July 2015 movie reviews

DOPE.  Malcolm is a straight-A, Harvard bound (hopefully) high school senior in the marginal neighborhood of Ingleside.  He and his friends Diggy and Jib  are also into 90’s hip-hop and skateboarding.   As a black nerd, he must carefully negotiate threats at school and the streets.  But after attending a party to pursue a hot girl, he gets embroiled in some risky business.  After a slow start, this movie is funny and touching and hits on all kinds of stereotypes.  Really liked it.

TRAINWRECK.  Amy Schumer has a good job, good friends, and has an active social life.  In fact, she is quite the commitment-phobe.  She does have a boyfriend, but she “dates around”.  She is freaked out when a doctor (Bill Hader) she interviews for work actually likes her and wants to go out with her after a hook-up, but they do develop a relationship.  But like in all rom-coms, it goes off the rails.  However will they resolve their issues?  Very, very funny, and I liked that in this case it was the woman that was the screw-up.

AMY.  This is a documentary on Amy Winehouse.  She had a great voice from a young age, singing jazz standards and knocking them out of the ballpark.  She also clearly had addiction issues, drinking far too much even before she got addicted to drugs.  Given that she was taking anti-depressants when she was a teenager, she was probably just self-medicating.   Although it’s not clear anything could have helped her, if she had stayed a jazz singer things might have ended differently.  But becoming a popular star with the attendant fame and the tabloids and the hangers-on, that life was clearly not good for her. She became surrounded by people whose primary interest was making money off of her, not helping her.   The movie is interesting, and very sad.

JURASSIC WORLD.  The dino amusement park has re-opened.  But the tourists are becoming jaded, they want bigger and scarier dinosaurs.  So the managers start using technology to develop something that will knock the public’s socks off.  Not a good idea.  The movie is along the same lines as the original, with children in danger, Chris Pratt as an animal handler who fears the worst, overly self-confident scientists, etc.  Not original, but it’s been long enough since the first movie that I had fun here.  Good summer movie.

May/June 2015 movie reviews

I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS.  Blythe Danner plays a longtime widow, living alone in her house with her dog.  She has friends, but her life is very settled.  But slowly, things are starting to change.  She develops a friendship with her pool guy (Martin Starr), and while playing bridge with friends (including Rhea Perlman and Mary Kay Place) at a retirement community, spots Sam Elliott giving her the eye. Well, Sam Elliott is tough to resist.   One watches her with interest, wondering where her friendships will go and whether she is going to be able to get out of her rut.  This movie is quite amusing at times, and is overall very touching, and definitely worth seeing.

SPY.  Melissa McCarthy is a CIA agent, but she is relegated to the basement where she assists Jude Law (who she has a major crush on) in his covert operations.  But through a series of circumstances, all the CIA agents working a case involving nuclear weapons lose their cover, and Melissa has to step in.  Off she goes to Europe to track the culprits, and she rises to the challenge despite the very funny obstacles in her way.  Jason Statham, Rose Byrne, Allison Janney and Miranda Hart all add to the laughs.   This is very funny, right up there with Bridesmaids.

INSIDE OUT.  The latest Pixar.   Riley is 10, and we see her emotions (joy, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness) working behind the scenes in her brain’s HQ.  When her family has to move from Minnesota (?) to San Francisco, Riley rolls with it.  But then stuff happens in HQ, and joy and sadness are absent for a while.  It sounds complicated, but it isn’t hard to follow.  This is one of those Pixar movies that is pretty deep for the kiddies, but still fun for most.  

ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL.  Greg is a high school kid that is getting by, by not really connecting with anyone.  He does have one friend named Earl, and they make amateur movies that are takeoffs on classics (My Dinner with Andre the Giant, Senior Citizen Kane, etc. ).  One day his mother makes him go see an old childhood friend who has been diagnosed with cancer.  Because she doesn’t want pity, Greg’s awkwardness and lack of social skills really make them click.  It’s amusing and sweet and doesn’t feel fake.   As far as the sick teenager genre goes, I liked The Fault in our Stars better, but this is pretty good.

PITCH PERFECT 2.  Not much different from the first, except now they are competing on an international level.  Some laughs, but certainly not a can’t-miss in the theater.

EX MACHINA.  A brilliant programmer lives in a mansion in a remote area, and one of his employees wins the chance to spend a week there.  His job while there is to interview a robot with artificial intelligence, to see if he can tell whether the robot is artificially intelligent, or whether it could pass as human. Of course the AI being is an attractive female, so there is sexual tension as well.  What we have here are three very smart beings, and while we watch we are not really sure their true motivations, or if any of them are playing the others.  Although you are pretty sure that is what is happening.  This is a smart and intriguing movie, but unfortunately the pacing is really slow, especially at the beginning.  If they had tightened it up a bit, it could have been a really fun movie.

June 2014 Movie Reviews

EDGE OF TOMORROW.  Tom Cruise plays an asshole Army officer (he does P.R.) in the near future, and when he pisses off a general, he ends up on the front line of D-Day fighting aliens who have conquered most of Europe.  And having no combat training he promptly dies.  But he wakes up again at the beginning of the day, and goes back into battle.  And again.  He eventually starts trying to work out how he can succeed (not die and beat the aliens), and starts working with a successful soldier, played by Emily Blunt.  This is kind of Groundhog Day meets Independence Day.  It’s not a huge epic, but has humor in addition to action, and is pretty entertaining.

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS.  Hazel (Shailene Woodley) has terminal thyroid cancer, and although in remission, she is understandably depressed.  Her mother (Laura Dern) insists she go to a support group for teenagers with cancer.  She is the kind of kid that rolls her eyes at this kind of thing, but she goes.  And she meets Gus, who is there to support a friend of his with retinoblastoma.  Hazel doesn’t want to get involved (with anything or anybody) but they do have an immediate connection, and friendship and then more develops.  This is the second very real feeling movie about teenage love that Woodley has been in (The Spectacular Now the first), and she is really amazing.  Bring your hankies, but this movie is so worth it.  Sweet without saccharine, funny but not ridiculous, sad but authentic feeling.

CHEF.  Jon Favreau wrote, directed and stars in this as Carl, a high-powered chef in LA.  A restaurant reviewer is due to visit his very popular restaurant, and Carl wants to really swing for the fences.  But the owner of the restaurant (Dustin Hoffman) wants him to stick with the tried and true.  Things go very badly, and unemployed Carl ends up taking a break in Miami with his ex-wife (Sofia Vergara) and son.  With no opportunities on the table, he ends up with a food truck serving cubanos.  This movie has some great cooking scenes, and nice characterizations (no horrible clichés) but is basically just a nice little tale with few surprises.  Not special, but fine.

OBVIOUS CHILD.  Donna is a young New Yorker trying to make it in stand up.  She is willing to completely bare her psyche for a laugh.  But when her boyfriend dumps her for her best friend, she goes off the rails a bit.  And gets drunk and has a one night stand with a guy she doesn’t know.  Then she loses her job.  Then she finds out she is pregnant.   She is the kind of girl who tries to make a joke out of everything, but that isn’t working so well for her these days. So it is time for Donna to grow up a bit, and she knows what she has to do, and faces up to it.  Meanwhile, she keeps running into Mr. One-Night-Stand, is who sooo not her “type”.  This is an engaging character study, and because Donna is such a wit, also very amusing.  Liked it.

BELLE.  Belle is an “inspired by a true story” costume drama of the 18th century life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of an English admiral and a former slave.  When Belle’s mother dies, her loving father puts Belle in the care of her aristocratic uncle, and he raises Belle in a privileged way but still within constraints of the racism of the day.  She and her cousin are of the age to find husbands, but they both have different obstacles to overcome.  Meanwhile, her uncle is the judge that has to make a decision that will impact slavery in the English empire.  Although this movie felt longer than it was, and had some Pride and Prejudice type goings-on, I still found it interesting enough.

April 2014 movie reviews

PARTICLE FEVER.  Even basic physics goes over my head, but this documentary on the building and first experiments of the Super Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland is very good.  Physicists’ quest to understand the origins of the universe and prove the existence of the Higgs Boson are at stake.  Even though I understand this in only the most general terms (and the movie tries to explain everything at that level), I enjoyed this a lot.  It humanized the scientists quite a bit, and it is saying something when a movie has a layperson rooting for a experiment you barely understand.

FINDING VIVIAN MAIER.  Vivian Maier was a nanny who kept to herself.  After she died, a documentary filmmaker found a box of negatives of photos she had taken in Chicago from about the 1950s on.  And he and others felt many of her photos were works of art.  So he undertook to find more of her work, and more about her.  Why did she never show anyone her photos?  What was her back story?  Interviews with the children and parents she worked for, research into her background, images she took, opinions of photographic scholars, all contribute to this fascinating character study.  An intriguing story.

THE GALAPAGOS AFFAIR: SATAN CAME TO EDEN.  In this documentary, a German couple left their respective spouses to lead a back-to-basics life on a small, uninhabited Galapagos island in the 1930s.  Life was hard, but for them it was almost an intellectual exercise (the guy was into Nietzsche).  Unbeknownst to them, letters back home were being published, and another couple showed up to live the same life.  The original couple looked down their noses at the more conventional couple.  Then a self-proclaimed Baroness shows up, with two boyfriends, and things start getting really crazy as she seems to believe she is queen of the island. Paradise turns to hell, and people end up dead.  Who did what?  It’s a really interesting story that includes home movies and letters read by actors.  It’s worth renting or seeing on TV, but unfortunately the movie is a bit padded with interviews from people who lived on other islands, etc., so it drags at times.

THE LEGO MOVIE.  This animated movie is lots of fun for kids (I would guess), and not painful for adults.  People who are conversant in the world of Lego will especially enjoy a lot of the references, I assume.  The plot involves a bad guy who wants everything to conform to his view of the world (permanently) and a low-level construction worker called on the save the world’s creativity.  Extremely fast-paced, there are enough call-outs to other movies and pop cultures references to keep one entertained.  And it’s funny sometimes, too.

March 2014 Movie Reviews

GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL.  This is clearly a Wes Anderson movie – I could tell within 30 seconds of seeing the trailer.  I loved THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, but wasn’t such a big fan of MOONRISE KINGDOM.  With this film, unfortunately, my reaction was more toward the latter.  The movie is about a 1930s Europe that is slightly true, slightly fantastical.  Ralph Fiennes is the concierge at a previously grand, but now fading hotel.  Numerous characters drop in (Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, etc., etc) and odd plotlines – one involving the will of an old lady – abound.  Anderson’s quirkiness doesn’t charm me, and his plots are pretty much beside the point.  Although the movie has style, for sure, and is occasionally humorous, Anderson is apparently just not my thing, so I would say this one is for his fans.  

NOAH.  The movie opens with an overview of Genesis.  Then we see how Cain’s descendants have industrialized and populated cities.  Seth’s descendants apparently consist only of Noah and his little family being vegetarian and living off the land.  Technology bad.  It’s a little heavy-handed, but there are cool visuals and I am going with it.  Noah (Russell Crowe) starts having dreams and visions and knows that The Creator is going to destroy everything and it is up to Noah to save the living things.  I am still on board; it is still fun to look at, at least.   Then…the movie starts to lose me.  Fallen angels help him build the ark and fight off Cain’s tribe.  They look like a cross between Transformers and the rock monsters from Galaxy Quest, and the action scenes seem out-of-place.  And then, to top it all off, Noah becomes a religious fanatic who thinks The Creator wants him to kill.  By the end of this loooong movie (140 minutes), I was alternating between rolling my eyes and really, really hating it.   

BAD WORDS.  Forty-year-old Guy (Jason Bateman) is brilliant, but never finished 8th grade.  That gives him a loophole to enter the kids’ spelling bee, which he does with a vengeance, playing nasty and making it to the finals.  He has a journalist along for the ride, but he isn’t letting her know his motivations.  He does pair up with an adorable kid with a pushy dad, and their relationship is kind of sweet.  And some of the things Jason says are very, very funny.  But not quite enough for me to love the movie as a whole, because Guy’s personality isn’t consistent.  His motivation is kind of lame, and doesn’t make up for being mean to kids, really. 

MUPPETS: MOST WANTED.  I am a fan of the Muppets, and really enjoyed the last movie.  In this one, Ricky Gervais worms his way into being a manager of the Muppets.  But really he is conspiring with criminal mastermind Constantine, who is a double for Kermit.  Constantine is in prison, but escapes, and has Kermit kidnapped so Constantine can take his place.  The fake Kermit takes the Muppets on tour in Europe, stealing masterpieces and jewels as he goes.  Meanwhile, Kermit is stuck in a Russian gulag, where Tina Fey is the prison matron.  She makes Kermit produce a song-and-dance show with the inmates (I did get a kick out of seeing Ray Liotta and others put on a show).  This movie is generally amusing throughout, although without much of an edge.  And I am not sure how much of the humor children would get.  I liked the variety show numbers, but the rest didn’t charm me.  The movie isn’t that cool, more a catch on TV type thing.

THE ROCKET.  This movie takes place in rural Laotian countryside.  It begins with a childbirth, and when it is discovered there are twins, this is a bad sign.  Apparently in this culture, one twin will be cursed.  Although his mother won’t allow her son to be killed, he will have this curse hanging over his head in the eyes of some.  And like all children, he makes mistakes, which his superstitious grandmother blames on the curse.  When a dam is being built, and the village is re-located, the family’s luck gets really bad.  So the boy decides to build a rocket and win the local rocket contest (with prize money) to improve his family’s lot.  This movie isn’t all that original, story-wise, but I did really appreciate the view into a culture I know nothing about.

THE LUNCHBOX.  Apparently in parts of Indian, the breadwinners don’t carry their lunches to work with them.  Instead there is a very elaborate system where the lunches are picked up and delivered.  Here, a neglected housewife is trying to kindle her husband’s interest, and makes a special lunch for him.  But it ends up being mis-delivered to an older widower on the verge of retirement.  The two actually develop a relationship by writing notes back and forth via the lunchbox, telling each other stories that they can tell no one else.  This movie is a little slow, but kind of sweet, although the ending will annoy those who like definite endings.  (PS – the movie may make you hungry – the food looks great!)

ELAINE STRITCH: SHOOT ME.  This is a documentary about Elaine Stritch’s last concerts (maybe) and includes a summary of her Broadway career.  She’s quite a character and diva, but I am not sure she is all that likeable.   She is worshipped by some, but she has reached the point where she really can’t sing anymore, and (I think) is being acclaimed more for her past, her age (she’s 87 in the movie) and her grit (she has health issues) than her current abilities.  But in her favor, she is just as honest with herself as she is with others, and she can be quite a hoot.  She may be quite the character, but I found her personality a little grating.  But this movie would be a must-see for those who adore her.  

August movie review

Yep, just one this month…

BLUE JASMINE.  Cate Blanchett knocks it out of the park as the title character in Woody Allen’s latest.   She is a Mrs. Bernie Madoff-like socialite, moving to SF to live with her  working-class sister (Sally Hawkins) after her husband’s downfall.  She suffered a nervous breakdown, and is downing the booze and pills, all the while still being completely self-centered.  If you want to see an Academy Award winning performance, I recommend the movie.  But just for that.  I didn’t care for the plot all that much, because Jasmine certainly isn’t someone I would route for, and the other characters aren’t very interesting or likable either.  It’s hard to believe the sister’s boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale) and ex-husband (Andrew Dice Clay) are San Franciscans – they seem very east coast.   The A Streetcar Named Desire parallels didn’t grab me.  Not funny, meaningful, interesting…

May 2013 movie reviews

STAR TREK.  The gang is back, and this time they are responding to a terrorist attack on Federation offices.  They are sent into forbidden Klingon territory to track down the perpetrator (Benedict Cumberbatch).  But rather than kill him as ordered, they arrest him.  But he’s quite a handful, and getting home safely will be a challenge.   The characters keep developing (while keeping with what we know of them from the earlier incarnations), the Kirk and Spock relationship grows deeper despite their inherent differences (maybe because of them), and there a really nice emotional touches along with moral ambiguity.  A tiny quibble for me is that nearly all of the action scenes could have been trimmed by 30 seconds or so, but it’s a small thing in this movie, which is great fun and every bit as good as the last one, if not even better.  

MUD.  Ellis and Neckbone are two 14-year olds living in rural Arkansas.  They are at that age where you start discovering that the world and people are a lot more complicated than you think.  One night, they take their boat out on the river to a deserted island where they have heard of a boat stranded up in a tree.  The boat is there all right, but someone is living in it – he says they can call him Mud (Matthew McConaughey).  Although a little wary of him at first, he seems pretty open and honest and they grow to trust him.  He tells them he is just waiting for his girlfriend (Reese Witherspoon) and he will be moving on.  But of course there is more to the story than that, and the boys end up helping Mud both connect with his girl and help him plan a getaway.  Meanwhile, Ellis’ parents are having troubles, and Ellis himself is falling for a girl.  This movie has lots of layers, is very atmospheric and visually beautiful, the personalities are well drawn, good acting all around – I really liked it.

THE ICEMAN. The movie opens with Richard Kuklinski (Michael Shannon) having coffee with a nice young woman (Winona Ryder).  She has to drag conversation out of him.  But she sees something in him, and they end up marrying.  And they end up having a nice suburban New Jersey life.   What she doesn’t see is that Kuklinski is a psychopathic killer who murders in cold blood, sometimes for the mob, sometimes just because.  He would never hurt a woman or child, but he is completely detached from the inhumanity of killing men.  The couple have two daughters and for all his family knows, he works in finance.  The wife starts to suspect that it’s not all on the up and up, but she never knows the truth.  It’s very odd to see a man who has two diametrically opposed sides to his personality.  Shannon is always compelling, and he pulls this off, and it makes for a movie worth seeing, or at least renting.  Based loosely on a true story.  

FRANCES HA.  Frances (Greta Gerwig)  is a New York City 20-something, apprenticing at a dance company and couch surfing for places to crash.  She just doesn’t seem to be too focused on what she needs to do to….well, grow up.  Still, at this point in her life, although she is just drifting, she is happy. She’s not that different from a lot of young adults, and she is a sweet girl.  But the fact is, that didn’t make her interesting to me, just kind of goofy.  And boring.  Perhaps I am too far removed from my 20s to get it.   The movie is in pretentious black and white.  I have come to the understanding that I don’t care for the movies of critical darling Noah Baumbach (Greenberg, Squid and Whale).

March movie reviews

A PLACE AT THE TABLE.  Documentary on the status of hunger in America.  The movie covers lots of different aspects of the issue, from fast food being cheaper than health food, the obscenely low level of food stamp benefits, the corporate welfare for producers of grains but not fruits or vegetables, what hunger does to children, food deserts, etc. etc.  If this is a topic you are not familiar with, this is a good introduction, with lots of statistics and examples of people who are paying the price for our policies.  But as a reasonably well-read person, I found the movie fairly superficial, with little analysis of why the system that eliminated hunger for the most part in the 1970s fell apart (politics of course, but how and why?)  I think the movie would have been better if they focused on one aspect and really analyzed why it exists and what needs to be done about it.    Still, worth seeing.

THE GATEKEEPERS.  This documentary interviews six former heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli security/spy agency tasked with preventing terrorism, interspersed with footage of the events they are describing.  You might think these guys would be on the right wing of the political spectrum, but they might surprise you.  They understand the ramifications of what they are doing better than the politicians they have to serve.   Despite the decisions they are called on the make, they are fairly thoughtful about the conflict with the Palestinians.  This is a nice little history of the conflict.  Very interesting.

LORE.  Teenager Hannalore and her four younger siblings are living in 1945 Germany.  Their dad comes home, and the family starts burning papers and preparing to flee.  It looks like not only were mom and dad fervent Nazis, but that they may have had something to do with the policies toward the handicapped.  Eventually both parents are taken by the authorities, and Lore must cross Germany to get the younger kids to Grandma’s house.  It is quite dangerous, but they are being followed by a strange young man who helps them out.  I understand that Lore is becoming a young woman and is taking a journey toward understanding that what she was led to believe growing up was wrong, but I didn’t quite get some of her actions.  Somewhat interesting move, but in the end not really recommended.  In German.

NO.  In 1988, Chilean dictator August Pinochet was pressured by the international community to allow a vote on his continuing in power.  Part of the rules for the election was that the opposition would get 15 minutes on TV each night to present their case – vote “no” to continuing the dictatorship.  Most of the opposition thought it was hopeless, but they do start working on their campaign, and hire an experienced ad man to work his magic on the people.  His genius is in marketing the NO campaign as a positive thing and not focusing on the atrocities of the dictatorship.   I think that has the potential for a terrific story.  Unfortunately, this movie mostly shows versions of the two side’s competing commercials, with a little background on the ad man’s personal life.  They have taken what could have been a terrific movie and made it pretty dull.  In Spanish.  

January 2013 Movies

ZERO DARK THIRTY.  The movie opens with the sights and sounds of 9/11 and other terrorist events of the decade.  It then follows Maya (Jessica Chastain), a CIA analyst who is assigned to Pakistan and working to find Osama Bin Laden.  Events along the way (including torture of detainees) are depicted in a judgement-free, matter of fact way.  Maya is convinced she is on the right track, and pursues her leads doggedly.  The movie ends with the raid on Bin Laden’s compound, which at the time of course, was considered a risky undertaking.  This is a good movie, but I don’t  quite understand the the critical love.  It’s not edge-of-your-seat like ARGO.  It is more of a procedural on how the CIA works.

THE IMPOSSIBLE.  This movie tells the true story of a couple (played by Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor) and their three sons, who were celebrating the 2004 Christmas holiday in Thailand when the tsunami hit.  The first half of the movie does a really good job of showing the terror of the wave, the scale of the disaster, and the subsequent confusion.  SPOILER ALERT: The second half details the efforts of the family to reunite after being separated by the water.  Usually I am a sucker for reunification scenes, but for some reason these didn’t do it for me.  (Maybe because hundreds of thousands of people were dead, so their eventual reunification doesn’t seem that important.  After all, they still had family to re-unify with.)   Even though Watts and McGregor (and the oldest son) are terrific, the the second half was a drag for me.  So first half yes, second half no.

QUARTET.  In a beautiful old country mansion that is a home for retired musicians, the residents are busy preparing for a fund-raising gala, including reserved Reggie (Tom Courtenay) and outgoing Wilf (Billy Connolly).  Into their midst arrives diva Jean (Maggie Smith).  Not only is she distressed to end up in the home, but she was briefly married to Reggie way back when and he has never forgiven her.  They were all part of a quartet who most famously sang together in Rigoletto.  I can’t say there were many surprises in this movie, and I am not one for thinking that ditzy, cranky, and/or inappropriate behavior is hysterically funny just because the perpetrators are old people (as apparently the audience I saw the movie with did).  Just an OK movie, but for me, it was completely saved by a very sweet ending.  

NOT FADE AWAY.  Douglas is a teenager in 1960s New Jersey.  Like many young guys, he dreams of his garage band making it big.  Meanwhile, he has a father (James Gandolfini) who seems to be very bitter at all the advantages his son has that he never had.  And his mother seems depressed.  The band has ups and downs.   That’s kind of it.  The changes that occurred during the 60s were interesting, and the soundtrack here is fun, but these people aren’t.  I found this semi-autobiographical movie by David Chase to be a bit dull.  

RUST AND BONE.  In this French movie, Marion Cotillard is a Sea World-type trainer who suffers a terrible accident.  Before the accident, she meets a single dad who is making ends meet as a bouncer, and  is a former boxer.  She has a boyfriend, so nothing happens.  But they reconnect after the accident, and develop a very unusual friendship.  It’s very matter of fact.  He starts making money by participating in “street” fights.  She starts adapting to her disability.  He is the right person to help her at the right time, because he completely lacks sentimentality.  Their friendship becomes a little but more, but not really a romance.  I found this to be a very odd movie, maybe a bit too French for me.  

Favorite movies of 2012

Here is the list of the movies I enjoyed the most in 2012.  Keep in mind these aren’t necessarily the BEST movies (LINCOLN and BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD might be on that list), but the movies I’d be most likely to see again.  Not in any particular order:

BERNIE.  In this comedy, a small Texas town loves their gay no matter what he does.

HEADHUNTERS.  Terrific Norwegian crime thriller.

RUBY SPARKS.  Man’s search for the perfect woman.

END OF WATCH.  Cops as regular guys.

ARGO.  Who cares if it’s not %100 faithful to the truth?  Still exciting.

SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN.  Wonderful documentary.

LIFE OF PI.  Thoughtful look at the way we choose to tell our life story. with great visuals.

DJANGO UNCHAINED.  Yes, it was too violent, but still entertaining.

SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED.  Charming indie flick.

FIVE YEAR ENGAGEMENT.  Romantic comedy done well.

HUNGER GAMES.  Terrific female protagonist.