In Theaters
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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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Her (R)
Her, written and directed by Spike Jonze, contains three scenes of strong sexual content, and at least two other scenes with frank sexual language. All the sex is varyingly virtual. The movie uses sex both to demonstrate closeness between characters, and the gaps between them. Taken as whole, however, it’s not clear that Jonze understands […]
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Frozen (PG)
In the first minutes of Frozen, the older of two sisters nearly kills the younger, making it the rare Disney Princess Movie initiated by a brush with mortality. The principle concerns of the movie fall out around this life and death incident. We learn: That the older sister has the power to create and control […]
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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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Out of the Furnace (R)
The revenge drama holds a special place in American cinema. More than any society since pagan Greece we find satisfaction in watching a man achieve his desire over his enemies. The elements of the story are gratifying enough to have grown into a formula. The protagonist (nearly always a man of average temperament and social […]
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12 Years A Slave (R)
It is fitting that the hero of 12 Years a Slave is called Solomon. I thought often of Ecclesiastes while watching the film. Few books in Scripture are responsible for more intellectual patricide than Ecclesiastes; begin reading any commentary on the work, and the first comment most authors feel compelled to make is something like, […]
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The Book Thief (PG-13)
“This is Heaven Street.” The Book Thief (2013) is the story of Liesel Memminger (Sophie Nelisse), a young orphan on the brink of adolescence who is transported to a quaint German town amidst the boom of World War II when her Communist mother relinquishes her to the care of German foster parents Hans and Rosa […]
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Ender’s Game (PG-13)
Ender’s Game plays like a Power Point presentation of the novel by Orson Scott Card. That’s not an inherent problem. Power Point presentations can be informative, entertaining, and occasionally are not complete wastes of time. I’m not going to go so far as to say that they can’t be exciting, transformative, and powerful— attributes which […]
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Carrie (R)
You can only push someone so far before they break. Based on the Stephen King novel of the same title, Carrie (2013) is a suspenseful and horrific tragedy about a teenage girl who is tortured her entire life by her psychotic mother and relentless peers and ultimately destroys herself and her community with her inherited […]
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The Fifth Estate (R)
The political thriller has had a life of varying fortunes. In the ’70s, it enjoyed for a brief spell of privileged status at the box office, where Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor or Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men became two of that decade’s more successful major releases. In more recent times […]