Winter's Tale Review

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Bad Movies don’t just happen, you know.

Genuine Bad Movies, the kind that endure, take a lot of weirdness and a lot of hard work and mistakes and rigorous attention to making terrible decisions. All of those decisions must be fully and completely wrong and all of them must be perfectly timed. The finished product, if it wants to exist in a longterm state of Bad Movie grace, has no choice but to come about as the result of ineptly calibrated systems of variables and a little bit of anti-magic. Only then can the Bad Movie congeal into a wiggly Jello mold of garbage-flavored pleasure.

Winter’s Tale, the story of a young burglar (Colin Farrell, 38 and playing 21) and his love for an illness-ravaged young heiress (Jessica Brown Findlay, Downton Abbey's doomed Lady Sybil), enacted against a supernatural backdrop of demons, angels and miracles, is almost that kind of Bad Movie. It certainly aims for the anti-magic.

But to explain why it only hits the

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The Wind Rises Review

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Released for one week in New York and Los Angeles in December of 2013, in Japanese with English subtitles, master animator Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises returns to theaters for a wider American release with a large ensemble English language voice cast that includes John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Martin Short, Elijah Wood, Darren Criss, William H. Macy, Stanley Tucci, Mandy Patinkin, Werner Herzog and, in the lead role of historical figure Jiro Horikoshi, Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Wind is a gentle, sad film about a strange subject: artistic pursuit of purity and the beauty of form versus the often ugly realm of function. The story of Horikoshi, a pioneer of aeronautical design and the man who developed the Japanese Zero fighter plane used during World War II, it follows his life from childhood to adulthood during the war. His dreams figure prominently, woven into the narrative and inextricable from it, and in them he’s usually chaperoned by Italian aircraft designer Gianni Caproni, who pushes him toward the beauty of design. It's a place where young Horikoshi can remain pure, even as he goes to work, clear-eyed, for Mitsubishi to create machines that will be used in the service of death. At one point Caproni asks his troubled young friend if it would be better to live in a world without the great Pyramids, knowing they were built by slaves and, analogously, a world without flight to avoid war’s use of airplanes. And then the film refuses to weigh in with an answer even as it acknowledges the sorrow of its own moral dilemma.

Ethical ambiguity aside, Wind is a quiet, subtle and impeccable piece of animation for adults and thoughtful young people, and it's at its best when it allows its young artist the opportunity for creative discovery, moments he describes as

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Pompeii Review

Milo (Game of Thrones star Kit Harington), a Celt slave, is sent to Pompeii to be part of a fight-to-the-death Olympics, where he’ll be pitted against champion brawler Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) when not busy being ogled by effeminate fight organizer Graecus (Joe Pingue, serving pursed lips, curly forelock and limp wrist like an old-school exploitation pro) or getting groped for cash by rich Pompeii ladies. But along the way Milo helps Cassia (Emily Browning), the daughter of Pompeii’s richest family, put down her injured horse. Blank-stare love blooms.

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Non-Stop Review

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February goes out with a bang thanks to what has turned into an annual event: the Liam Neeson Is Going To Kill You movie. Kevin Costner can keep all of 3 Days to Kill’s warmly comedic father/daughter bike-riding tutorial sequences for himself, because in the world of the action film, family warmth is an outcome but never the focus. If anything it’s the sprinkles on top of the icing on top of the brutality cake, the state of well-being the hero comes home to after identifying, tracking, positioning and neutralizing miscreants. Any more than that is an unwelcome distraction. And there are no distractions in a Liam Neeson Is Going To Kill You movie. If you are a kidnapper, hijacker, terrorist, sex trafficker or murderer, you are going to be killed by Liam Neeson (exception: you are a wolf). This Liam Neeson Is Going To Kill You movie is on a plane.

Everything you’re allowed to know: Neeson plays a troubled Air Marshall on a transatlantic flight and he must find the person on board who keeps making good on a threat to murder a passenger every 20 minutes until $150 million dollars is deposited into a Swiss bank account. One more thing you’re allowed to know: the terrorist is also diabolically skilled at making Neeson look like the bad guy.

Everything else is what you’re not allowed to know. All the whys and hows and whos get doled out selectively and precisely, each bit of information piling up into a goofy, preposterous heap of plotting. The tightly enclosed space allows the audience to witness only a little more than Neeson himself can see, and most of that consists of a series of suspicious, sidelong glances from passengers and crew, any one of whom could be pulling the digital strings of a crime being announced via texts to Neeson’s phone. It’s a cast full of red herring character actors: the jittery flight attendant (Michelle Dockery), the other Air Marshall (Anson Mount), the hot-tempered cop (Corey Stoll), the chatty tourist (Scoot McNairy), the overly nice lady with the mysterious scar (Julianne Moore), the rude business traveler (Nate Parker), the British doctor (Omar Netwally) or the shifty co-pilot (Jason Butler Harner). Or maybe it’s the pilot himself (Linus Roache) or that last minute fill-in air hostess (Lupita Nyong’o). The only person completely rule-outable is the child (Quinn McColgan) and you’d be forgiven for having doubts about her.

Convenience and coincidence collide way too often here, as does the laughably improbable nature of the evildoer’s scheme when it butts up against fairly well-documented information about the nature of commercial airliners in distress. But theater seat bloodlust doesn’t care; it hungers for thrills and vengeance dispensed in equal measure and here is where that hunger is happily, crazily sated. Besides, this is not the real world or even an approximation of it; it’s a universe governed by physical laws that allow for a sixtysomething badass to defy turbulence while catching, aiming and successfully firing a loaded gun as it floats through the air

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Son of God Review

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Christians, I’m talking to you. And you deserve better than this.

I’m going to assume that you’re the audience who’ll pay for tickets to this movie, a multi-part miniseries chopped down to feature length (with a little new footage), one that already aired on basic cable last year and is readily available on DVD. And I get why church groups have bought out entire theaters for its opening weekend. It’s about representation. Specialty audiences, no matter who they are, are hungry to see their lives, values and concerns depicted on the big screen, even if it means spending money and traveling to see something they could just have easily stayed at home to watch.

But shouldn’t Christian filmmaking, if it’s going to be a regular part of the culture and routinely show up at the multiplex as something more than a novelty event like this, do more than pander and reach for the squarely unimaginative middle? Shouldn’t a contemporary retelling of the life of Christ, one that follows in the footsteps of movies like The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Gospel Road (my personal favorite, thanks to on-camera chaperone Johnny Cash), strive for the kind of artistic quality worthy of its mission? And shouldn’t the high drama inherent in this particular narrative create sparks no matter how familiar the final act?

Maybe you just answered

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300: Rise of An Empire Review

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It’s all fun and games fighting in the Greco-Persian Wars until you have to chill on the warrioring for a bit while the lengthy introductory narration tells the audience a lot of nothing. Or until a horse stomps on your face. But after that stuff’s out of the way the games can begin.

And by games I mean the ones where a bejeweled, caped and man-kini’d sorta-god Xerxes (a crazily unrecognizable Rodrigo Santoro), whose eyes have

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Mr. Peabody and Sherman Review

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They didn’t ruin Mr. Peabody and Sherman.

They could have. It’s not like anyone under, oh say, 50 remembers the original Jay Ward television cartoons that aired in the 1960s and lived again through 1970s reruns, or even would have cared if this feature film adaptation from Lion King director Rob Minkoff and screenwriter Craig Wright had re-branded the characters to fit comfortably within the low-standards niche of contemporary children’s entertainment. It didn’t have to be smart or funny to make its buck. But surprise

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