Movie Reviews

Buddhist monks create a sand mandala in "Samsara."

‘Samsara’: Around the world in 99 minutes and zero words

Susan Sontag concluded her book “On Photography” with a plea for “an ecology of images,” an approach to making and reproducing photographs that would protect both the meaning of particular pictures and the integrity of the reality they depict.

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Archive by category ''Movie Reviews

MOVIE REVIEWS

Disney borrows from Pixar’s best for ‘Wreck-It’

Disney Animation takes a page out of Pixar’s well-worn playbook for “Wreck-It Ralph,” a screwball farce with a novel setting and more edge than your average Disney ’toon.
MOVIE REVIEWS

Name cast can’t save ‘Cold Light of Day’

So murky that it is hard to discern shapes, let alone faces, in many of its scenes, and so crudely edited that its frenzied action has scant continuity, “The Cold Light of Day” is a catastrophe worth noting only for the presence of its big-name cast.
MOVIE REVIEWS

In ‘Queen of Versailles,’ a high-end meltdown

The rich aren’t different from you and me — they weren’t ready for the recession either.
MOVIE REVIEWS

Find ‘Nemo’ all over again — this time in 3D

It’s the details that stand out whenever a classic film is converted to 3D.
MOVIE REVIEWS

It’s easy to buy Gere in very good ‘Arbitrage’

We know who and what Robert Miller is the moment Richard Gere brings the character into the frame in the new thriller “Arbitrage.” He’s a player, a business titan, a guy for whom the rules of the normal world don’t apply.
MOVIE REVIEWS

‘The Words’ plays as a bit too wordy to work

“The Words” is, as its name suggests, a wordy melodrama about a young writer, Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper), who finishes his first novel, three years in the making — which is promptly rejected. Maybe, he wonders, he’s not who he thought he was — a writer.
MOVIE REVIEWS

A stand-up comedian’s nightmares

It takes a kind of crazy tenacity for an aspiring stand-up comedian to endure the grubby humiliations of life on the bottom rung of the professional ladder. Watching Matt Pandamiglio, the jocular, slightly schlubby alter ego of the comic performer and writer Mike Birbiglia, take his act on the road...
MOVIE REVIEWS

Movie review: Story balances comedy and poignant drama

Nadine Labaki’s new film begins with a poem recited by a group of black-clad women, walking in rhythm. Their story, about “two clans with broken hearts, under a burning sun,” sets the stage for the film. In an isolated village in the Lebanese countryside, Muslims and Christians...
MOVIE REVIEWS

Movie review: ‘Premium Rush’ pedals an escapist story

“Premium Rush” is the kind of action movie that always tumbles into theaters in late August. Not enough star power or special-effects whizbang to run with the big dogs of summer and not bad enough to bark its way straight to DVD.
MOVIE REVIEWS

Movie review: Young revisits his old stomping grounds

There is a town in north Ontario — and that is where we find Neil Young at the outset of “Neil Young Journeys.”