Category: Film Review

Unlike many of its low budget brethren, “Transit” has a singular drive to thrill its audience with ferocious displays of gunfire, car stunts, and feverish performances. It’s a ridiculous movie, abandoning logic immediately upon commencement, yet its dedication to pace and intensity is charming and frequently effective. It’s a turn-your-brain-off viewing experience, with director Antonio Negret eager to share a little Louisiana troublemaking with viewers, hitting juicy points of pursuit and intimidation with a clear vision for violence. Instead of playing dead due to lack of funds, “Transit” carries itself with confidence, delivering the goods in a clean and efficient manner.

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A few years back, I reviewed “Universal Soldier: Regeneration,” which was technically the fifth installment of the tired series, leading to minimal viewing expectations. Instead of a snoozy actioner, director John Hyams (son of inconsistent helmer Peter Hyams) refreshed the franchise with a shockingly stout effort, returning some firepower back to a flatlining futuristic concept, also replacing a few blown light bulbs in Jean-Claude Van Damme’s marquee value. Unfortunately, the excitement was only fleeting, with Hyams’s latest, “Dragon Eyes,” a tepid fight picture that’s too reliant on chaotic moviemaking elements to make an impression, creating noise where a thrilling revenge saga should be. Where “Regeneration” showcased a filmmaker ready to pound some life into dreary formula, the ugly and bafflingly dull “Dragon Eyes” revels in cliché, slowly falling asleep despite some gratuitously violent content.

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It’s almost impossible to decode the true intent of “LOL,” which is such an obnoxious and baffling viewing experience, clouding whatever teen angst authenticity it was striving for. A remake of a 2008 French feature starring Sophie Marceau, the original picture’s writer/director Lisa Azuelos has returned to helm the American take on the war between teens and adults, perhaps best qualified to film material she’s already tackled before. The challenge proves too insurmountable for the creator, with her update a choppy, confused observation of growing pains and adolescent insubordination, executed with a bizarre obliviousness to the toxicity of these characters and their extraordinarily superficial concerns begging for sympathy.

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After years of insides jokes, cameos, hints, and calculated introductions, it’s finally led to this. “The Avengers” pays off a promise made in 2008’s “Iron Man,” bringing together Marvel’s greatest superheroes (and two question marks) for a battle to save the Earth, after they’re done pummeling one another. A mildly clunky but largely soaring presentation of citywide devastation, costumed hero neuroses, and flamboyant evildoing, the feature gathers all the details and character quirks fans could want from a super-sized outing such as this. And who better to direct than a man with practically his own religion in the realm of geeklandia, Joss Whedon. Every ticket should come with a tube of smelling salts to keep the target demographic from passing out.

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With such an esteemed cast and capable director, it’s hard to argue with anything “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” provides. The familiarity of the story’s revelations and relationships are a tad deflating, but the overall feature puts forth a great deal of heart and empathy, with emphasis on the aging process, rarely handled delicately in features. Although mildly comedic, “Marigold Hotel” is at its finest sitting back and allowing the gifted performers an opportunity to feel around the situations, usually discovering the most precise emotions to play. It’s far from a remarkable film, yet it strikes all the satisfying notes required to remain meaningful and entertaining.

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As a child, I adored the CBS Saturday morning program, “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.” A phantasmagoria of cartoons, slapstick, and puppetry, the show was a miracle shot of creativity in a realm of glorified commercials, drilling into my brain with its purity of imagination and firm grasp on ridiculousness. At the time, I didn’t consider the personalities that drove the series alongside Paul Reubens, but as the years went by, revisiting “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” exposed brilliant work emerging from multiple sources. One of those fountains of genius was Wayne White. While the playhouse festivities don’t define his career, it’s an excellent entry point into a snowballing mind always on the prowl for absurdity.

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When it comes to Jason Statham and his action entertainment endeavors, one always knows what to expect. While maintaining a perfectly respectable career as an unshaven action figure, Statham’s movies haven’t always displayed a level of concentration and imagination that could solidify the star as a punch-happy icon. “Safe” is a fitting match of the actor’s growly determination to restless cinematic overload, with writer/director Boaz Yakin orchestrating a largely insane bruiser that invests in mesmerizing absurdity. It’s ridiculously violent and frequently flat-out ridiculous, but the picture’s commitment to the underlying promise of roaring bullet-drenched mayhem is kept in a big way. With “Safe,” Statham finds assertive material that fits his limited range like a glove, blending the diminutive scrapper into a larger portrait of New York City chaos, prizing every last broken bone and open wound.

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The latest from Aardman Animations, “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” (released elsewhere as “The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists”) carries all the hallmarks of the British studio’s wit, speed, and visual creativity. A stop-motion animated effort, the movie is a delightfully entertaining yarn that puts a little cheekiness back into cinematic pirating, especially after the gradual disruption of jollity found in the last three “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequels. Besides, what’s more fun to watch, a mincing Johnny Depp or a plasticine figure of extraordinary flexibility and cartoon possibility, plundering and bumbling across a vividly designed and colored background, surrounded by pure mischief? It also doesn’t hurt that “Band of Misfits” is easily the most charismatic performance Hugh Grant has delivered in over a decade.

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“The Raven” should be a lot more entertaining than it actually is. Extrapolating the final days of writer Edgar Allan Poe, the movie turns the author into a detective of sorts, playing up the man’s expertise with macabre situations as he races to save a damsel in distress. After all, who’s more skilled at catching murderers than a man who’s spent his life imagining indescribable horrors? What’s actually committed to the screen is stillborn, poorly arranged by director James McTeigue, who’s too caught up in stiff period details to keep suspense in play. It’s a neat idea for a film, but it doesn’t come alive in this uneventful attempt to refresh the serial killer genre.

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“The Five-Year Engagement” highlights familiar cinematic working parts, keeping in step with previous Judd Apatow productions with its overreliance on improvisational comedy, unnecessary foul language, and a bloated run time (clocking in at just over two hours). Yet, the picture manages to locate a morsel of life left in the mummified romantic comedy genre, using relationship realism and blindingly charismatic stars to carry a heavy load of Apatowian formula. While a bit unwieldy, “The Five-Year Engagement” is a winningly silly effort to dissect pre-wedding tension and longtime commitment coziness, doing a capable job milking domestic discomfort for every drop of goofballery, punctuated with a sweet dollop of genuine affection shared between the lead characters. In an industry obsessed with wedding movies, here’s an anti-ceremony heartwarmer, executed with a spongy comedic imagination and a little touch of soul.

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From Norway comes “Headhunters,” a startlingly aggressive offering of thriller cinema that arranges quite a ferocious ride of murder and escape. While it introduces itself as a darkly comic heist picture with satiric flavors popping from its business world setting, the feature soon takes off like a shot, hitting the viewer with all sorts of gruesome acts of violence and desperate scenarios of survival, maintaining an outstanding pace as it mounts numerous twists and turns. Although it carries a few off-putting moments for the average moviegoer, “Headhunters” is a truly accomplished showcase of direction, with copious amount of surprises and neat corners on the storytelling. That Hollywood is rabid to remake the film is the least shocking thing about it.

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“96 Minutes” is a story about violence told in a violent manner. It’s an unsightly film, dreadfully cynical and obvious, but there’s a germ of an idea concerning the foundation of cruelty that’s worth noting, but it involves sitting through a 90 minute picture anchored by unnecessary shaky cam, one genuinely bad performance, and superfluous cursing to prove itself hard enough to dramatize life locked in dire urban centers. It’s a mediocre effort from writer/director Aimee Lagos, making her feature-length helming debut, but “96 Minutes” has moments of promise and severity that suggests the moviemaker might excel with better material one day.

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Despite a provocative title, “Jesus Henry Christ” doesn’t really have anything interesting to share with its audience. It’s an empty calorie viewing experience, helped along by a few commendable performances, but the event is largely drowned in meticulous frame details, mimicking Wes Anderson’s directorial fingerprint. Helmer Dennis Lee (“Fireflies in the Garden”) comes to “Jesus Henry Christ” with a clear idea on how the feature should look, but the human element is sorely lacking from his whirring filmmaking tastes. It’s boldly colored and sharply designed, but there’s little to take away from the movie besides a surface appreciation for certain production accomplishments. The rest of the effort doesn’t share the same vibrant position.

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“The Moth Diaries” initially caught my attention due to the participation of writer/director Mary Harron, the filmmaker behind such pictures as “American Psycho” and “I Shot Andy Warhol.” Last seen on the big screen with 2005’s “The Notorious Bettie Page,” Harron spent a considerable amount of time in television, with “The Moth Diaries” a long-awaited return to feature-length moviemaking. Sadly, Harron’s instincts have flattened some since her last major cinematic effort, as this latest offering lacks a confident vision and true storytelling clarity. While effectively eerie, “The Moth Diaries” doesn’t provide a sustained vibration of dread, mixing adolescent hysteria with monstrous developments to little effect.

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“Think Like a Man” is an extended infomercial for comedian Steve Harvey’s 2009 book, “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man.” There’s no real cohesiveness to the production, which basically stitches together various battle of the sexes shenanigans starring unpleasant characters intended to represent the average man and woman as they play the game of love. When it’s not hackneyed and abusive to the concept of a tender relationship shared between two people, “Think Like a Man” is exceptionally unfunny, utilizing noise instead of wit. In fact, the entire film is one long yelling match whacked up into dreary episodic adventures with personalities who deserve the single life. Harvey’s a terrific comedian and hosts the heck out of “Family Feud,” but when it comes to matters of the heart, the man has perverted passion into a moviegoing event that induces conversion disorder.

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Even for a syrupy Nicholas Sparks adaptation, “The Lucky One” is awfully hard to swallow. However, it starts off promisingly enough, displaying dewy stars frolicking in dewy locations, trading bedroom eyes as the melodrama grows like weeds around them. We’ve been here before, in movies such as “The Notebook” and “Dear John,” yet “The Lucky One” stands out from the pack as material that could’ve found a distinctive position of romance and redemption, yet all ambition is thrown away on cartoonish villainy and a complete lack of rational thought from the main characters. There’s genuine heat between stars Zac Efron and Taylor Schilling, but the rest of the picture is utter nonsense, cruelly unaware of its own absurdity.

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A significant amount of nature documentaries are created every year, and each one of these productions tends to follow a common structure of introduction and behavioral understanding, punctuated with a harsh environmental message, hoping to inject a sense of action into the viewer. “To the Arctic 3D” is an IMAX effort that does away with friendly preambles to hit the audience right in the gut with the realities of life near the North Pole. Our world is heating up and the ice is melting, leaving those creatures dependent on ruthless conditions and steady climate changes to fend for themselves in a new frontier of water and warmth.

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When approaching cinematic investigations into the pope and Vatican affairs, most features take extra caution, often depicting the Catholic authority with a severe attitude befitting such religious and cultural power. “We Have a Pope” doesn’t attempt to deface the organization, but works to understand the clouded headspace of a man suddenly thrust into the spotlight, handed authority and publicity he’s not fully prepared for. The psychological study makes this film special and enlightening, seeking to find a human side to the misgivings inherent in any papal election, creating an uncertain lead character facing unimaginable responsibility, struggling with his fears as the world waits patiently for him to step forward and accept his heavenly duty.

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For Disneynature’s sixth worldwide release, the company turns their attention to chimpanzees and all the curiosity and cuteness they provide. “Chimpanzee” has plenty of personality to share as it constructs a tale of a baby fighting to find his place after the death of his mother, but this feature is more reality show than distanced animal documentary. Building a narrative out of random footage, the production aims to control nature to meet the needs of tired formula. The technical achievements of “Chimpanzee” are nothing short of stunning, but missing here is an authenticity of behavior and stillness of observance, wiped away to give audiences a cartoon rendering of the wild — the producers fearful they might not sit still for the real thing.

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Here’s a documentary that expands a 10-minute-long subject into a hypnotic 80 minutes of food preparation and philosophy. “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” approaches the fine art of meal construction with a goal to revel in the gifts of a sushi master, only to discover something far more appealing about a highly respectful family dynamic behind the counter. Foodies will likely lose their mind watching a genius assemble bite after bite of world-famous sushi, but the picture’s command emerges from a heartfelt place of craft and expertise, working beyond gastronomy particulars to understand a deep sense of tradition and quality that’s carried on for decades, found in a most unlikely place.

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