Category: Film Review

The last sequel was titled “The Final Destination,” but clearly New Line Cinema is run by a bunch of sneaky little liars. Thanks to a 3D boost at the box office and renewed interest in the slaughter of no-name actors, the franchise has been pulled out of retirement, revving up again with an all-new multi-dimensional gore show. While the thrill was officially snuffed out once the end credits rolled on the first “Final Destination,” that hasn’t stopped the producers from mounting a surprisingly snoozy fourth sequel.

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The hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest has been lauded for decades now, blessed with encouraging record sales and a consistent vibration of love emanating from the rap community. However, they’ve rarely been explored in full, leaving actor Michael Rapaport to step behind the camera and investigate the inner workings of this musical union with his thumpy, riveting documentary, “Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest.”

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Brevity is a good friend to the mediocre comedy “30 Minutes or Less.” Running roughly 75 minutes long, the film is tidily arranged by director Rueben Fleischer, who has enough sense to hit his slapstick bullet points and bail. I just wish he had better material, at least something substantial that would prevent the picture from becoming yet another R-rated comedy cursed with crummy improvisation-addicted actors and their distracting potty mouths.

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Full disclosure: I’ve never seen a single episode of the Fox television smash “Glee.” I know frighteningly little about the series; however, after viewing “Glee: The 3D Concert Movie,” I’m now extremely curious about the program. At the very least, I’d like to see how the show continues on now that Charlie Sheen has been fired.

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I want a varied landscape of cinema as much as the next person, but did the world truly need a movie based on the depravity of Uday Hussein, son of Saddam? It’s difficult to ascertain exactly why the story behind “The Devil’s Double” required a feature film treatment, a quibble inflated to flat-out disgust by the end of the picture. Unsophisticated and unnecessarily ugly, the movie seems to favor Uday’s sadism instead of condemning it, making its ultimate purpose too fogged for comfort.

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If “The Tree of Life” is a full-course dinner of philosophy and emotional reflection, the sci-fi snoozer “Another Earth” is a particularly chewy intellectual amuse-bouche. A plodding melodrama concerning the effects of loss and the potential for soulful rebirth, “Another Earth” doesn’t pursue its provocative ideas with any sort of narrative momentum. Instead, it’s all dreary navel-gazing and cinematographic posturing hoping to wade into a profound philosophical bath, using the mysteries of the universe as a way to hypnotize an audience more likely to be annoyed by this story than entranced.

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After five motion pictures, two television series, and a 2001 Tim Burton remake, it seems a prequel is the only logical place to go in the exhausted “Planet of the Apes” saga. The origin tale of apes and their early stages of domination is surprisingly fertile ground for the producers, who loosely rework 1972’s “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” into “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” a frequently thrilling, emotionally resonate reboot that takes advantage of today’s vibrant motion capture technology to help articulate the complexity burning within these damn dirty apes.

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Thanks to various works from Judd Apatow and the smash success of “The Hangover,” the summer of 2011 has played host to a resurgence of hard R-rated comedies, each sharing the same improvisational DNA while declining a cheery spirit of punchline imagination, more content to primitively shock than organize surprises. While the bar was set low by the intolerable June belch, “Bad Teacher,” the body-swap extravaganza “The Change-Up” stumbles into August to claim its prize as the worst feature of the new batch.

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It’s difficult to ascertain exactly what story director James Marsh is attempting to tell with his latest documentary, “Project Nim.” Part bio-pic, part animal cruelty call to arms, and part scientific study, the feature is an engaging, horrifying look at the life and times of a special chimpanzee, but doesn’t quite bundle the reveals and the revulsion in a tight cinematic package.

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“Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” features a sensitive story of bittersweet separation, reportedly altered quite a bit from author Lisa See’s original 2005 novel. A tale of patchy sisterhood and the circular patterns of betrayals and mistakes, director Wayne Wang has his hands full with melodrama and historical reflection, exploring China’s foot-binding past while returning to the intricacies of Asian culture, which served him well in the 1993 hit, “The Joy Luck Club.” Wang’s also made perhaps the most flavorless, outright boring picture of 2011, breaking down the plot into tiny, inert pieces of meaninglessness.

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Director Jon Favreau has quite a playground with “Cowboys & Aliens,” permitting the filmmaker a big-budget opportunity to stage classic western encounters while banging away with large-scale sci-fi elements. Although it lacks an extraordinary pace that would normally accompany the collision of two disparate genres, the picture is a comfortably entertaining slice of summer escapism, blasting away with a blissful discharge of six-guns and lasers.

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The best compliment I can pay the comedy “Crazy, Stupid, Love” is that it works extremely hard to maintain a vital oxygen blast of vulnerability to an otherwise stiflingly sitcom plot. Actually, there are numerous compliments I can pay this hilarious, poignant motion picture, which mounts a tremendous effort to keep the audience guessing, undermining as much formula as it can. It’s a sharp movie, layered with impressive performances and a generous heart, yet it’s the sensation of surprise that truly matters.

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“Good Neighbors” is suspenseful, but oddly unfulfilling. A distinctly Canadian production taking place during the 1995 Quebec referendum, this serial killer/psychological thriller relies on mood and stylistics to conjure a critical feeling of dread. However, writer/director Jacob Tierney is spun dizzy by the complex narrative of deceptions and confessions, laboring over moody particulars while the tension gradually dries up.

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There are several abyssal melodramatic pits “Sarah’s Key” has difficulty avoiding, but it proffers a tale of breakthrough that’s engrossing, shedding light on a few dark corners of French history. Guided by Kristin Scott Thomas’s focused performance, the picture depicts disturbing, paralyzing feelings of loss and guilt, though it achieves a few too many moments through clumsy hysterics.

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Being the fourth superhero offering of the summer, “Captain America” arrives in theaters without the benefit of a fresh launch, stuck trying to assemble thrills in a costumed crusader farmland already picked clean. The upside here is a distinctly retro adventure that feels like a funny book page-turner, playing up its WWII setting with obvious joy and care for the character’s origins. The downside is the influence of modern technology, shining up a 1940’s hero with glossy 2011 filmmaking tools, making the picture resemble more of a video game than an epic realization of jumbo comic book details.

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There was a visit to this comedy realm already, with January’s “No Strings Attached.” It wasn’t funny or particularly romantic then and a second pass at the trials and tribulations of the young and loveless yields pretty much the same entertainment value. “Friends with Benefits” isn’t simply charmless, it’s poorly scripted, edited with a butter knife, and features two lead actors turning blue as they frantically flail to overcompensate for their lack of chemistry. Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis look swell with their clothes off, but does it really matter when they generate a sibling-like sense of sexual connection?

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“Submarine” is certainly a humane picture, but it’s often so affected, a mouthguard should be issued with every ticket to prevent oral damage from all the reflexive teeth grinding triggered when writer/director Richard Ayoade blasts the screen with unrelenting quirk. It’s a film that commences with fidgets and concludes partially asleep, yet between the artificial moments lies an astute comedy about teen anxiety and the cruel realities of first love.

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What began as the story of a boy’s wondrous introduction into a limitless world of magic ends in an epic display of war, death, and desire for peace. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” is the final chapter in the longstanding fantasy series and it’s a fitting conclusion to the legend, marrying the extensive exposition of “Part 1” with an intermittently furious finale that satisfies and rouses in all the proper ways. I'm certain few will want to say goodbye to the admired franchise, but the production has secured a superb finish that’s elegant and carries significant emotional heft.

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Simplicity reigns supreme in “Winnie the Pooh,” which isn’t a reimagining, reconstruction, or reevaluation of a classic character. Instead, it’s just a breezy, endearing, humorous romp with everyone’s favorite stuffed bear, going back to the basics of traditional animated feature filmmaking. Imagine that, an entire motion picture built around the innate charms and feisty personalities of its cast of characters, without the need for bathroom humor or story padding. This movie is downright huggable.

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Kevin James and talking animals. Doesn’t seem like a particularly extensive screenwriting challenge, yet “Zookeeper” features an extraordinary amount of outside interference for a picture that shouldn’t stray from the essentials. More amusing than funny, but only when it includes the antics of the wild kingdom, the picture drags unnecessarily, trying to convince viewers that the human elements of the script have value when all anyone really wants to see is a talking gorilla in a polo shirt.

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