his elite elf squadron, lots of technology (including a gigantic spaceship), and one of his sons, Steve (Voice of Hugh Laurie), commander of mission control. His other son, Arthur (Voice of James McAvoy), works in the letter department, answering countless letters from children requesting presents and posing questions about the existence of Santa.

After a seemingly successful Christmas, it is discovered that one child has not had their gift delivered. Santa and Steve don’t seem too bothered by this, but Arthur becomes extremely worried that this one child will wake up and find nothing under the tree for her. In order to deliver the gift, Arthur gets some help from Grandsanta (Voice of Bill Nighy), who decides to use the old fashion sleigh in order to show that advanced technology is not needed to deliver presents. Together they set off for England to spread Christmas cheer to the one child whose gift slipped through the cracks.

There are some things to admire about “Arthur Christmas” including its animation. It’s not the lifelike animation you’ll find in Pixar films or the upcoming “The Adventures of Tintin,” but it is colorful and enjoyable to watch. Sadly, the film was presented in 3-D, so the colors were drowned out quite a bit, but lifting up my glasses, I was able to see that it was indeed supposed to be a bright film, so as per usual, make sure to catch it in 2-D if you plan on checking it out, especially since the 3-D stops being noticeable almost immediately.

The voice cast here is pretty good and includes some big names like Hugh Laurie, well-known at this point for his fantastic work on “House,” Jim Broadbent, a great character actor who has appeared in such films as “Moulin Rouge!” and “Gangs of New York,” and James McAvoy, most recently seen in the excellent “X-Men: First Class.” The whole cast does a great job with their characters’ personalities which really helps bring them to life.

Despite these two things that are really going for the film, they can’t overcome the weaknesses in its story. It’s true that it’s simple and predictable, but these are forgivable as it’s a childrens’ film. However, the story never really becomes engaging to a point where you actually care about what’s going to happen. In fact, it’s actually a bit bland, even for a film that is trying to appeal to kids.

It ends up feeling like it’s overly-stretched, even at 90 minutes. The story seemed like it would be more fitting for a short TV Christmas special rather than a feature film, but due to an increased length, we get several parts that feel like the film is dragging along as it struggles to fill the 90-minute runtime. The film’s heart was indeed in the right place, just not in the right format.

There are moments of charm and it is a sweet story which kids might find entertaining enough, but chances are they will become just as restless as my crowd as the film stretches on. As far as kids’ films go, it’s not a bad choice, but ultimately, there are other movie choices out there, “Hugo” in particular, that would be a better use of time for your entertainment dollars.

2.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

The film involves a young boy, Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), who lives in the walls of a Paris train station. His father (Jude Law) has passed away, leaving him with his uncle (Ray Winstone), who leaves him to live on his own. Hugo has been trying to collect spare parts for an automaton left behind by his father, a clockmaker who was trying to complete it, that he believes will contain some kind of message. However, the man who runs the toy shop he has been stealing from, Georges (Ben Kingsley), catches him in the act, but instead of turning him in to the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), he takes Hugo into his employ to make up for the items he’s stolen.

One day, he runs into Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), who is under the care of Georges and his wife. Isabelle just happens to have the last piece of the puzzle to make the automaton work, a key in the shape of a heart. Upon activation, the automaton delivers its message, a message that will send Hugo and Isabelle on a fascinating adventure through early film history which culminates in their discovery of just how important a man Georges was, and still is, considered.

At first, Scorsese’s excursion into childrens’ films had me worried as the first half of the film doesn’t really go anywhere, but is used instead as a kind of set up for the story. We are introduced to Hugo and his vast world in the walls of the train station where he keeps the clocks all wound up, a task his uncle taught him to do. It begins to set up the mystery beginning with the automaton that his father left him, something that Hugo has been very vigilant about putting back together using the skills his father taught him as a clockmaker.

However, when the second half begins, we are taken on a lovely journey that will inevitably teach those not familiar with the early days of film a thing or two. The importance of film to the plot is set up early on as we learn that Hugo used to go to the cinema a lot with his father, seeing such films as “Robin Hood.” At one point, Hugo and Isabelle even treat themselves to a show of Harold Lloyd’s “Safety Last,” one of the great silent comedies.

However, this gets taken to the next level when we realize that Isabelle’s “Papa Georges” is really the great Georges Méliès, director of over 500 films in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including his most famous work “A Trip to the Moon.” Diving into Méliès’s background is a fascinating springboard for the film’s amazing final act. As this story tells us, he apparently thought his films were no longer wanted in an era post World War I, but he soon finds out that he couldn’t be more wrong as film lovers like Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg) soon show him.

We also learn that most of Méliès’s films were melted down so the chemicals could be used for the heels of shoes. However, thanks to an exhaustive search, many of his films were discovered in vaults, and while the prints needed some touching up, film lovers were more than happy to do the work with the reward being that they were able to see these films after so many years. In a sense, this film becomes an advocate for film preservation, something Scorsese himself is well-known for doing.

It will be interesting to see how this plays to a wider audience. Critics, including myself, are already enjoying it immensely partly because we know a lot about this material, but how will the average filmgoer react to a story that tries to teach them a little about the history of cinema? Scorsese has made a film for film lovers and for those who are appreciative of film history. It delves into not only Méliès, but also the Lumiere brothers, who were pioneers in developing a camera to shoot motion pictures. Your average filmgoer is not going to be familiar with people like this, but will hopefully still get something out of the story if they are a lover of cinema.

The film treats us to some iconic film imagery that shows just how widespread and recognizable it can be. While Hugo and Isabelle are watching “Safety Last,” the iconic scene of Lloyd hanging from a large clock face from several stories up is shown, and while we are shown parts of “A Trip to the Moon,” we see the infamous shot of a rocket hitting the moon in its face. These are such famous images that people who have never seen the films, or don’t even have a vague idea where they’re from, will recognize them.

It’s hard to imagine how this film is going to be enjoyed by the kids that the marketing seems to be directed toward, and indeed, the kids at this screening seemed to be getting rather fidgety, especially during the telling of Méliès’s backstory. The marketing is a little misleading, but while it’s not really a kids’ film, they will probably still enjoy the story of Hugo and Isabelle, even though their story ends up getting overshadowed by that of Méliès.

It should be noted that the film was in 3-D, and while it’s not as immersive as it should have been and still dims the colors, it didn’t bother me as much this time as I was already immersed in the fascinating story without its help. It should look even better on a second viewing in 2-D. Scorsese is a master storyteller and one of the best directors working today. He doesn’t need a gimmick like 3-D to prove this. His films speak more than enough for themselves and “Hugo” is no exception.

3.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.

Part 1 of the final chapter in this saga begins with the big day that fans of the series have been waiting for: the wedding of Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart). Everyone is there including Bella’s dad, Charlie (Billy Burke), who still seems quite unsure about his daughter marrying Edward. Even Bella’s good friend/previous potential boyfriend Jacob (Taylor Lautner) makes an appearance after taking the news of her wedding rather hard.

After the ceremony, Edward and Bella go off to a private island for their honeymoon where they play chess, go swimming, and, of course, make out. However, not long after, Bella realizes that she’s pregnant, something that neither of them thought was possible between a human and a vampire. The rapid growth of the baby only complicates matters as it begins to threaten Bella’s life. Once Bella returns to the Cullen household, Jacob’s tribe begins planning an attack on them, despite Jacob’s desire that Bella not be harmed. In order to ensure this, he forms an alliance of sorts with the Cullens as the attack draws nearer.

If the intention of the filmmakers was to bore the audience to death with this entry in the saga, then they have succeeded better than they could have possibly hoped. The film starts off with an uneventful wedding between two characters who haven’t had the opportunity to develop throughout three movies, and yet, we’re expected to actually care about the fact that they’re finally getting married.

From here, they go on their honeymoon where not much else happens. We’re even subjected to watching them playing chess on a few occasions. Then there’s an awkward sex scene that, luckily, we don’t have to see much of, though it must have been quite something as the room ends up being trashed by the next morning. The pregnancy situation only ends up adding more melodrama to the film than there was before, only dragging it further into the land of soap opera.

You get the same level of bad acting as was present in the other films. For this series, the only directions that Stewart, Pattinson, and Lautner seem to have been given is simply to mope, brood, and overact by raising their voices every now and again. All three have shown time and time again that they got into the wrong profession as their lack of talent has not improved over the last few years. Pattinson has begun to be a better judge of material, having starred in “Water for Elephants” earlier this year, but his performances remain very bland and not particularly convincing.

As with the other entries, this film has its share of unintentionally funny moments thanks to some terrible production values that show themselves in particular in a scene where Jacob’s wolf pack meets. The wolves are so badly animated (as they have been throughout the series) and the voice acting so badly done that you can’t help but laugh at this terrible attempt for the filmmakers to make the audience take it seriously.

We also have a badly-written screenplay from series regular Melissa Rosenberg, based on the book by Stephenie Meyer, to thank for the dullness of the film. Like the previous film, they have set it up so that we are teased into thinking that there’s going to be an eventful showdown between two sides. However, while the last film gave us a little something, this film gives us even less, making the audience wonder what they’ve been waiting for throughout the once-again bloated runtime of nearly two hours.

But who are we kidding? This film was made for the fans as they’re going to be the only ones able to appreciate it, despite it not having any redeeming qualities whatsoever. They will see it en masse, making it very successful, while the rest of us merely have to tolerate its existence. It’s sad to see that this entry, as well as the final entry, has been directed by Oscar-winner Bill Condon, who could have been putting his time to much better use. He’s given us the screenplays to such memorable films as Chicago, Gods and Monsters, and Kinsey. Oh, how he has fallen. At the very least, there’s only one film left to go, one film left to see if anything the least bit interesting happens throughout this saga. We still have another year until it arrives, but my early guess would be that the filmmakers aren’t about to start now.

1.5/4 stars.

You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.