Movie Reviews

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

A fresh start offers the same old problems

A lonely Spanish fishing boat pulls up a man in its net. Clasping a map and suddenly reanimated, he mumbles something about the Fountain of Youth. To the king!

article – Movie Reviews

– by Diana Beechener – 5/26/11

Bridesmaids

Kristen Wiig proves that women can be funny too, when they write the script.

Annie (Kristen Wiig: Paul) isn’t having the best year. Her cake-baking business went under in the recession. She’s in a sex-only relationship with a vapid but handsome user (Jon Hamm: Mad Men). Now childhood friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph: Saturday Night Live) asks Annie to be her maid of honor.

article – Movie Reviews

– by Diana Beechener – 5/19/11

Thor

The God of Thunder rumbles through two worlds in this fun comic book adaptation

Life ain’t easy when you’re the son of the Asgardian king. Well, actually, it’s pretty easy, but arrogant young Thor (Chris Hemsworth: Ca$h) makes life hard for himself.

article – Movie Reviews

– by Diana Beechener – 5/12/11

Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil

A fractured fairytale gets more splintered with poor storytelling

If a terrible movie bombs at the box office, does anyone care what a reviewer writes about it? We’re about to find out.

article – Movie Reviews

– by Diana Beechener – 5/5/11

African Cats

A G rating takes the teeth out of this lion and cheetah documentary

Cheetah mother Sita stalks an antelope in the tall grasses of the Kenyan savannah. She chases her quarry, closing the gap between them with bounding strides. Sita leaps, claws out, and lands upon the antelope’s hindquarters. And cut! The director returns to Sita later, face smeared with blood, feeding her hungry cubs. The antelope, curiously, is nowhere to be found.

article – Movie Reviews

– by Diana Beechener – 4/28/11

Scream 4

Good slasher fun is marred by lectures about the good old days.

Wes Craven (My Soul to Take) wants you damn kids to get off of his lawn. Also, the director wants the You Tube generation to show some respect for old-school slasher films. In the reboot of the Scream franchise, the curmudgeon director sets out to prove that fusing old-school scares and new-school pop culture smarts are his forte. Craven’s got a point. When he focuses on the gore and the fun, he makes a smart, scary flick.

article – Movie Reviews

– by Diana Beechener – 4/21/11

Hanna

An action fairytale pits a little girl against the big bad wolf.

Once upon a time there was teenager named Hanna (Saoirse Ronan: The Way Back) who lived alone in the woods with her father Erik (Eric Bana: The Time Traveler’s Wife). They spend nights reading by the fire, living off the frigid land of Finland and training in the art of the kill.

article – Movie Reviews

– by DIana Beechener – 4/14/11

Jane Eyre

An uninteresting lead turns a brooding gothic classic into a tepid tale of inconvenient love

There is a fundamental problem with adapting Jane Eyre into film: Most people know what’s in the attic. To counteract the English Lit 101 plot, the movie has to make you invest in the characters so that you dread what you know will befall them. At the very least, filmmakers need to make that attic creepy.

article – Movie Reviews

– by Diana Beechener – 4/7/11

Sucker Punch

Great visuals get KO’ed by an insulting, incoherent script

The world has been hard on 20-year-old Babydoll (Emily Browning: The Uninvited). After being assaulted by her stepfather and accidentally killing her sister, Babydoll is committed to an asylum. In five days, she’s scheduled for a lobotomy.

article – Movie Reviews

– by Diana Beechener – 3/31/11

Paul

A raunchy alien makes men out of two nerds

Graeme (Simon Pegg: The Chronicles of Narnia) and Clive (Nick Frost: Pirate Radio) are two nerds living the dream. The Brits combine their savings for a trip of a lifetime to California’s Comic Con. Spending money on essentials — a Gorn mask and signed copies of Jeffrey Shadowchild’s (Jeffrey Tambor) latest sci-fi tome — the pair is looking forward to an RV trip to see the great American sights.

article – Movie Reviews

– by Diana Beechener – 3/24/11