Letterboxd — Your life in film

I'll admit it at this point, I am no longer that kid that patiently awaited that big blockbuster in the summer to blow my socks off. My tastes have changed, and quite a lot. (Of course, you bet good money I'll be in the theatre for Jurassic Park IV next year though - some things never change...) But, last year, Whedon even beat out Chris Nolan in directing the best comic-book fanboy movie of the year and it was a…

What I see here is a lost opportunity. Sam Raimi is directing this. Great choice, Disney. He's done big budget features in the past to mostly great effect. Here, though, it's a little all over the place for him. He seems out of his element, or more-likely, restrained, by Big Brother.
His witches are terrific (though Kunis is a little over the top once she becomes evil and green) and I'm glad they made him stick with Weisz, who is…

There are a lot of things I want to give it credit for and, yet, I keep coming back to it just not all that impressed. It doesn't last in the memory (save a devastating, Oscar-worthy Hathaway). Tom Hooper's choices, I feel, mar this big screen adaptation. His intimate camera-work doesn't work on a grand scale, like it did so wonderfully for his slight character-piece The King's Speech. And, it's grimy realness (cinematography, production design, etc) takes away some of…

Again, I want to like Peter Jackson's efforts more than I do. Here, I think the rating is a little lower just because the "WOW" factor is gone. We've been there, done that. There's nothing less impressive about it, but it all just seems a bit lost on me. Now, I think that the story structure he's crafted here for three films works surprisingly well (better than I was expecting). While it did not feel very tedious, there's still a…

This is a bitter, angry little pill of a film. It's not interested in being subtle, but truly hammering home its philosophy. What Dominick did with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is nothing short of masterpiece. He turned the themes of the Western on its head and into a grandiose art-house character study. His scope here is quieter, more direct, less interested in character. Dominick doesn't seem to want to create the typical genre film,…

At its heart, the film struggles to find its voice and its rhythm within its themes, all the while providing great acting, but by the end, when it has figured out that these two have switched roles (Schoenaerts losing something physically to keep his son, just like Cotillard lost her limbs to keep her life), the film finds its home. Cotillard was the one who got most of the attention (deservedly, as she does so much with so little dialogue…

Joe Wright took quite a risk here. It's a bold one, and it infuses new verve into an old, familiar story that's been told on screen more times than we can count at this point. It doesn't pay off across the board, but it certainly doesn't deserve the flack that some people/critics have been handing to it. Here, he allows his characters to "strut and fret their hour upon the stage" and what that provides in terms of intrigue and…

Perfectly adequate - the script (less-so) and the actors (more-so) get it through. Nothing more, nothing less.

The thing about this film is that it covers up its flaws (the most egregious being that romance can cure mental issues - yay!) with so much charm, we're almost forced to not notice. Still, for the first half I was marveled by how wonderfully off-putting the trajectory of the story was going. I had no idea where it might head. But, after…