With found-footage movies cleaning up at the box office over quite an extended period of time now, it seems inevitable that they’d move past their horror roots and into other genres. Chronicle is the found-footage superhero movie, and it’s one of the most unique movie-going experiences in years.
From 31-year-old director Ti West, who in 2010 directed the wonderfully retro The House of the Devil, comes The Innkeepers, a simultaneously old-fashioned (and unabashedly so) and tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of overused genre clichés
Man on a Ledge is a colossally dumb heist movie that works more often than it doesn’t in spite of the filmmakers’ best efforts to maim it. The fact that director Asger Leth and writer Pablo F. Fenjves think this is a smart thriller feels insulting: it’s riddled with cliches and more than a little preposterous. But perhaps because it goes for the jugular, it ends on a note that’s pretty satisfying, at least compared to your average January popcorn flick.
Even in its rare grim moments, One for the Money is ever so mildly enjoyable and its light pace keeps things moving along rather rapidly. However, the movie’s virtually devoid of personality and doesn’t boast anything that makes it genuinely stand apart from other hybrids of crime and comedy.
Most of the early indicators in The Grey give you the sense that Neeson will do his usual solemn-faced hero routine that he executes to perfection, but the way the film unfolds (not in terms of plot, but in terms of the quality of the storytelling) asks him to go beyond that. He definitely responds.
September 11, 2001 marked one of the darkest, scariest, and most uncertain times in the lives of many Americans, and with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Stephen Daldry touches upon such confusion with a powerful story and top-notch performances.
Although the films took a break from the misadventures of Kate “Does-the-Leather-Have-to-Be-That-Pain-Inducing” Beckinsale as Selene and her vampire/werewolf boyfriend Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman), the leading lady is back in Underworld: Awakening, though I wouldn’t say she is better than ever.
It’s that hawk-eyed attention to skin color that’s supposed to make Red Tails stand out. It dramatizes the story of the Tuskegee airmen, the first African-American pilots to see active combat in World War II, and the inequality that would confront them daily. Although based on a true story, it plays like a retelling of every World War II movie ever made.
The trailer for Haywire presented itself as a fun action-packed B-movie homage with A-list caliber talent, but what we get is a very bland, boring movie that fails as an action flick and as a thriller and should have been confined to straight-to-DVD hell.
The Artist is a silent film, but more so an homage to those films. After all, what better way to make a movie about silent movies than to make a silent movie? And in an era when a lot of movies don’t know when to shut up, how nice to have some silence.
