Hyde Park on Hudson

Bland Hyde Park on the Hudson, about a 1939 weekend sojourn between the FDR, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, doesn’t do much to illuminate Roosevelt and even less to enliven its decidedly slight chapter of history. It wants to be a whimsical comedy…

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Silver Linings Playbook

Silver Linings Playbook is one of the year’s most emotionally generous movies, a crowd-pleaser of a romantic comedy that also happens to be a gritty family drama about bi-polar disorder. If that sounds like an unlikely combination, writer-director David O. Russell deftly juggles such…

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The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2

Bigger is definitely not better in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2, an overblown series finale that jettisons Twilight’s signature love triangle between a vampire, human and werewolf in favor or a cluttered, badly CGI-d vampire showdown the likes of which we’ve seen…

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Anna Karenina

All the world’s a stage, but in the case of Joe Wright’s new screen adaptation of Anna Karenina, perhaps it shouldn’t be. While wish I could say that Wright’s conceptual audacity in setting his new movie version of Tolstoy’s classic largely inside a decrepit,…

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Flight

The opening scenes of Flight tell us everything we need to know about Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), a middle-aged, coked up alcoholic who happens to be a respected commercial airline pilot.  He’s just had a wild binge of sex and substances with a pretty…

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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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