By Roger Moore McClatchy-Tribune News Service Cast and crew err on the side of silly in Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, the amusingly childish sequel to that unlikely 2008 hit Journey to the Center of the Earth. They’ve rendered Jules Verne’s novel into a jokey lark, with broad, corny wisecracks, comic sidekicks and everybody riffing…
He must have joined ‘‘The Agency’’ with an eye toward excitement, exotic locales and danger. But in Capetown, a backwater as far as foreign intrigue goes, agency newcomer Matt Weston is stuck — a one-man show, running a never-used “safe house” in the CIA’s real-estate portfolio.
The title isn’t an exaggeration. It was something of a Big Miracle, the way the plight of a family of gray whales, stranded under the Alaska ice, captivated the country and forced oil men and environmentalists, natives and Cold War foes to team up back in the waning days of the Reagan administration.
Director David Cronenberg took a decidedly idiosyncratic turn in his latest film, shifting from grim tales of violence and betrayal (Eastern Promises, A History of Violence) to a grim tale of psychoanalysis and sex.
The role of Albert Nobbs is one that’s been near to Glenn Close’s heart for a while. She first played it 30 years ago off-Broadway and reprises it now in a project she’s been working for some time to bring to the screen.
The Grey is an old-fashioned survival tale harboring pretensions that it is something more. Not a lot more — just a hint of the psycho-cerebral here, a smidgen of the primal and primitive there.
There are sections of the movie Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close that are very effective emotionally, and not because they involve the devastation of 9/11. Rather, they dig deep into the feelings that arise with any abrupt loss of a loved one, especially for a child to whom any such loss is incomprehensible and enraging.
In an age when the idea behind action movies seems to be making everything as big, loud and fast as possible, Haywire is a refreshingly modest variation on the form.
That “tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme” returns to the screen, now in 3-D. But Beauty and the Beast, the greatest animated film ever made and one of the screen’s great musicals, hardly needs this sort of sprucing up.
The Iron Lady, a new film about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, boasts a stunning performance by Meryl Streep, who seldom presents work that is less than stunning. And the movie overall is effective in presenting Thatcher as a likable but driven and at times contradictory woman who changed the course of British history.
In Hollywood terms, Carnage is relatively tame violence-wise. A pet hamster may be in peril, a bunch of tulips get mauled and a cell phone is abused, but that’s pretty much it. There’s more actual carnage in Puss in Boots.
