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.
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.
This week on video store shelves, Phil Brown stays home with Jeff, Who Lives at Home before developing Wanderlust, while heads out west to deal with zombies in Exit Humanity and Christian Slater in Dawn Rider before returning home to wreck the place with Project X Also, a few words about the now cancelled Canadian cult series Being Erica and the intriguing family documentary My Reincarnation.
Bad Medicine is a gritty new series by Oni Press that debuted at Free Comic Book Day, featuring a questionable cast of characters thrown together to solve a crime drama with some serious sci-fi elements. How do you find a perp you can't see? This is the paradox facing Detective Joely Huffman in the case of a body found with an invisible head with all signs pointing to an invisible murderer.
Although overstuffed, lazily plotted, and autotuned nearly into oblivion, the big screen adaptation of the jukebox musical Rock of Ages still has a real kind of shaggy dog charm evocative of the 1980s hair metal scene (minus, you know, any sort of crippling addictions, of course).
A bit of an interesting failure, Pawel Pawlikowski's The Woman in the Fifth comes tantalizingly close to becoming a great thriller before losing the thread.
