Tag Archives: Movie Reviews

Review: Jurassic World

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Jurassic World PosterJurassic Park is one of my all-time favorite movies, but I also believe it’s one of the most important films in the history of cinema.  It ushered in a new era of filmmaking and box office blockbusters, where anything an artist could envision could appear convincingly on the screen, while setting a standard for visual effects that is still unmatched.  It was also one of my most memorable moviegoing experiences, and to an entire generation of people my age it was our Star Wars.  It inspired us and filled us with wonder, while delivering a story, characters, and a universe that captured our imaginations and dominated the pop culture landscape.  It also had dinosaurs.  Jurassic World was seemingly inevitable, particularly in today’s nostalgia-obsessed world.  Take one of the most popular franchises of all time and update it, bringing the most modern visual effects and most popular stars to the series, and the result has been the biggest box office smash of all time.  It’s also a mess.

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Review: Mad Max: Fury Road

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In Mad Max: Fury Road, Max drives a tanker truck through a desert wasteland in order to help rescue a group of women from the psychotic warlord who is pursuing them.  That’s pretty much the entire plot of Fury Road, but it fails to capture the essence of what is one of the most intense, full-throttle, and absolutely insane action films of all time.  But to reduce Fury Road by calling it an “action movie” is to ignore the craftsmanship, storytelling mastery, and the scale of what had to go into this film.  Writer/Director George Miller has returned to his original creation 30 years after Max was last seen on the big screen and has managed to build something that feels unlike anything we’ve seen before, yet entirely at home in the universe of Mad Max combining elements of all three previous films.  On the one hand, Fury Road defies description; it’s the sort of film that must simply be experienced, preferably on the big screen.  But on the other hand, it also provides so much to talk about, from its strong feminist tendencies to its impeccable stuntwork to its brilliantly crafted visuals to its surprisingly clever storytelling.  Fury Road is simply one of a kind.

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Review: Tomorrowland

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Teenager Casey Newton spends her days in school listening to her teachers tell her over and over that the world is doomed, that war, injustice, and climate change will be the end of us, but never answering Casey’s question of how we fix it. She spends her nights breaking into NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in order to sabotage the demolition equipment poised to destroy one of their launch pads that is no longer in use, hoping to save both the space program that has inspired her as well as her dad’s job at NASA. Things start to change when, upon having her possessions returned to her after being arrested for trespassing, she’s given a mysterious pin that, when touched, seemingly transports her to another world. The vision only lasts a brief while, but it shows her a future where humanity is united in the pursuit of expiration, led by dreamers and optimists for whom Enstein’s quote “Imagination is more important than knowledge” is a guiding principle. The pin’s vision fades, and Casey is left with the unyielding need to find out more. Her quest will lead her from her home to a bizarre science fiction shop to a mysterious young girl who knows more than she’s letting on and finally to Frank Walker, who might have been able to take her to this Tomorrowland if only he hadn’t given up a long time ago.

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Review: Pitch Perfect 2

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According to the assumptions by which Hollywood usually operates, Pitch Perfect should never have been an success.  It was a musical about nerds, a film about women made mostly by women, with no box office stars to its name.  It wasn’t a sequel, a remake, a superhero movie, or any of the typically bankable films that Hollywood regularly pumps out.  Its eventual success happened not in spite of the things seemingly stacked against it, but because of them.  It was a film that celebrated women the way it celebrated music, and served not the stereotypical male “geek culture” that movies like The Avengers cater to, but instead it embraced the nerd inside of us.  The one that’s sometimes awkward or embarrassed, that hides from the world around us, but is immensely passionate about whatever it is that we love, music or otherwise.  And in the end it made big stars out of its cast of familiar faces.  There is no other movie among my friends and acquaintances that is as universally loved as Pitch Perfect, and it is always one of the first answers given to the question, “What should we watch?”  Its passionate fanbase meant that a sequel was inevitable, and the only question was whether they could recapture lightning in a bottle and make something as special as the film that captured so many hearts.  The answer isn’t quite so simple, but Pitch Perfect 2 is still a lot of fun, and it fills a niche that is too often ignored by Hollywood.

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Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron

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If there was one criticism that could be leveled against 2012’s The Avengers, it might be that the film was just a little too perfect.  I know that sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but bear with me.  The second highest grossing film of all time was almost universally beloved and forever changed the landscape of the film industry with its success, but it was perhaps a little too polished.  The action was too slick, the one-liners too well-timed and well-written, the effects too impressive, the heroes too heroic and the villains too villainous.  For Avengers: Age of Ultron, the second Avengers film, the eleventh movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Joss Whedon’s second and final outing in the MCU, that perfection is intentionally avoided and the result is a film that’s messier, dirtier, more complicated, and ultimately a richer and better film than its predecessor.

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Review: Cinderella

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I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Disney’s new live-action version of Cinderella, and I even had some doubts about how it might turn out (and I am definitely not the doubting sort).  With Maleficent, it was clear from the outset that we would be seeing a familiar tale retold from the villain’s point of view, and this focus allowed the cast and crew to breathe new life into a well-known story.  Cinderella, on the other hand, presented itself as a straight-forward adaptation, and I was worried that it would either feel dull or unnecessary as a result, with nothing new to bring to the conversation.  (In the spirit of full disclosure, Cinderella was always my least favorite of the classic Disney princess films.)  Could Cinderella find a way to be engaging and feel fresh despite its old-fashioned approach?  In the end I was wrong to doubt, because Cinderella succeeds not in spite of its old-fashioned approach, but because of it.

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Review: Frozen Fever

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Given the phenomenal level of success enjoyed by Frozen, a follow-up of some sort was inevitable.  And while a full sequel was recently announced by the Frozen’s creators, we already have a sequel-of-sorts in Frozen Fever, the new animated short showing before Cinderella.  The seven-minute short reassembles the team behind Frozen, including the directors, cast, and songwriters, to deliver a fun update to what Arendelle’s queen and princess have been up to now that Elsa’s ice has thawed.

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Review: The Imitation Game

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In telling the story of Alan Turing, The Imitation Game is an interesting conglomeration of films and stories, and which one it feels like to you will probably be more a reflection of your interests and views than of the film itself.  It could be a World War II movie, about the various efforts by the Allies to gain the upper hand and win the war against the Axis powers in a race against the clock with lives hanging in the balance.  It might feel more like a celebration of math and science, of how wars are won with brains instead of brawn, and how one of the first computers was created to solve an unsolvable problem.  Or perhaps it’s the story of a brilliant man with a gift to offer society who is unable to find his place or fit in, and how that society he stood to help eventually destroyed him just because he was different.  Regardless of which story you might feel you’re watching, the end result is a compelling, driven, expertly crafted film shedding some light on a man and an endeavor with which few are probably familiar.

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Review: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

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After three Hobbit movies and three Lord of the Rings films, it’s hard to view The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies as a standalone picture.  It carries far more weight than it necessarily should, and as the presumed final film in the Lord of the Rings saga it has higher expectations than perhaps are fair.  So while it’s a film that can be both thrilling and emotional while also plodding and uneven, its place in the saga serves to magnify both its faults and its virtues as a representation of the successes and failures of the Hobbit trilogy and the LOTR saga as a whole.  Narratively, it serves as both and end (to The Hobbit) and a beginning (to Lord of the Rings), but it’s status as a link doesn’t detract from the big dramatic moments of the film’s story, even if at times it feels designed more as a link than as a cinematic experience of its own.

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Review: Into the Woods

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The production of Into the Woods has been a series of ups and downs for theatre fans around the world.  The film’s mere existence is worthy of excitement, but the presence of Disney overseeing the relatively mature Stephen Sondheim musical was cause for concern.  Sondheim’s involvement (along with the original show writer James Lapine) allayed some fears, but his interviews caused a lot of confusion about what changes had been made, what songs had been cut, and how “family friendly” the film had been made.  The A-list cast and director Rob Marshall brought some Hollywood glamor to the movie, and all that remained was to wait and see how it turned out.  The end result is a fairly faithful, extremely well made adaptation of a musical that is perhaps better suited for stage rather than screen.

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