Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li lacks heart. It injects a handful of the player characters from the Street Fighter game into the most standard action-adventure plot this side of Star Wars. Yes, cue “Story” by Robert McKee and Joseph Campbell’s twelve steps of the hero. Although in this case it’s a heroine (go…
Twelve-year-old Molly is learning about civics in her fifth-grade classroom. And that’s about where this movie belongs. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good movie, if you’re trying to teach voters about their civic duty and how in a billion-to-one fluke their votes might actually count. I do hope a G-rated version of the film…
I loved “Public Enemies”. I love Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, and both were in top form. I love the fact that we still have actors who can look like they belong in a tailored suit. “Public Enemies” was like an old-fashioned Clark Gable gangster movie, an inspiration which was referenced in the film itself.…
If this was a spoof, it wasn’t spoofy enough. And if this was pure action escapism, I cringe at the puny imagination of whoever’s getting their kicks from “Paul Blart: Mall Cop.” Kevin James takes his average Joe act from the King of Queens straight into this movie. He stars as the overweight but fairly…
Everybody needs an Igor – this film could’ve used one, too. I think that’s the real lesson here, even though the trumpeted one was that “it’s better to be a good nobody than an evil somebody.” What the story really showed was that to DO anything at all you need someone focused on the job,…
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I won’t say this movie was perfect, but it’s about as perfect as a movie of a very long book can be. In other words, it was great. Yes, the hard-core Potter fans are going to complain about the number of memories Dumbledore shows Harry, or that there wasn’t…
Editor’s Note: Since most of us comedy film nerds are a bit… older, have grown up with the Star Wars franchise and hate seeing it slowly destroyed, we thought we should get a fresh younger perspective on this film. And yet I think both the young and older have come together on this one. It…
Tom Hanks returns as Professor Langdon in this adaptation of the sequel of the bestselling “The Da Vinci Code.” Langdon is again the detective in this second religious-history whodunnit. And, of course, the mystery to be solved is tailored to him to a T. Otherwise, as the captain of the Swiss Guard so aptly puts…
Films made as book adaptations are often hard enough. You don’t always know what you’re going to get on the screen. But sometimes you’re really impressed. So when I heard Spike Jonze was making a film of “Where the Wild Tings Are”, I was alternately delighted and wary. How do you make a movie…
Well, another Halloween down, and that means another Shriekfest has also crept into the history books. Or shall I say; the dusty, creaky tomes of yesterdays. Nonetheless, it was a treat to attend as it was last year. Our gracious hosts, Denise Gossett and Todd Beeson, always put on a great festival of independent films. …