Red Tails - Review

Review by Chicago Reader

George Lucas served as executive producer for this effects-heavy action film about the Tuskegee Airmen, and it feels as synthetic and dull as The Phantom Menace. The film’s depiction of Italy in World War II feels like a second- or third-hand memory (and sometimes looks like a computer-game backdrop), and the characters are blatant composites of old war-movie archetypes.

Read Full Review

Review by Movie Nation

George Lucas planned “Red Tails,” the film he produced on World War II’s Tuskegee Airmen, with the best of intentions. But he begins this earnest, old-fashioned combat film with its worst scene. It’s a blast of video-game quality aerial combat, digitally rendered, blandly written, with maybe the worst sound effects and worst score (inappropriately modern, by Terrance Blanchard) Lucas has allowed since his days in film school.
It’s a body blow that this collection of corny cliches and stock movie “types” played by a very dull cast isn’t good enough to overcome.
The novel approach of this story — directed by Anthony Hemingway –  is leaving out the formation of a “Negro” fighter pilot training program at Tuskegee Institute, to pick up their saga after they’ve endured Army indifference, racism and months of being assigned outdated P-40 fighter planes and rear echelon patrol duty on the Italian front.

Read Full Review

Review by Reel Views

I wanted to like Red Tails. I really did. Largely financed by George Lucas (whose fingerprints are all over the final cut), this movie tells a story – that of the 332nd Fighter Group (a.k.a. “The Tuskegee Airmen”) – that could combine dramatic power with impressive air combat sequences. It’s a movie Lucas has reportedly been toying with making for more than 20 years. Sadly, the result is a disappointment. Sure, the aerial battles are technically adept and occasionally exhilarating, but it’s almost painful to sit through some of the “drama” that occurs on the ground. The character-building moments are woeful, but they’re masterpieces of writing when compared to the dialogue. One can get away with a lot of cornball speeches a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away but it doesn’t work nearly as well a short time ago on planet Earth.

Read Full Review

Declaration of War - Review

Review by nypost.com

France’s “Declaration of War” has it all: comedy, romance, fantasy, musical interludes and a child with a brain tumor. Wait — what?

A quick trawl through the memory turns up no other movie like this comedy-drama, about the ordeal of a sexy young couple (His name? Romeo. Hers is Juliette) — who learn their infant son needs brain surgery.

The stars and screenwriters (Valérie Donzelli, who is also the director, and Jérémie Elkaïm) recapped their own similar experiences as the parents of a gravely ill son.

Read Full Review

Review by Salon.com

Channeling personal trauma into creative work is pretty much what artists do, as Dr. Freud and Vincent van Gogh could have told you. In the case of French actress and director Valérie Donzelli’s striking and imaginative film “Declaration of War,” the autobiographical element is so strong that the movie’s virtually a docudrama – but a dazzlingly strange docudrama with musical numbers, choreographed interludes and prodigious cinematic verve. What could have been a wrenching family tear-jerker, in which a young couple discovers that their infant son is dangerously ill, becomes a bittersweet tragicomedy in the classic French style, suggestive of Jacques Demy, Christophe Honoré or François Ozon. (“Declaration of War” opened the Critic’s Week at Cannes this year, and now reaches theaters just after its United States premiere at Sundance.)

Mind you, “Declaration of War” still is a profoundly affecting family drama, no matter how much artifice Donzelli piles on top of it.

Read Full Review

Review by The New York Times

“Declaration of War” is a manic sprint whose style and momentum recall French New Wave films like “Jules and Jim” revved up to double-time. On paper, the story of Juliette (Valérie Donzelli) and Roméo (Jérémie Elkaïm), bohemian Parisians whose 18-month-old son develops a brain tumor, may sound depressing. But the emergency channels their energy into an exhilarating race against time. A crucial insight of the movie, directed by Ms. Donzelli, is that a crisis can infuse daily life with a surreal, zany urgency.
The war of the title refers to the couple’s mobilization of every resource available to help their little boy, Adam (César Desseix), beat the condition. The story closely approximates the real experiences of Ms. Donzelli and Mr. Elkaïm, who collaborated on the screenplay and whose own son had a near-fatal illness. For all its heightened emotions, “Declaration of War” is the opposite of a disease-of-the-week sobfest, for Roméo and Juliette have little time to indulge in weepy self-pity.

Read Full Review

The Innkeepers - Review

Review by ew.com

As a ghost story, The Innkeepers is pretty tame. As a horror movie, it’s relatively low-gore — and low-budget. But those constraints become assets in writer-director Ti West’s warm and witty deconstructed spook tale. West, a thirtysomething horror aficionado who previously toyed with the fate of an unlucky babysitter in his highly satisfying 2009 thriller The House of the Devil, now fiddles with the spectral malaise that infects a hundred-year-old inn. Wide-eyed Sara Paxton and hipster-bespectacled Pat Healy play the joint’s only two employees, working each other into a lather of what turns out to be well-founded hysteria. Kelly McGillis is a surprise treat as a grouchy medium.

The movie’s payoff is not exactly a stunner, and the narrative tension is relatively loose, even with the first appearance of the ghost of honor.

Read Full Review

Review by MSN

It’s the last weekend of business for Connecticut’s Yankee Pedlar Inn, with slackers Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) manning the front counter once more. They’re each crashing in one of the hotel’s many empty rooms rather than commuting, a maneuver that adds a degree of convenience to their late-night, last-ditch efforts to make contact with the spirits rumored to be haunting the halls.

Read Full Review

Review by THR

Director-screenwriter Ti West exhibits less stylistic fetishism with his latest film while remaining solidly outside of contemporary fashion, which results in a largely entertaining picture with too few scares to satisfy the multiplex crowd.

AUSTIN — Following his grindhouse-loving House of the Devil with a ghost film that could have been mainstream in the ‘80s, Ti West exhibits less stylistic fetishism with The Innkeepers while remaining solidly outside of contemporary fashions. The result is a largely entertaining picture with too few (and late-arriving) scares to satisfy the multiplex crowd, but one that will please many die-hard genre aficionados.
Shot in the Connecticut hotel where West’s crew stayed during Devil’s production, the film cares more about the chemistry between its two leads than the paranormal lore that fascinates them both. Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) take turns manning the front desk during the century-old hotel’s closing weekend, tending to the two or three remaining guests while taking breaks to hold microphones in vacant rooms, hoping to record a ghost.

Read Full Review

Man on a Ledge - Review

Review by nj.com

The movie is called “Man on a Ledge,” but right from the start, the story is in free fall.
The hero, Nick, is an ex-cop and convicted diamond thief — who escapes from prison only to check into a midtown hotel, order himself a nice dinner and then climb out the window, threatening to jump.
Pretty soon a crowd forms. Then a nice (and, of course, beautiful) NYPD negotiator shows up to try to talk him down — or rather, in. He won’t budge. But eventually he will tell her, and us, what he’s up to.
And it’s pretty ridiculous.

Read Full Review

Review by newsday.com

Whenever Sam Worthington, as felon Nick Cassidy, scurries along the outside wall of Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel in “Man on a Ledge,” you might start thinking: He’s supposedly on the 21st floor, but the highest ledge on the mostly flat-faced Roosevelt is at floor 17. What’s more, you can sometimes count a mere 10 windows between Nick and the sidewalk. As a result, Nick often looks rather undizzyingly low to the ground.

There isn’t much else to occupy your mind in “Man on a Ledge,” a clumsily made thriller with very few thrills. The script feels like a made-to-order job to suit the nifty title — the author, Pablo F. Fenjves, is a ghostwriter whose credits include O.J. Simpson’s book “If I Did It” — and its threadbare plot won’t keep you guessing, caring or even vaguely interested.

Read Full Review

Review by Detroitnews.com

“Man on a Ledge” is a movie for those who like their vertigo straight up.

It is essentially an hour-and-a-half of waiting for a guy to fall 21 stories and splatter on the street below. Considering the simplicity of the idea, first-time feature director Asgar Leth manages to keep things fairly tense.

Oh, sure, the screenplay from Pablo F. Fenjves throws in some side action and your basic confusing backstory, but it all still comes down (or up) to a guy standing on a thin ledge outside a hotel room in New York.

Will he jump? Will he slip? Is he crazy walking sideways like that? And why isn’t he sweating more?

Because he’s cool, obviously. The guy on the ledge is Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington of “Avatar”), a former cop who was wrongly convicted of stealing a $40 million diamond from a Donald Trump-like jerk (Ed Harris).

Read Full Review

The Grey - Review

Review by The Detroit News

‘The Grey” is a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

At first, this survival film seems to have artsy aspirations. Man against nature and all that. But then it gets so spectacularly dumb and predictable and long-winded that you lose all respect and interest.

Liam Neeson stars as Ottway, working at a remote Alaskan oil rig. His job is to shoot wolves that might attack other workers. That’s right — he’s a professional wolf shooter.

We also get early on that he’s a dreary sort and suicidal, pining for a woman he’s lost. Fun guy.

He gets on a plane with a bunch of other workers, heading home in a snowstorm. Then the plane crashes in a harsh wilderness controlled by wolves. Karma time.

So Ottway leads the survivors off to hypothetical safety, with the wolves dropping in from time to time to chow down on one of them. That is pretty much the entire movie.

Read Full Review

Review by Newsday.com

After surviving a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness and gathering around to watch a mangled friend die, the oil-rig roughnecks of “The Grey” do something unexpected.

They cry.

Tears don’t usually come easily to men in survival movies, especially before they’ve shared the bonding experience of devolving into murderous animals. “The Grey,” however, is a different beast. It’s a puzzling mix of brutal violence and softhearted sentiment, both embodied at once in Liam Neeson as a poetry-quoting alpha male named Ottaway. The film’s conflicting tones never quite mesh, but some fine acting and powerful moments make “The Grey” watchable, if not entirely compelling.

The title refers to a large wolf whose pack is hunting the human survivors, though it also applies to Ottaway.

Read Full Review

Review by NYpost.com

Forsaken in a cruel wilderness, a man looks to God and pleads for help. Receiving no answer, he says, “F- -k, I’ll do it myself.”

There isn’t quite enough of that kind of flinty dialogue in the survival thriller “The Grey,” but the level of manly bravado is more than sufficient. Director Joe Carnahan, the hyperactive force behind “Smokin’ Aces,” this time slows things down, to highly pleasing effect. As Liam Neeson’s loner and a group of fellow survivors of a plane crash try to outwit the wolves stalking them, there are moments of stern beauty and quiet devastation.

Underworld Awakening - Review

Review by Variety

Back in black and cutting no slack, Kate Beckinsale returns as Selene, the kickass vampire warrioress who always shoots first and never bothers to ask questions afterward, in “Underworld Awakening,” the fourth entry in the enduringly popular action-horror franchise launched by Len Wiseman’s “Underworld” back in 2003. Although the directorial chores have been turned over to Swedish co-helmers Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein (billed jointly as Marlind & Stein), this latest episode extends the mythos and sustains the excitement of its predecessors with sufficient fealty to ensure another killing at the box office and a long afterlife on homevid.
After being conspicuously absent (except for a fleeting cameo) from “Underworld: Rise of the Lycans” (2009), a swashbuckling prequel to “Underworld” and “Underworld: Evolution” (2006), Beckinsale slips back into the latex suit to resume Selene’s crusade as Death Dealer extraordinaire in the secret, centuries-long battle between vampires and werewolves (aka Lycans).
The big difference here is that humankind finally has caught on to the fact that, well, vampires and Lycans have been battling each other for centuries, and homo sapiens have frequently sustained collateral damage.

Read Full Review

Review by Kansascity.com

Pitiless, puerile, pointless and perfunctory – and those are just the “P’s” – “Underworld: Awakening” was brought into this world to revamp the vampire franchise and prove Kate Beckinsale can still wear the spandex, the leather bustier, the werewolf-kicking boots and the black leather cape of “death dealer” Selene.

But as any fashionista will tell you, just because you can get away with wearing something is no reason to actually do it.

Beckinsale, her mop of gelled, jet-black hair dropped over one luminescent-blue eye, never makes us forget that she’s doing this for the paycheck, for the chance to be something more than Mark Wahlberg’s victim-wife in “Contraband,” to prove that Gina Carano may be the real action deal in “Haywire,” but that she’ll never pack the fanboys in like the Brit with Grit.

Review by The New York Times

Milla Jovovich may have the zombie post-apocalypse covered with the “Resident Evil” series (guided by her husband, Paul W. S. Anderson). But in vampire-werewolf warfare, Kate Beckinsale rules, with the “Underworld” movies (guided by her husband, Len Wiseman). No wan, moony “Twilights” these: we’re talking more than a thousand years of battle between Lycans (werewolves) and vampires, recounted in three installments before the latest, “Underworld: Awakening.” (“Underworld” scholars, see Chapter 3, “Rise of the Lycans,” for some origin details.)

Now the weaponry of choice, depending on your persuasion, fires slugs containing silver nitrate for offing Lycans, or ultraviolet light for vampires (although Lycans in full-fur mode just use teeth and claws). Dank, clanky settings; a bluish palette; and chewy bits of gore are the order of the day, er, night.

Perhaps you remember Selene, Ms. Beckinsale’s vampire and former scourge of Lycans (a death dealer, in franchise parlance), she of the pale complexion, black bodysuit and blazing twin automatics.

Read Full Review

How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? - Review

Review by npr.org

The title of the new documentary about British architect Norman Foster comes from a question posed by one of his American mentors, Buckminster Fuller. How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? shows the designer’s answer: structures that are airier, both in appearance and fact.

The movie, directed by Carlos Carcas and Norberto Lopez Amado from a script by Devan Sudjic, attempts to emulate Foster’s buildings; it uses aerial photography and impressionistic glimpses to present a lofty, gliding viewpoint. But the documentary’s approach to Foster himself is anything but subtle. Whether contemplating his own sensibility or challenging himself in cross-country ski marathons, the 76-year-old architect appears here as a man who stands heavy upon the planet.

Read Full Review

Review by The New York Times

“How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?,” an admiring documentary about the British architect Norman Foster, by Norberto López Amado and Carlos Carcas, gives the viewer quite a lot to marvel at, which is, after all, the root meaning of the word “admire.”
Accompanied by Joan Valent’s pulsing, soaring score, the camera swoops over some of Mr. Foster’s largest and best-known structures and floats through the bright and airy interiors of his skyscrapers. Even before you hear Paul Goldberger (a former architecture critic for The New York Times, currently at The New Yorker) describe Mr. Foster as “the Mozart of Modernism,” you can appreciate the grace and harmony of his compositions in glass, steel and light.

Read Full Review

Review by Village Voice

In this country, British modernist “starchitect” Norman Foster is perhaps best known for the Hearst building in New York, with its huge atrium set within the old masonry shell and a faceted new glass tower rising above. A working-class Manchester lad, Foster trained at Yale and became a brand name by the late ’60s—aided in part by association with his futurist mentor, Buckminster Fuller (who posed this doc’s titular question). Now in his mid seventies, Foster runs a large international firm that—detractors will tell you, though not in this movie—has been chasing the mega-project money from China to Dubai to Kazakhstan. “They are thinking big,” he says of such emerging economies, and big is certainly what Foster does best.

Read Full Review

Contraband - Review

Review by MSN

Mark Wahlberg generally brings a terse, direct credibility to his work in action pictures. But that gets him only so far when he doesn’t have credible … OK, maybe “credible” is too much to ask these days, so let’s say entertaining, material to work with. While the jumping-off point for the New Orleans-set “Contraband,” his latest action movie, is as hackneyed as hackneyed gets (it’s the one about the old pro who’s gone straight and just when he thinks he’s out they pull him back in again, rinse, lather, repeat), it piles on complications and veers in new directions with such impressive dispatch that it more often than not sweeps the viewer past a bunch of plausibility checkpoints with no concerns save how the hero’s gonna get out of his next nasty jam. It’s a good, chugging caper movie for the most part.

Read Full Review

Review by Triangle.com

Mark Wahlberg delivers the goods in “Contraband,” a B-movie about smuggling in boozy, corrupt New Orleans.

t may telegraph its punches and follow that “one last job” heist picture formula. But the cascading collapse of first one best-laid plan and then another and the odd moment of jaw-dropping surprise make this a thriller with its share of nail-biting moments.

Wahlberg plays Chris Farraday, a smuggler who has gone legit – selling household alarm systems. His old man, Bud, is in prison. His wife, Kate (Kate Beckinsale), runs a beauty salon. They have two kids. He’s wised up and left “the life” behind.

But his wife’s younger brother (Caleb Jones) hasn’t. And after he dumps drugs overboard when the Customs and Border Protection guys board his ship, the kid is in the hole to a pretty bad hombre, played with his usual goateed glee by Giovanni Ribisi. To save the kid and his own family, Chris takes on that one-last-you-know-what.

Read Full Review

Review by Newsday.com

After a long run of serious movies like “War Horse” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” I was looking forward to “Contraband,” starring Mark Wahlberg as a reformed smuggler reluctantly pulling one last job. Everyone needs a little action now and then, right?

Unfortunately, a little action is all you’ll get.

“Contraband” is a sub-par crime flick based on the 2008 Icelandic thriller “Reykjavík-Rotterdam,” whose star, Baltasar Kormákur, directs the American version. He takes the job way too seriously. All the ingredients for a satisfying slice of pulp are here — tattooed baddies, ruthless mobsters, the pretty wife who needs protecting — but “Contraband” is so busy establishing a dark mood of menace that it keeps forgetting to deliver the goods.

Wahlberg seems oddly emasculated as Chris Farraday, a security-systems technician, doting husband to Kate (Kate Beckinsale) and father of two darling boys. Chris and his buddy Sebastian (Ben Foster) were once “the Lennon and McCartney of smuggling,”

Read Full Review

The Woman in Black - Review

Review by sky.com

After putting paid to evil Lord Voldermort and his diabolical plans for world domination, Daniel Radcliffe’s got another malevolent child-killer to deal with.
With rather more modest ambitions than The Dark Lord (this one merely does for local nippers by showing her shadowy face), Dan’s new nemesis still has the power to terrify.
She’s the Woman in Black, an eerily spectral figure whose chilling appearance always presages the violent death of a child in the local village.
Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a lowly solicitor whose wife died in childbirth leaving him to raise his young son. He’s despatched to the bleak northern English coast by his London law firm to sort out the papers of the recently-deceased Alice Drablow.
The reception isn’t a warm one.

Read Full Review

Review by This is London

Back in 1983, Susan Hill wrote an exquisitely restrained gothic yarn about a cheerful lawyer called Arthur Kipps, sent to a village to sort out the papers of Mrs Drablow, inhabitant of an isolated mansion called Eel Marsh House. Hill’s villagers are wary but sensible folk, no deaths take place while Kipps is in the region and the titular “woman”, Jennet, is a single, solitary ghost.

In Hammer Horror’s reworking of the story, our hero (Daniel Radcliffe) is a cash-strapped widower, pale and neurotic. Meanwhile, the townsfolk are nuts, violent deaths are two a penny and the undead are legion.

Read Full Review

Review by Totalfilm.com

Is there life, you know, after? Two British institutions – the revamped Hammer studios and Hogwarts alumnus Daniel Radcliffe – certainly hope so. Forging ahead with an adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 ghost story, best known as a West End fixture since 1989, it certainly seems to be the case.

Under the guidance of Eden Lake writer/ director James Watkins, Radcliffe, who’s always had the look of a provincial office junior, plays Victorian solicitor Arthur Kipps. leaving his young son behind in London, Kipps heads north to the village of Crythin gifford to sort the affairs of the late Mrs Drablow, the sole resident of Eel Marsh House – or so it would seem.

In the village, he encounters Royston Vasey levels of hostility (“if it’s a holiday you’re after, you’re better off going inland… there’s a lot of sea mists!” warns the innkeeper).

Read Full Review

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Review

Review by Kansascity.com

A bright, socially awkward boy tries to make sense of 9/11 and find some closure with the father he lost on what he calls “the worst day” in “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” The film, based on a Jonathan Safran Foer novel, is a sometimes tearful remembrance of that day and the lives it ended or forever disrupted. And while it flirts with the preciousness that comes with Foer novels (“Everything is Illuminated”), it is engrossing and emotional in ways no other 9/11 drama has managed.

Oskar (Thomas Horn), our hero and narrator, is a tween who was once tested for Asperger’s Syndrome, but those tests were “inconclusive.” He’s a loner who thinks and thinks and thinks; his sympathetic dad (Tom Hanks) had figured out a way to bring him out of his shell. Dad’s fanciful quests, “reconnaissance expeditions,” send the kid into Central Park in search of New York’s lost “sixth borough,” and the like.

Read Full Review

Review by Detriotnews.com

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” might have also added “and Fairly Obnoxious.”

It’s the rare film with the chutzpah to trade on the 9/11 tragedy, a damaged grieving boy and a mute old man; but this film based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer and directed by Stephen Daldry (“The Hours”) does just that, managing to match implausibility to crass sentimentality.

The film’s focus is 9-year-old Oskar (Thomas Horn), a socially awkward child whose father (Tom Hanks, seen in constant flashbacks) died in the World Trade Center attacks and whose mother (Sandra Bullock) is left grieving and empty.

Oskar keeps a secret stash of things connected to his father, including some final, tense phone messages his mother doesn’t know about.

Read Full Review

Review by denverpost.com

Oskar Schell, protagonist of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 9-11 novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” is bright and amazing in ways precocious and exhausting.
The 9-year-old inventor, tambourine player and only child of Thomas and Linda Schell had been tested for Asperger’s syndrome. The diagnosis was “inconclusive,” the 2007 novel stated.
As compelling as he is on the page, young Oskar might have been a tough sell on the screen in “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.”
So, in director Stephen Daldry’s beautiful balm of a movie, gone is Oskar’s habit of saying “What the?” about nearly everything. Gone, too, is how the boy constantly described the weight of loss, the heft of his depression, as wearing “heavy boots.”

When his father was killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, Oskar’s boots became leaden.
A bad day, confusing encounter or a bout of anxiety after “The Worst Day” made them even heavier.

Read Full Review