The Latest Movies Online
Tuesday, 7 May 2013
Olympus Has Fallen (3.0 Stars)
Evil Dead (4.0 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (4.5 Stars)
Olympus Has Fallen (3.5 Stars)
Thor (4.5 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (3.0 Stars)
Mud (4.5 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (4.5 Stars)
Pain and Gain (4.5 Stars)
21 and Over (1.5 Stars)
Lawless (4.0 Stars)
Monday, 6 May 2013
Gangster Squad (2.0 Stars)
The Devil's Rejects (4.0 Stars)
Evil Dead (5.0 Stars)
Aliens (4.5 Stars)
D3: The Mighty Ducks (3.0 Stars)
When the Hockey team are awarded junior varsity hockey scholarships at Edan Hall, a prep school full of aspiring professionals little do they know the difference in teaching method from new head coach, Ted Orion - a ex NHL player adamant on developing a defensive style play for the team to perform - after the recruitment of Gordon Bombay into the Junior Goodwill Games committee. Clashing with this new style of teaching, and forced to not don his Ducks jersey, Charlie struggles to fit in. With the school classing him and his teammates as nothing more than famous underachieves, Charlie and his team must grow from childhood to adolescence, whilst dealing with the apparent abandonment that they feel they have suffered at the hands of Bombay. Clashing with the senior Hockey team, the Eden Hall Warriors, the Ducks must develop well into this new style of play - for any chance to beat their rivals in the JV- Varsity Games, a showdown between the schools two teams.
The overall narrative arc implemented into this film is much stronger than both the other 'Mighty Ducks' movies. Perhaps its because finally within this series, the film actually seems to have a goal in which the story heads towards. Not needing the narrative to become international, the film also derives its arc without making the film feel overly massive - thus bigger than its characters. Balancing the two well throughout.
Overall 'D3: The Mighty Ducks' is an above average sequel that rights the majority of wrongs that the first sequel suffered. For starters the film is less reliant on cheesy one liners, and stupidly in the method of creating comedy to enlighten younger audiences. The script is better; more streamlined and the characters are more well outlined to audiences. Still the acting is below average from the majority of the cast, but by film three this is easily forgotten as the characters are so well known. Shifting focus from Bombay to Charlie, feels completely correct and does deliver a much more grounded and dark narrative through this choice. Come the thrilling conclusion, the film delivers upon one of the best and overwhelmingly happy finishes which will leave audiences engrossed in what has come before. Still cheesy throughout, but more deeper fulfilled than previous installments, the franchise has finally hit the high point the first film showed with potential. A shame that this has had to come within the final film, but a worthy close nevertheless. CDo you like this review?Comments (1) To leave a comment, please sign in or use
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closed the series on a high.
The Incredible Hulk (3.5 Stars)
Pain and Gain (0.5 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (4.0 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (5.0 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (3.0 Stars)
Stay (4.0 Stars)
The Impossible (4.0 Stars)
King Kong (4.5 Stars)
21 Grams (4.5 Stars)
Mulholland Dr. (5.0 Stars)
The Fighter (4.5 Stars)
Iron Man: Rise of Technovore (4.5 Stars)
The Kings of Summer (4.5 Stars)
Kon-Tiki (3.0 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (4.0 Stars)
Silver Linings Playbook (4.5 Stars)
Argo (3.5 Stars)
The Employer (5.0 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (5.0 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (4.5 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (4.0 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (3.5 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (4.5 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (4.5 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (3.5 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (4.0 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (4.5 Stars)
Take Shelter (4.5 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (4.5 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (4.5 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (4.0 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (4.5 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (4.0 Stars)
Iron Man 3 (5.0 Stars)
Friday, 3 May 2013
Scary Movie 5 Review
The following is 100% spoiler. Like it matters.
Busted, dead-eyed Lindsay Lohan makes a clothes-on sex tape with Charlie Sheen and body doubles spin around in the air and then a Morgan Freeman narration impersonator goes yap yap yap yap yap and then Snoop Lion and Mac Miller walk to a cabin in the woods and enjoy an amiable chat about how it burns when they get shampoo in their respective "pee holes" before then launching into an extended conversation about the cabin in the woods and how much it's like the cabin in the woods from the horror movie about the cabin in the woods and then they roll a huge canoe-sized blunt and then Ashley Tisdale and Simon Rex are the people from Mama and they punch a toddler in the face and set a baby on fire and one of the feral Mama children puts a toothbrush up her own butt and smells it and faints and then Rex goes to work as an ape researcher and Tisdale goes to work as a ballet dancer so that there can be references to Rise of the Planet of the Apes and also Black Swan and also Inception but I forget why that happened other than that they wanted to show you that they found a Leonardo DiCaprio look-alike and then somebody takes a frying pan to the face and Tisdale and Rex's housekeeper goes into a Paranormal Activity-style trance and hits a pinata with a stick because she's Mexican and that's why that's so much LOLs and then Honey Boo Boo backward-pops out of the Sinister box and Tisdale and another ballerina go to a dance club where a DJ spins a pizza instead of a record because they're both round in shape and that's also a lot of excellent chuckles and then Tisdale and the other ballerina have lesbian sex but it's PG-13 so they cut to clips of people mangling scissors together and tacos bumping up against one another and then it was all a hallucination and Tisdale was actually humping a poison ivy plant and a lamp and a microwave and the Mexican maid makes them a pie full of turds because of that bit we all loved from The Help and exorcist Katt Williams comes over and steals their valuables and Rex bangs his penis against metal objects to make a funny clanking noise because his boner is actually some kind of unseen lead pipe and then stop-motion pool vacuum cleaners have a party and Molly Shannon's funny bits as an aging ballerina are chopped from the film but used over the end credits and there's a giant sock monkey that goes on a rampage when the apes from Rex's job go insane and start talking and Mike Tyson hits Rex in the face and Jerry O'Connell tries to put nipple clamps on Tisdale because whoo-hoo 50 Shades of Grey and a Naughty Santa Claus Man-Whore shows everybody his fat old ass.
All of life is futile and pointless. I'm so unhappy.
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To The Wonder Review
"We climbed the steps..." whispers Olga Kurylenko, as a French woman named Marina in love with a nameless American man played by Ben Affleck (the credits call him "Neil"). After that ellipsis and a further pause, she finishes her hushed thought, "...to the Wonder." The camera follows the couple as they climb those steps at Mont Saint-Michel, which is a pretty wondrous place, you have to admit. But did she have to tell us they were doing it when we could, you know, already see it taking place? Yes, asserts director Terrence Malick for the next two hours of love-meditation, she does. They all do.
The story -- and it's not hard to follow if you're paying attention instead of spacing out -- involves Marina and Neil moving to Oklahoma, ostentatiously displaying loving glances and frolicking in fields before stumbling over love and parting for a moment. Into this moment arrives a local priest (Javier Bardem) whose own whispered words are full of existential despair as he slowly loses grasp of his faith. Rachel McAdams also shows up as "Jane," a woman from Affleck's past. She's the less ethereal and way-more-blonde flip side of the angelic lady coin and her time with Neil is brief. Marina is returning. But for how long?
Malick's been moving in this direction for a while now, but here his gauzy, poetic brand of spiritual display -- formerly shapelessly cosmic and huge, increasingly straight-up Christian and highly specific -- is long on suggestion and montage, light on traditional narrative locations like character and plot. Every moment trails off into a question mark. Every element of darkness is balanced by an element of light, every sentence offered up as a prayer to, in Kurylenko's words, "this invisible something."
Malick's lovers (both the agape and eros varieties) speak in voiceover more than to one another, in murmurs or barely audible fragments or not at all. They join together and separate and love and hate and marry and divorce and pray and curse as the director creates a Calgon bath of soft liturgy and softer cinematography of Extreme Prettiness, no matter if the shot is following Kurylenko twirling with products in a fluorescent drugstore or Kurylenko twirling in sun-streaked meadows or McAdams twirling near some bison. Malick's men are wordless but his women are intuitive spiritualists; they love to twirl and reach out to the sky because, like Jessica Chastain said in the director's earlier movie, The Tree of Life, "That's where God lives."
What's it all mean? The director isn't telling. So if you're without patience for movies that depart from storytelling as usual then you'll hate it because it's confusing. If you're without patience for any sort of spiritual seeking then you'll hate it for its earnest God-yearning (but seriously, if you've seen the kinds of inept Christian movies getting made lately, you know that Evangelicals would be lucky to get Malick on their media team). And If you're a longtime Malick devotee you'll appreciate his continued, determined resistance to the mainstream, even if you're beginning to play a mental game of Bingo with his sunsets, flowering fields, billowing curtains and hands grasping for the ineffable. If you're in advertising you've already caught up to him and turned his aesthetic into "the touch, the feel of cotton." And If you're the guys behind Scary Movie 5 looking to parody a Malick film, then sorry, he already did the job for you.
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Oblivion Review
3.0
54 out of 100 Metascore®
Read other critic reviews
Dave's recent reviews Iron Man 32.5You'll put your eye out, kid.
The Iceman3.5Murder most chill.
Pain & Gain0.5Actually, just pain.
The Big Wedding2.0Registered at the 99-Cent Store
Mud3.5McConaughey's winning streak, not over yet.
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The Lords of Salem Review
You'll find the full review of To The Wonder here if you choose, but it's about Terrence Malick's obsession with spiritual beauty and the yearning for solid faith in God, communicated through beautifully suggestive montage of a man in love with two women and a priest struggling with his own failing belief structure. Rob Zombie's movie is about Satan worshipping covens and his own determination to show off his wife's naked body. It's Christian theology's kick-fighting flipsides: spirit and flesh, doubt and certainty, locked in a cage-brawl for dominance.
Sheri Moon Zombie plays Heidi, a hard rock radio host in Salem who goofs on the very interview subjects she has in her studio, whether they're Satanic black metal musicians or witch trial historians. Dreadlocked and tattooed, she looks the part of a typical Rob Zombie horror nerd/acolyte but she doesn't really have time for any of it. She'd rather listen to Rush and play fetch with her dog, go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and hang out with her tea-drinking landlady (Judy Geeson from To Sir, With Love, whose evil intentions for Heidi are revealed fairly quickly). So when a mysterious record shows up from a band called The Lords and Heidi plays it, unleashing a hypnotic pull toward evil, she's not prepared for the ride. In other words, Rob Zombie has made a gnarly Chick Tract about ignoring evil and simultaneously letting it infect you (in fact, it shares weird commonalities with Tyler Perry's Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor, which pulls its own woman down the stoney end, minus the ghouls and incantations).
Hopefully Zombie wasn't aiming for actual scares here because there are none. But there is a kind of vintage Polanski-aping comedy taking place as Judy Geeson's pack of devil-loving tea time pals (E.T.'s Dee Wallace and The Rocky Horror Picture Show's Patricia Quinn) become more and more involved in the reeling in of Heidi's soul. In fact, it's clear that all three actresses are having a blast being so nasty and, more importantly, that Zombie loves taking his beloved spouse and turning her into a demonic witch-Madonna while The Velvet Underground drones "All Tomorrow's Parties" over the soundtrack. As horror it's not horrifying, but as a valentine to creepshow romance it's almost heartwarming. And as a crazy, gruesome, companion piece to Malick's veneration of To The Wonder's Olga Kurylenko and Rachel McAdams -- that film's twin angels who spend their time communing with God by twirling around in sun-streaked meadows, arms outstretched to the sky -- it's almost serendipitous. This cage-match is a tie.
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist Review
Well, this is unfortunate timing.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist arrives in art-house theaters in limited release twelve days after a terrorist bombing in Boston, one that claimed 3 fatalities and created over a hundred life-scarring injuries, one that resulted in a city-shaking manhunt, a police officer's death and the death of one suspect. Subsequent reports indicate that the two young men allegedly behind it all were guided by "religious fervor."
But the real problem with Mira Nair's latest drama isn't timing. If it had been released a month ago it would still be a bad film.
"All I want is a loft in SoHo, a weekend in the Hamptons and big, American boobs," says the soap actress sister of Pakistani man Changez (Riz Ahmed, star of the superior terrorism comedy Four Lions). And Changez is on the same page, committed to materialism, minus the part about the boobs. He leaves his family (their father is a middle-class poet) for New York and quickly makes a name for himself as a merciless corporate appraiser. "God bless America and its level playing fields," he says, learning how to gut reasonably functioning companies, bust unions and make recommendations for brutal mass layoffs. Naturally, this pleases his boss (Kiefer Sutherland) and the shareholders. In his spare time, Changez falls for a wannabe Larry Clark-style art photographer (Kate Hudson in a lose-lose role) who spends a lot of time aiming her camera at skateboarders. Then 9/11 happens. Changez reconnects to Islam and his life becomes a series of harassments, mistaken identity arrests and embarrassing gallery displays of his girlfriend's terrible art. Time to leave for Pakistan.
Back home he becomes a professor and is perceived to be sympathetic to anti-American causes, sparking concerns that he supports a student-grown terrorist organization and drawing American intelligence interest to his activities. And while Changez still lacks the self-awareness to make the connection within his own thought process, the movie goes full-tilt sledgehammer with parallels between the corporate culture of greed where quotidian terrorism involves ruining workers' lives and the more clear-cut brand of blowing-up-everybody terror. There's a lot of chatter about "fundamentals" in both camps and director Nair is going to make sure you get the message by any dull means necessary.
Landing with a thud every step of the way (in spite of Ahmed's solid, sympathetic performance) the film decides that the tragedy on display is the thoughtless judgment of books by their covers, of people unable to see that both economic and political brutality bring equal misery to the world, of the world refusing to listen to its poets. But the religious fervor component is never fully addressed -- weird for a movie with "fundamentalist" in its title -- unbalancing the center and highlighting the real tragedies on screen: honkingly obvious moral positions, air-headed thrillerisms like, "You're playing a dangerous game" and a naively earnest can't-we-all-just-get-along worldview. Apparently we can't, yet the movie is still too timid to do anything but politely pretend it doesn't know that. Maybe Nair is saving those revelations for the sequel.
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Mud Review
4.0
70 out of 100 Metascore®
Read other critic reviews
Dave's recent reviews Iron Man 32.5You'll put your eye out, kid.
The Iceman3.5Murder most chill.
Pain & Gain0.5Actually, just pain.
The Big Wedding2.0Registered at the 99-Cent Store
Mud3.5McConaughey's winning streak, not over yet.
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The Big Wedding Review
It's beige. That's the first problem. Everything is beige. Most of the clothes, the couch the cast sits on, Diane Keaton's hair. The title of the film is white against this beige, so that you can barely read what it says. And the fact that it's a uselessly generic title like The Big Wedding really should be enough to make you not care if you can read it or not. It's also one of those group photos where nobody was in the same room at the same time, everyone with wide open laughing mouths, shoved together after the fact. But back to Diane Keaton. She's in it. Diane Keaton is very rarely in funny movies these days. This is probably not her fault. I'm sure she just likes to work. And now she's in a family comedy with Robert De Niro. Let's take Silver Linings Playbook out of the equation for a minute and ask, again, when was the last time you saw Robert De Niro in a funny film? If you say the word "Focker" then that means you and I aren't friends.
But it gets worse, this poster. Katherine Heigl is well-represented. She's been an enemy of comedy from the moment she decided to improve on her supporting role in Knocked Up with the star-makery of 27 Dresses. And then there's Robin Williams, resuming his zany priest role, the one he apparently failed to fully eviscerate and corpse-hump in License to Wed (c'mon you remember that one -- it had Mandy Moore and that guy and there were those robot babies that squirted blue fake-poop from their mechanical anuses -- it was great). I think it bears repeating: ROBIN WILLIAMS IS A ZANY PRIEST AGAIN.
So this film arrives with not merely low expectations, it is the first movie of 2013 to feature a negative amount of expectations. Which is why I'm... pleased?... not sure if that's the right word... surprised or relieved, maybe, like finding out you get to be the front part of the human centipede... to report that this not-very-good wedding farce (plot-schmott: kids getting married, lies told to save parental feelings, sex sex sex and people being pushed off piers) is also not the worst film of all time. It's even occasionally funny.
It looks bad, of course, indifferently directed and shot. And there's very little to hold your attention to the screen except for a few of the performances. But the story -- translated from French into English and based on the film Mon frere se Marie -- is much more sexually free than you'd expect, licentiousness scrubbed clean but still allowed room to get politely busy behind closed doors. It's cute cunnilingus humor that'll make grandma giggle and the cast seems to be having a casually effortless good time swimming in the R-rated end of the pool. Williams is, thankfully, kept on a tight leash and, shock of shocks, Heigl is given a handful of lippy, mean lines that she handles in a winning, sarcastic-bitch manner, playing off Topher Grace's similarly caustic brother character. I want her to run with this persona, take her cues from Lisa Kudrow's knife-sharpness in 1999's The Opposite of Sex and go be the unlikable comedic presence she seems born to play. Next stop: doing it in a better film.
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Pain & Gain Review
3.0
45 out of 100 Metascore®
Read other critic reviews
Dave's recent reviews Iron Man 32.5You'll put your eye out, kid.
The Iceman3.5Murder most chill.
Pain & Gain0.5Actually, just pain.
The Big Wedding2.0Registered at the 99-Cent Store
Mud3.5McConaughey's winning streak, not over yet.
View the Original article
The Iceman Review
One of my favorite things on YouTube right now is a clip called "HowtTo Make Any Movie Look Good." It's a remixed trailer for 2003's comedy flop Kangaroo Jack. The person responsible took out all the examples of the CGI marsupial dancing and rapping along to Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" and replaced it with serious music and healthy amounts of bad guy Michael Shannon, whose role in the film is actually pretty small. One thing you learn from this clip is that when Michael Shannon is in a movie he tends to be the most interesting element of that movie.
The other thing you learn? Dude is the king of Crazy Eyes, possibly American cinema's foremost practitioner. That's a very complex face to pull when the camera is close up in your nose pores. People will think you're overacting if you aren't highly skilled. But Shannon is a master at it. When he looks at you that way, you're sure he's about leap off the screen to murder you. You already watched the Delta Gamma clip. You know what it looks like.
The Iceman, then, represents a next step for our current coolest actor. It features very little in the way of Crazy Eyes. Shannon's replaced them with a hollowed out emptiness, a ruined soul, a stern blank gaze. And it's chilling.
He stars as Richard Kuklinski, a real-life contract killer who, between the years 1966 and 1986, worked for various organized crime outfits and murdered over 100 people. He also froze and chopped up the bodies with the help of hippie ice cream truck driver Mr. Freezy (Chris Evans, hilariously shaggy) in order to make time-of-death more difficult to determine. Thanks to a brutally abusive childhood, Kuklinski's tendency toward becoming a sociopath was enhanced with extra fearlessness and powers of repression, so much so that his own wife (played here by a skittish Winona Ryder) and daughters didn't know what he did for a living until his arrest. He was a devoted family man and a nearly impeccable liar, his psyche divided, desperate for the kind of decency not found in any other aspect of his life.
Filmmaker Ariel Vroman's account straightforwards you into darkness, into the familiar and unsurprising grimy pit of true crime, the kind of black-n-blacker morality tale the movies have loved to tell for decades. A very bad man does very bad things and then he's caught. And aside from those brief flashbacks to his cruel younger years, we're not given much in the way of reasons why. All the camera shows us is how a man like Kuklinski conducts himself in the moment when he's about to kill and what happens when the kill is complete. We witness him making others as literally dead as he feels, reserving what little humanity he possesses for the three people he's allowed himself to love.
It's a career-changing performance in a movie that wishes it were as accomplished, one worth watching even though you know the beats and rhythms surrounding him and an ending observable from far away. He'll be our next De Niro, Duvall, Hoffman or Pacino soon enough. So keep your eyes on this guy and learn the name that goes with that glare. Because he's coming to get you.
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Iron Man 3 Review
In my fantasy world, every summer weekend brings a new pop achievement to movie theaters. These aren't just spectacles, they're important; they stand up over time and they move audiences for generations to come, successful as entertainment and as art. Your brain, your heart, your soul, your aesthetic sensibility, your politics, your values, all full-throttle engaged by creative people with nothing to sell but well-executed personal visions.
Iron Man 3 would like to sell you a car. Maybe an energy drink. Definitely a future ticket to the next Avengers film. It's a gigantic product in the service of other products, a malleable enterprise that ingratiates itself to both you, multiple corporate entities and China (they shot extra footage with popular Chinese actress Fan BingBing that will play only in that country). It's a thing made to sell other things.
And that's fine. It can still be entertainment. And sometimes it is. But it's not the pop art masterpiece my fantasy world needs. Not even close.
When the numbers in the title start to rise in a franchise, the element of surprise becomes a valuable commodity. So in terms of plot I'll tell you that Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is a little shaken from the events of The Avengers (but not so rattled that it affects the precision sculpting of his beard-stripe) and he suffers from panic attacks. He was always neurotic so that's not such a big deal. But Earth-grown villains have been working overtime while Iron Man was busy battling space-bads and someone called Mandarin (Ben Kingsley, acting like no one's watching) is wreaking havoc, terrorism-style. Meanwhile, a biological agent that regrows missing limbs has been developed by extreme-nerd Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce). Too bad it also blows up the people implanted with it. You could say everything and everybody is unstable here, even Stark's ongoing romance with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, whose oil-and-water chemistry with Downey is one of the franchise's ongoing pleasures). And then stuff happens.
That stuff comes with writer-director Shane Black's imprint. And there's a lot of his trademark (PG-13-ready) Kiss Kiss Bang Bang style going on here: the fast-paced banter and crazy explosioning, the bluntly sarcastic line deliveries, everything you already know about the man right down to his Christmas obsession. It's what gives the film its energy. Black is the reason for the season and Downey is his Santa Claus.
But the movie never stops remembering that it's got a big money obligation to meet and that involves a serious tradeoff. A big product from a big studio with big expectations riding on it almost automatically means that my original wishful definition of pop art masterpiece (or even pop art prettygoodsterpiece) isn't going to be satisfied. That's just not how the world spins. These kinds of movies are less directed than they are engineered by various teams of creatives and executives and marketers to guarantee smooth performance. Once its made its way through those gates it's less like an offering to cinema and more like the Audi Tony Stark drives around. No real danger is on the menu because that would involve death and that's not happening; the villains don't pose a coherent threat because that might be insurmountable even for Iron Man; confusing battle sequences where the camera just gets shaken around like a snow-globe are glossed over because there's a Downey punch line coming to make you forget that what you just watched didn't make any sense; it's like that.
So distract me (okay, delight me) by throwing a piano at a helicopter all you like; kill bad guys with exploding Christmas tree ornaments. I like those mini-spectacles. But in the end, that's all they are and that's not quite enough. Summer is no excuse.
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