Reel Reviews

Romantic comedies don’t get more manipulative than writer/director David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook.  They typically can’t get any more damaged either.  Centered rather seriously upon mental illness, Russell constructs a fragile film built upon instability ...

Anyone who knows me or reads my reviews or has a brief conversation with me knows I cannot stand Michael “Mr. Awesome” Bay films.  His adolescent shenanigans just do little for me … except make me feel as if I suffer from PTSD.  This time out, Bay toys with ...

I’ll be blunt. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, both as a film and a Star Trek entry, is not very good.  It isn’t completely without joy (it’s the few chuckles that save this from being a complete downer) but the older the film gets the harder it becomes to defend its ...

Tom Cruise has been a busy boy of late: first Jack Reacher and now a big budget science fiction adaption from the unpublished graphic novel Oblivion. The writer of that graphic novel happens to be the writer/director of the film, who vowed a couple of years ...

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Many critics and fans have dismissed it because, to them, it’s …ehem… boring.  Okay, sure, soap operatic Star Wars it isn’t but the film – to its credit – is a most successful leap ...

Moody, stylish, and brimming with edgy atmosphere, Danny Boyle’s genre-bending psychological thriller Trance is the Trainspotting director doing what he does best. Only this time he does his thing in the world of fine art, applying his hard-edged style to an elaborate ...