Tyler Perry's latest outing with the mad black woman Madea is just as broad and potentially damaging as ever, but the low point of Madea's Witness Protection is that it might be more of a direct rip off of Big Momma's House than the previous entries in the lowbrow series.
A cheesy triumph for both star Channing Tatum and director Steven Soderbergh, Magic Mike is a crowd pleasing delight despite a simple story that might seem beneath the esteemed director at first glance.
Obnoxious, absurd, and sentimentalized to the point that could even Hallmark greeting card writers vomit, People Like Us wastes of the talent of the people who made it and the time of the people unfortunate enough to watch it.
For Seth MacFarlane fans, the foul mouthed fantasy comedy Ted will hold a great deal of amusement, but it’s hard to think that even his most die hard supporters won’t start to get a little antsy with the Family Guy creator’s awkwardly conceived first feature.
The Amazing Spider-Man still faithfully tells the origin story of Marvel Comics’ famed web-slinger for the first half, but a stellar cast raises the material past the bar set by Sam Raimi’s franchise and the second half wisely becomes its own movie from that point onward, even if the more original second half has more problems than the part haters will probably unjustly dismiss as redundant.
More thematically interesting than good, Take This Waltz is the rare breed of film that strives for realism in individual sequences, but it never fully comes together as a total package.
This week in new DVD releases, a pair of sonically intriguing films with the Best Picture winning The Artist and the winning Swedish import Sound of Noise, and a pair of buddy action films with the smash hit 21 Jump Street and WWE Studios' Bending the Rules
Pilot episodes are notoriously hard to pull off. The writer must introduce characters, themes, and settings, all while telling a very specific type of “jumping off” story likely bearing little resemblance to the episodes that will follow. Such is the case with “We Just Decided To,” the first episode of super-creator Aaron Sorkin’s new show The Newsroom.
A farce that’s desperate for laughs and devoid of anything resembling a consistent tone, the Canadian-Argentine-Columbian co-production The Boss (El Jefe) might have been a bit of a success in South America last year, but it’s about as welcome as the latest man-child offerings from Adam Sandler around these parts.
In this week's archival DVD and Blu-ray column, Phil Brown looks at three cult favourites that break genre expectations: Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave, Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude, and the John Wayne classic Hondo.
Action packed, utterly hilarious, and sure to be divisive, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter balances thrills, outright silliness, and ludicrous revisionist history to create an experience where you'll either get the joke or you won't.
The Scottish fairy tale Brave is a sweeping, touching, and funny epic that will delight young and old with the perfect, classic blend of Disney and Pixar magic.
Oddly elegant for such a gritty project, the documentary Five Broken Cameras doesn't shed too much new light on the Israeli/Palestine conflict, but it will definitely leave audiences feeling angry and confused in some of the best possible ways.
In Greek auterist Yorgos Lanthimos' Alps the audience gets a keen, darkly humorous, and emotionally affecting look at the need to belong and the sometimes selfish underbelly of the grieving process.
Bolstered by a great sense of pacing, a darkly comedic sensibility, and the best performance of Steve Carell's career thus far, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World has a sense of warmth and humanity many films this summer have been missing.
