Adventure Films
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Catching Fire (PG-13)
On the one hand you have Athanasius contra mundum, and on the other hand, Fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong. I’ll confess equal sympathies for both dictums. The Truth is a Man, a single Man, and He does not depend on massive crowds to give Him cultural validity. His cult is the genesis of […]
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300: Rise Of An Empire (R)
Some days call for dumb movies. Every now and then, on a late night or a quiet Saturday afternoon, there’s reason enough to watch something that will advance your psyche in no way. I admit it. I’d even go so far as to allow Zack Snyder’s 300 (the 2006 one) to be such. Maybe. It […]
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How I Live Now (R)
When I was still quite young, no more than ten or eleven, little excited my soul more than the sound of a fire alarm going off at school. We would exit the building quickly and stand in the parking lot, surveying the school. Someone would claim they saw smoke, and we would all say we […]
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Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (PG-13)
Approaching a film directed by Kenneth Branagh, I cannot pretend my expectations were low. Of all the actors of our generation, Branagh ranks in the elites. His understanding of characters and strong story telling has consistently shown him to be more than a passing phenomenon. His work in the Shakespearean genre alone is dazzling. Let […]
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Monuments Men (PG-13)
Of all the mysteries of Monuments Men, the most baffling is how George Clooney (director/co-writer/star) managed to make Bill Murray boring. Murray’s got plenty in the bank. He can afford to shoot a boring part while hanging out in Europe with Clooney. Given the chance, I’d do the same. But you still feel a sense of […]
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All Is Lost (PG-13)
The majority of the dialogue in J.C. Chandor’s All is Lost comes in the first thirty seconds. The only human character, Our Man (Robert Redford) narrates a letter that he doesn’t send until the final act. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to […]
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The LEGO Movie (PG)
I experienced the collective cringe we all felt at the announcement of The LEGO Movie. Does their avarice know no bounds? They’ve made billions of dollars, saturated childhoods for generations, moved into video games. Nobody doesn’t know what Lego is. Do they need the marketing? A movie at this point seems cynical, doesn’t it? It’s […]
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Pompeii (PG-13)
Not a lot of great volcano movies out there. They tend to be straight-forward affairs, as is evidenced by their titles, like Volcano. That particular 1997 disaster-movie disaster memorably ended with a young child observing (in a moment of benevolent, racial innocence and goodwill) that Caucasians and African-Americans covered in black ash “all looked the […]
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RoboCop (2014) (PG-13)
I feel like a sucker. I liked the Robocop remake. I make it a point not to read reviews of movies I’m reviewing, because I have this lingering hope that maybe there’s something incorruptible and true and creative and my own, right down at the core of me. So I haven’t read any reviews. But […]
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Pacific Rim (PG-13)
I remember as a child having near hallucinogenic nightmares after watching Jurassic Park for the first time on our old black and white, sixteen-inch television. After not being able to sleep at all the night after, I wanted to watch it again the next day. Such is the magic of cinema, I suppose. A well […]
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The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (PG-13)
Two FilmFisher reviewer’s took on the latest Ben Stiller picture and took away comparable, but distinct impressions. Please enjoy both sides. Tom’s take: The lonely individual’s flight from mediocrity has, in our time, provided the motif of many films, most of which fail to rise above mediocrity. The patriarch of the genre is The Man […]
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The New World (PG-13)
When The New World arrived in 2005, it was met by two types of reviews. Many critics understood it as an epic work of poetic genius, offering glowing praises for the revolutionary storytelling and arresting eye of the film’s writer/director, Terrence Malick. However, more than a few critics and most moviegoers found the film wanting. […]