What to Expect When You’re Expecting is a Valentine’s Day take on impending parenthood. Assorted couples cope with pregnancies, planned and unplanned, adoption and the epic change that is coming to their lives.
‘The Dictator’ falls between ‘Borat’ and ‘Bruno’ in quality
For most of its quick and extremely dirty running time, the new Sacha Baron Cohen offender The Dictator wages war with itself, crude nonsense up against crude nonsense that’s really funny. Then comes the golden ticket, the speech of speeches, the scene in which the fictional North African dictator General Admiral Haffaz Aladeen addresses a gathering in New York City, recanting his barbarous ways with a heartfelt confessional.
‘Perfect Family’ provides modest pleasures
The Perfect Family is at best a moderately entertaining movie, one that tries to grapple with some big ideas about faith and doctrine, but which seems unwilling to make either its characters or its audience too uncomfortable.
Tim Burton and Johnny Depp sink teeth into ‘Dark Shadows’ parody
The years, gray hairs and wrinkles fade away from Johnny Depp and Michelle Pfeiffer, and the cobwebs are brushed off Dark Shadows in director Tim Burton’s campy and dark take on the late 1960s vampire soap opera. The cheesy and cheap but beloved TV program takes an affectionate ribbing in the film, which has more in common with That ’70s Show than its actual source.
Great cast can’t make ‘Marigold’ bloom
Movies draw into theaters in different ways. They may offer what look to be spectacular stunts. Or a big star. Or a reworking of an old concept. But regardless of the promise that gets us to buy a ticket, a movie still has to deliver on that promise once we are in our seats.
Movie review: ‘Avengers’ is grand, old-school adventure
Marvel’s The Avengers is big, generally satisfying entertainment: a contemporary equivalent of one of those World War II movies where a scrappy, seemingly mismatched bunch becomes a team united in common cause.
Christian films find fans at the multiplex
By Cory Bennett Columbia News Service NEW YORK: Left Behind: The Movie is filled with drama: sudden disappearances, a vitriolic Russian Antichrist bent on global domination, and fireballs raining down during the Apocalypse. “The future as foretold by the Bible has come to pass,” a grandiose voice proclaims in the trailer. “Seeing is believing.” Its…
Movie review: ‘The Pirates! Band of Misfits’
‘The Five-Year Engagement’ just goes on and on and …
The Five-Year Engagement plays like a five-episode, R-rated story arc from How I Met Your Mother. With more profanity and more explicit sex. And considerably less drinking. And no Neil Patrick Harris.
‘Casablanca’ still bracing after all these years
April 23, 2012 Leave a Comment Filed under: Featured, Featured 2, Movies, On Screen, Rich Heldenfels
There are movies meant to be seen on a big screen. Casablanca is one of them. In the past, now and as long as theaters show movies.
‘Footnote’ a funny, painful look at ambition and family
Two men sit next to each other at an academic honors ceremony. As the announcers list the accomplishments of the honoree, one looks blandly ahead while the other slips deeper into a scowl, his head bowing. The rivalry is clear, the winner too obvious.
Disney swings for the trees with ‘Chimpanzee’
By Roger Moore McClatchy-Tribune News Service Disney’s 2012 movie offering for Earth Day is a gorgeous and technically dazzling look inside the world of chimpanzees — their use of tools, their nurturing instincts, their means of organization during fights and hunts for smaller monkeys, whom they sometimes eat. But Chimpanzee is also a throwback, a…
Movie review: ‘We Have a Pope’
Like the classic runaway bride, the skittish lead character in Nanni Moretti’s emotionally generous and moving tragicomedy We Have a Pope wears a sumptuous gown, has the aspect or at least symbolic air of the unsullied and suffers from severe commitment issues.
