Top Ten Movies

Movie Review:
Let others sermonize about Angels & Demons. Let voices rise on matters of truth versus fiction, entertainment versus religious heresy, book plot versus screen adaptation, and old hairdo versus new coif in Tom Hanks’ portrayal of heroic Harvard scholar Robert Langdon, previously seen irking the Vatican in The Da Vinci Code. What matters to [...]

Movie Review:
How ordinary a girl is Miley Cyrus? So ordinary that she has to sneak into her own concert. In the opening sequence of Hannah Montana: The Movie, Miley tricks her way into an arena, slips backstage, and puts on her blonde wig, makeup, and a spangly minidress to transform herself into that alterna-bubblegum rock [...]

Movie Review:
Partially constructed from the groundbreaking BBC and Discovery Channel television series PLANET EARTH, EARTH is a ravishing and often gut-wrenching tale of natural survival and beauty. Five years…  Partially constructed from the groundbreaking BBC and Discovery Channel television series PLANET EARTH, EARTH is a ravishing and often gut-wrenching tale of natural survival and [...]

Movie Review:
Ginormica is a great name for a woman, regardless of her size. As it happens, the California girl so designated in the ginormically showy but super-average 3-D animated entertainment Monsters vs. Aliens grows into her moniker the old-fashioned sci-fi way: Born plain old Susan Murphy (and voiced by Reese Witherspoon), she’s hit on her [...]

Movie Review:
On paper, The Soloist sounds like a classic softhearted middlebrow awards-bait movie. Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) is a homeless schizophrenic on the streets of Los Angeles whose outward dementia — mismatched clothing topped by full sequined jacket; hair plastered down on either side; a mode of ”talk” that’s really a jumble of word salad [...]

Movie Review:
When two bumbling criminals accidentally receive a package of grade-A cocaine, they think they’ve hit the jackpot. But when they try to cash in on their luck, it triggers a series of events that forever changes the lives of ten people. Smalltime hoods Brody and Guch have seen better days. But when a wacked-out [...]

Movie Review:
The philosopher George Santayana famously wrote that ”those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The philosopher Homer Simpson famously responded ”D’oh!” The lame high school comedy 17 Again tries charmlessly to synthesize those two schools of thought, preaching a pro forma 
appreciation of adult responsibilities while making pro forma jokes [...]

Movie Review:
Derek Charles (Idris Elba) has it all. He’s the executive vice president of a Los Angeles asset-management firm that’s thriving exactly as it would in a movie conceived before the economic crisis. He’s moving his family into an impossibly spacious, polished-oakwood-floor dream house. And he’s married to a woman so radiant and gorgeous and [...]

Movie Review:
Any film starring the self-regarding, teak-veneered charisma vacuum that is Matthew McConaughey has more to overcome than most. So the fact that the rom-com Dickens riff Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is even sporadically entertaining is no mean feat.
The reasons that this latest addition to McConaughey’s romantic oeuvre is better than, [...]

Movie Review:
So, the makers of the industrial-strength franchise extender X-Men Origins: Wolverine have now revealed the psychological roots of the famous ”berserker rage” that has caused the title’s angry Marvel superhero to bare his adamantium claws in three previous X-Men movies. The question is, was anyone wondering? Or are you, like me, content enough [...]

Movie Review:
J. J. Abrams’s thriller Star Trek is the first tent-pole film that has made me sob with pure pleasure. The 42-year-old boldly goes where no other Star Trek director in his right mind has gone before. He goes backwards. To those heady days when James Tiberius Kirk was a teenage [...]