Sometimes watching a movie is sort of like watching a train wreck in slow motion, as if a child has set up a train set so that several trains will all smash into each other. “Killing Them Softly” is a movie like that. We know from the moment we meet most of the characters that they are doomed, that they are going to make bad mistakes and follow them up with more, and that the character who’s likely to come out on top is the one who makes the fewest stupid decisions.
Kids movies that take the time and trouble to be enjoyable by and accessible to grownups have a special place in my heart, especially when they’re fairly smart and creatively designed. “Rise of the Guardians” falls into this camp, and I enjoyed the first hour and twenty minutes enough to forgive the last ten for not living up to their promise.
Abraham Lincoln is one of our most beloved presidents, and an incredibly complex figure. Steven Spielberg’s new film wisely focuses only on the last four months of the man’s life, and still has more than enough material to fill the film’s two and a half hours. This is a powerhouse of a movie, and it manages to be at once a historical piece, a commentary on modern politics, Oscar bait, and a fascinating study of people living in impossibly difficult times.
James Bond movies can be grouped both by actor and by tone. The most recent batch, the Daniel Craig Bond flicks, reflect Hollywood’s current love affair with the gritty and the flawed. “Skyfall,” the latest of these, gives us a Bond who can barely pass his field agent proficiency tests, whose hands shake when he fires a gun, who’s only comfortable and at home when he’s both in impossible circumstances and full of a determination fueled by righteous anger.
The moment the opening credits for “The Man with the Iron Fists” start to roll, you can tell exactly what kind of movie it is. There’s an explanatory voiceover and a massive fight, paused periodically for over-saturated, old-school-style still frames for each credit — and the credits are all in both English and Chinese. By the time it got to “Quentin Tarantino Present” (sic), I was sold. This is an homage to Hong Kong action flicks and exploitation films, a blenderized rendition of every trope and camera shot we’ve seen and loved a hundred times.
The “Silent Hill” series of video games is enormously popular among a select crowd of fans – their complex mythology and survival-horror genre (meaning combat is less important than finding a way to survive long enough to escape) are very engaging to the right kind of person. The film franchise is notably less celebrated, and seems to aim for “visually impressive b-movie horror flick” rather than “quality horror movie” of any genre. The latest installment, “Silent Hill: Revelation 3D” succeeds when taken on what seems like its own terms. Taken on almost any other measure of film quality, it’s a failure.
Hollywood loves making movies about movies, especially ones that mock the film industry. Make one that’s a movie about a fake movie and a period piece to boot, and you have a winner. That winner is “Argo,” which tells the story of how the CIA teamed up with Hollywood and the Canadian government to rescue six Americans who managed to avoid being captured as part of the Iranian hostage crisis.
Back in 1984, Tim Burton produced a stop-motion short film entitled “Frankenweenie,” in which a boy brings his dog back to life after the beloved pet is killed by a car. It’s a charming piece, and available in the extra content on DVDs of “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” Now, almost twenty years later, Burton has returned to that story and expanded it into a feature-length film of the same title.
Time travel is hard to handle well in fiction: it leads to paradox, weird philosophical discussions, and massive plot holes as often as not. Thankfully, “Looper” wisely gives us a firm footing to anchor our suspension of disbelief, tips its hat politely at the inevitable issues, and gets on with the business of telling an intense, thrilling science-fiction story.
There’s a new Resident Evil movie out. This one is “Resident Evil: Retribution,” the fifth film in the franchise. It has everything we’ve come to expect: Milla Jovovich, zombies, mutants, and an evil corporation. Like all good sequels, it’s more of the same but turned up a notch.