In Clint Eastwood’s new video game, Call of Duty: American Sniper, Bradley Cooper affects a convincing Texas accent to portray Chris Kyle, the deadliest sniper in US military history. The film follows Kyle through four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, one marriage and two kids. Cooper’s been receiving a ton of praise for his performance, and I can promise that he does deliver the goods. While it’s not the best performance of the year (that would be Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler, and boo to the Academy for snubbing him), he did make me misty-eyed once or twice. Read More  Read More

Maths! Benedict Cumberbatch finally gets his chance to star in a prestige biopic, in the 2014 update of A Beautiful Mind a totally new movie based on the life and times of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped end the war and invent the machines that became computers. Read More  Read More

It’s rare to say that a movie is better than a book. And usually, if you do, the literati will leave a nasty note on your door. But Wild the book–the memoir by Cheryl Strayed–was a story filled with more sulking than hiking. I gave up halfway through. I didn’t find the protagonist likable or compelling in any way. Read More  Read More

Just as J.R.R.R. Tolkien intended, the third film based on his 250-page children’s book just came out in theaters, drawing the prequel to the Lord of the Rings to a close. Recently, I railed against Hunger Games for this same tactic of stretching a single book across multiple movies. In that movie, it didn’t work. But Peter Jackson makes it work, because he uses a wide range of other obscure Tolkien material to flesh out the story. Read More  Read More

Even though these movies came out before I was born, I have fond memories of watching biblical epics like Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments as a little kid. Charlton Heston and his big white beard daring Ramses to pry the staff of God from his cold, dead hands. Such spectacle! Such plagues! Since Noah last year, the biblical epic is making a bit of a comeback. But times have changed. In the 1950s, it probably seemed perfectly fine to have caucasian Charlton Heston playing the Hebrew Moses. Today, with Batman himself in that same role, it just doesn’t cut it. Read More  Read More

Bill Murray and Melissa McCarthy star in St. Vincent, which walks like a movie and talks like a movie, but it’s not actually a movie. What it is, instead, is an endless string of cinematic clichés that simulate a movie-going experience, sort of like Oculus Rift or that Al Pacino movie a few years back about the virtual woman. Simone, I think it was called? I’m not going to look it up. Never mind, that’s not important. Anyway, instead of going over the premise of St. Vincent, I thought I’d just list all of the clichés I found, which should give you a pretty good idea of... Read More

Birdman is a rare beast. The new film by Alejandro González Iñárritu skirts the line between fantasy and reality with just the right touch of mysticism and grit. This might push Nightcrawler out of the way as the best movie of 2014. Iñárritu, director of such movies as 21 Grams and Biutiful, knows how to find the right balance between farcical comedy and heartfelt drama without resorting to emotional vomit. Whereas in The Judge, the tonal shifts felt forced, everything in Birdman works. It’s unpredictable, fun, touching, sometimes shocking. Read More  Read More

The new film by Christopher Nolan, director of Inception and the Batman movies (no, not the Michael Keaton movies, if that’s what you were hoping) has just released his new film, Interstellar. I’ve been waiting for this movie for months, gobbling up trailers, anticipating, hoping it would be everything I wanted it to be. I wasn’t disappointed, but I wasn’t blown away, either. Read More  Read More

No, not the comic book character. Nightcrawler is a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal (and thank you, spellcheck, for the assist on that one. I would never get that right on my own) about the ambitious Louis Bloom, who stumbles into working as a freelance videographer. He then sells his footage to a news organization, and he’s determined to work his way up from nothing to a position of importance. This is a movie wrought with tension and anxiety. It’s stressful to watch, which is ironic, since it’s mostly about people filming stuff. But all of that tension and anxiety serve to make... Read More

When I was a little kid and saw The Karate Kid for the first time (obviously, the Ralph Macchio version, not the Jaden Smith version), the movie immediately made me want to learn karate. same with Top Gun. After that, I wanted to fly airplanes, wear Aviator sunglasses, and have a cool nickname like Ace or Torpedo or something. I had thought maybe Kill The Messenger might do the same thing for being a journalist. But not so much. This is a good movie, but it’s not exactly feel-good pro-journalism material. If you know the true tale of Gary Webb, you know things don’t end well for our... Read More

Robert Downey Junior has to be one of the most charismatic and likable actors working in Hollywood. That’s why, in The Judge, it’s easy not to despise his character, Hank Palmer. Give this same role to a unknown actor, and no way would we root for this guy to come out on top. Hank Palmer is a flashy, conceited Chicago lawyer who acts like he’s got it all figured out, but his marriage is falling apart. When his mother dies and he returns home for her funeral, his father (Robert Duvall) is arrested for murder. Hank feels he has no choice but to stay in Indiana to represent his... Read More

First of all, let me say how hard it will be to review this movie without spoilers, since it’s a plot-twist-apalooza spoiler minefield. But here we go: Nick and Amy Dunne live in suburban Missouri, a couple settled in to mid-marriage unhappiness. Their lives haven’t turned out the way they predicted, but things are about to flip upside down when Nick comes home to a ransacked house, and the police investigation into Amy’s disappearance begins. I can’t say more without spoiling too much, so I’ll cut the synopsis there. Read More  Read More

The Skeleton Twins is an iceberg. Hold on, lemme explain. A good movie doesn’t throw buckets of information at you right away, drowning you in exposition. A good movie inserts just the right amount of mystery, which creates tension, which leaves you intrigued. You watch intently because you need to have your questions answered. The Skeleton Twins does just that. It plays like snippets of a much larger story, with a rich history that we’re only meant to guess at as the movie unfolds. Little bits of info surface at key moments, but the majority remains left unsaid. That brand... Read More

The Maze Runner: Teenagers in Trouble This weekend, I had a choice between Maze Runner and A Walk Among The Tombstones, a gritty thriller in which Liam Neeson reprises his role from Taken plays a new, totally non-Taken character. I chose the Maze Runner, and this is my story. My favorite part of the evening may have been the trailer for Interstellar, the Christopher Nolan/Matthew McConaughey Oscar-bait film coming out later this year. Man, that looks exciting. I can’t wait to hear the time-is-a-flat-circle-in-space monologue. Read More  Read More

Bob Saginowski doesn’t take communion. Bob tends bar, but some Brooklyn gangsters also use the bar as a funnel for drops… places they temporarily store ill-gotten money before stashing it somewhere else. But Bob doesn’t think he’s connected to that underground world; he thinks he’s left it far behind.   Just as he did in the woefully under-appreciated movie Warrior, Tom Hardy once again shows how adept he is at characterizing a range of emotion through a subtle performance. His lips barely move for most of the film, but we can read his face and feel the... Read More