Skyfall Review (Second Take)
Daniel Craig plays a rougher, more conflicted 007 in Skyfall, the heavily hyped new installment in the Bond franchise. A first-rate villain and some gorgeous camerawork make this one of the most memorable yet.
Daniel Craig plays a rougher, more conflicted 007 in Skyfall, the heavily hyped new installment in the Bond franchise. A first-rate villain and some gorgeous camerawork make this one of the most memorable yet.
Robert Zemeckis’ direction of the plane crash at the heart of Flight, Denzel Washington’s killer lead performance, and the film’s surprising ability to overcome the trappings of its genre, are genuinely miraculous.
The concept behind Wreck-It Ralph owes a lot to the Toy Story movies that started the entire CGI revolution, but the level of complexity and creative world-building required by Ralph puts Toy Story in the bargain bin.
RZA’s The Man with the Iron Fists is a pastiche of colorful camp, eccentric caricatures and a healthy dose of CGI blood. If kung fu via glossy art is what you’re after, Fists will be an eye-rolling slog, but those hankering for a messy homage could do worse than this kinetic smear of martial arts.
Skyfall is a long-awaited movie thanks to MGM’s financial woes, but it delivers. Skyfall takes a darker approach as we’ve seen with the past couple films and it’s very character driven, yet Sam Mendes and the screenwriters still provide a massive injection of fun.
The first Silent Hill released back in 2006 to mixed (at best) reviews, with praise for it’s visual appeal but pans of the script. Six years later, we have Silent Hill: Revelation 3D and it’d appear that history repeats itself to an extreme degree.
Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas incorporates six different stories into a single film that tells of love, loss, and everything in between – the human experience. This ambitious effort clocks in at almost three hours and deals with often-taboo topics such as gender identity, race, religion, and sexual orientation.
The marketing states “all the activity has led to this.” Keeping that in mind, it’s easy to walk out of Paranormal Activity 4 thinking you got severally short-changed. A shame considering directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman directed Paranormal Activity 3, a marked improvement in the series. Now Joost and Schulman have hit us with 4, and despite their best efforts, nothing new has been brought to the table.
This revival of the James Patterson character once played by Oscar winner Morgan Freeman ends on a happy note as our title character begins a new chapter of his life, but what did the last chapter have to say about anything? The film takes on a weak story with apathy toward its characters and little to no urgency toward its high stakes.
Ben Affleck’s Argo will make you rethink how much you complain about going through customs at the airport. It seems unfathomable that such a typically mundane and slow-moving event could lead to the tensest bit of American filmmaking so far this year, but that’s what Affleck does with his third film.
