Film

Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back while simultaneously learning a profound life lesson. Rinse, repeat. That's the timeworn formula employed by every romantic comedy. Some films rest comfortably within the format and fail. (Good Luck Chuck, All About Steve) Others can work within those parameters and create art (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, When Harry Met Sally). Friends with Kids falls disappointingly between those two extremes. The screenplay has a fascinating central conceit that creates dramatic tension, but then falls back on all of the typical genre conventions for the final act.
WriterDirectorStar Jennifer Westfeldt has built a career writing films that playfully deconstruct traditional relationships in favor of something more experimental. In Kissing Jessica Stein, she told the story of a heterosexual woman burned by too many horrible blind dates who turns to lesbianism. With Ira & Abby, she focused on what would happen if two people got engaged after just one conversation.

It’s all well and good that, early in 21 Jump Street, a police chief (Nick Offerman) informs rookie cops Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) that they’re reviving an old undercover-in-high-school program from the 1980s, because the only ideas anyone can come up with now is to “recycle sh-t from the past.” But what do we really expect at this point from movies that cash in on nostalgia for old TV shows, cartoons, toys and board games? Is it enough for a brand-name reboot to wink at us and say, “Yep, we’re out of ideas, but at least we’re honest about it?”

Movies don't profess to really tell the truth. (Just check the Coen brothers' credentials surrounding Fargo.) But when a movie advertises something that it is not, you have to wonder, as an audience member, whether it's worth being lied to. If the movie is good enough, sure; however, in the case of Silent House, it's nothing short of an insult.
Silent House is based on La Casa Muda, a low-budget 2010 Uruguayan horror film, whose claim to fame is that it was shot in real time in one continuous take. Silent House also claims to employ this technique – one that has only been used effectively in just a few previous films, such as Hitchcock's classic Rope and director Yuri Zeltser's Circle starring Angela Bettis. However, I noticed at least three different cuts and one glaring camera trick, not to mention that the blood on Elizabeth Olsen's face and plunging neckline changed locations from scene to scene. That's not trickery – it's deception.

If you've spent any amount of time as a professional film critic, you get used to a few common rejoinders. We all know exactly what unhappy readers think about our thwarted real career goals, and the various contracts we've clearly signed in blood with residents of the underworld that robbed us of our capacity for joy. But among the most persistent are variations on uses of the word “fun.” To wit: “Hey, lighten up, it's not supposed to be Shakespeare; it's just meant to be fun.”
The unspoken assumptions accompanying the use of that word are many – that “fun” is an objective measurement; that the intent to create “fun” is a holy shield, a sort of artistic “get out of criticism free” card; that “fun” trumps all other considerations. The “fun mafia” is wrong about many things, but at the core is one easy-to-understand truth: a movie that puts a goofy smile on our face makes it easy to forgive a multitude of sins. As many little things as John Carter does that could tip the scales over to silly, it somehow manages to stay just on the right side of fun.

Not to be confused with the 1987 Matthew Broderick movie of the same name, in which military-trained monkeys act like people, 2012's Project X finds people acting like baboons. The film is basically Superbad gone turbo without any of its charm.
Nerdy high school seniors Thomas, Costa and JB, (Thomas Mann, Oliver Cooper and Jonathan Daniel Brown) decide to throw a party with the hope of having sex and winning fame. The obvious motivating factor in the flick is the necessity for these guys to get laid, especially nice guy Thomas for his 18th birthday. So plans are hatched for a major, babe-filled blowout the night his parents leave town for the weekend. As Costa puts it, “It's about changing the game.” Predictably, the festivities get out of hand to gargantuan proportions.

It's difficult to be too hard on Gone because everyone seems to be trying really hard. The problem is that every aspect of the film is at war with itself.
The PG-13 rating neuters it and keeps it from being as twisted as it should have been; the script loses so much focus in the final ten minutes that the entire premise of the film is lost.
There are characters that exist only as red herrings. When their purpose is fulfilled, they are discarded and never seen again.

Just as in his last ghostly outing, Drive Angry, Nicholas Cage tries to ruin this movie every step of the way, but this time he has help. His mundane take is surpassed by the dismal directing of two hitherto innovative filmmakers, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, who drop the fiery ball big time. The fun that is supposed to be had in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is lost entirely. This flick aims to dazzle, yet sadly, it flat-out sucks.
The plot tries to stay true to Marvel Comics' original idea with its various takes on Ghost Rider's origin. Johnny Blaze (Cage) is hiding out in Eastern Europe, when called upon by a wine-guzzling priest (Idris Elba) who wants to stop Satan from taking human form as a boy. Forget about my theory that all haunted house movies suck, my new theory is anything with a boy in it sucks. Cage rampages hither and yon on his lame quest to find the boy and fight evildoers in an attempt to lift his own demonic curse.

The further I get away from my high school years, the more those days seem like a rose-tinted ball of nostalgia, even though at the time I was pretty miserable. I was a senior when the Columbine shootings happened and, until graduation, that event seemed to bring everyone in school closer. As school shootings have become either less frequent or less publicized, films set in high school have once again become focused on the us-vs.-them mentality.
Characters are drawn as black and white, leaving no room for shades of grey. Chronicle addresses this by having three complex main characters that don't fit into any of the boxes in which Hollywood normally places teenage characters. They are heroic, selfish, hopeless, moral and morally bankrupt. In other words, they're human, which makes them fascinating to watch. Oh, and they have superpowers.

Before getting to what Safe House is, I'll say what it is thankfully not, and that is another of those disappointing Tony Scott/Denzel Washington collaborations. It's more like an espionage version of Training Day, with a much cooler, calmer Denzel. Instead of director Antoine Fuqua, it's a Swedish director with an equally exotic name, Daniel Espinosa, known for Snabba Cash (Easy Money). Instead of the hard-driving streets of L.A., we have the intense avenues of Cape Town, South Africa.
CIA agent Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) is a low-level CIA “housekeeper” in charge of a safe house where suspects are taken by CIA operatives to be interrogated. Enter Tobin Frost (Washington), the agency’s most notorious traitor, who mysteriously turns himself in. When the safe house is attacked, gunmen pursue Weston and Frost. Taking a page from the identity-and-loyalty-in-question Bourne movies and Salt, this flick has two action heroes and more gratuitous violence than you can shake a semi-automatic weapon at.

The previews for Woman in Black are of the green-tinted night camera variety, showing “candid” audiences' reactions of fright. This is the same technique employed by the Paranormal Activity franchise to sell tickets. To me it's the film equivalent of restaurants showing faded pictures of their food in the window – never a good sign. It's a shame the marketing research team resorted to this kind of advertising because in actuality this is an old school Victorian gothic ghost story that qualifies as decent horror.
This atmospheric retro-chiller, set in an isolated Yorkshire village, is a production of England’s revived Hammer label and features a post-Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe in his first grown up role. The foundation for the story is screenwriter Jane Goldman's adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 novel, which also gave birth to a radio series, TV movie and long-running West End stage play. While the highly unoriginal title needs some sprucing up, in the context of this movie it suffices.