Cloud Atlas

If ambition and scale were the sole criteria for judging movies, Cloud Atlas would be a towering achievement. But this sometimes daring movie, based on David Mitchell’s sprawling novel about the interconnectedness of humanity and lives that reverberate across centuries, is at best a…

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The Sessions

In The Sessions, John Hawkes is real-life poet Mark O’Brien, paralyzed from the neck down after a childhood polio affliction and relegated to an iron lung. At age 38, O’Brien decided it was time to lose his virginity and hired a sex surrogate, played…

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Alex Cross

Tyler Perry is woefully miscast as James Patterson’s star detective in Rob Cohen’s mean-spirited Alex Cross, featuring a wildly possessed performance by Matthew Fox as a subhuman killer whose “true calling” is pain—a bounty which he inflicts upon viewers of this movie. Perry, an…

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Argo

Ben Affleck’s Argo so expertly balances its seemingly disparate story elements—the political history, the high-flying Hollywood satire, the great escape, the father seeking redemption—it signals a marked directorial growth from Affleck in one of the year’s best movies. Moving away from the Boston setting…

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Taken 2

There was something special about 2008’s Taken, starring Liam Neeson as an ex-CIA operative raising hell to rescue his teenage daughter from a Eurotrash sex slavery ring. It was a fast, efficient, Paris-set thriller about a father who’d stop at nothing to save his…

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