Review: Sucker Punch

When you walk into a movie directed by Zack Snyder – he of "300" and "Watchmen" fame, you more or less know what you are going to get – a highly stylized film loaded with digital effects. In this regard, “Sucker Punch” does not disappoint. In this film, Snyder immerses us into a dark world that snakes its way between reality and fantasy with a stunning brand of visual bravado. While this film differs from his last two live action jaunts in that...

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Review: The Best and the Brightest

If someone had told me that Barney Stinson, Shooter McGavin, and the stuffy dude who played Guitar Hero against Vince Vaughn in "Couples Retreat" were making a movie together, I would have run out to the local cinema with my AMC Stubs card in hand. The good news is that no one told me. The bad news is that when I did find out that the aforementioned Neil Patrick Harris, Christopher McDonald, and Peter Serafinowicz were in “The Best and the Brightest”...

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Review: Cowboys and Aliens

Cowboys and Aliens – the name alone seemed to promise a rollercoaster ride of a movie with two distinct film genres colliding on one screen. And with Jon Favreau directing Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, and Olivia Wilde, this film promised a raucous redefining of both genres. I could not help but imagine an amalgamation of “The Quick and the Dead” and “Independence Day,” each time I walked through Times Square and glanced at the gigantic...

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Review: The Kids Are All Right

I hadn’t seen “The Kids are All Right” during its theatrical release, but while I was working at NBCUniversal, there was a lot of buzz internally for it. So given the water cooler talk, the quality of the cast, and its Golden Globe and Oscar nods, I assumed this was a strong film that I’d eventually get around to watching. Sadly, I found it extremely mediocre, though one can tell that writer/director Lisa Cholodenko desperately wants it to...

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Review: Arthur (2011)

It has been slim pickings for On Demand lately. As a result of, I’ve been half-heartedly circling around three movies for some time now: “Arthur,” “Limitless,“ and "Sucker Punch." With the city being pounded by rainstorms of seemingly biblical proportions, I was forced to take the plunge. “Arthur” was the film of choice for no better reason that it begins with the letter “A” and thus required less effort to find in the On Demand menu. This...

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Review: Friends with Benefits

For the last three months, this movie has provided me with a joke that I have been working ad nauseum. Basically it would unfold as follows: A trailer or television spot for “Friends with Benefits” would run with clips of Mila Kunis as her typical neurotic self and Justin Timberlake doing his best Joseph Gordon Levitt “500 Days of Summer” imitation to try to make us forget he was once the front man for N’Sync. As said trailer fades to flack,...

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Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

The first time I saw the trailer for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” the crowd at the L.A. Live AMC cinema erupted into laughter. I have to admit, that amidst the mass chortling, I myself let out a semi-audible groan. I could not fathom why 20th Century Fox would want to revisit the franchise when this latest entry into the series would star James Franco – who is plenty competent as an actor, but incredibly difficult to take seriously after...

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Review: Crazy Stupid Love

I had it in my mind when I woke up Saturday morning that I was going to see “Crazy Stupid Love” in the evening. On tap before that was a trek off the island to Brooklyn into hipster central for a food flea market that is aptly and oh-so-cleverly dubbed “Smorgasburg.” If you’re having trouble wrapping your head around this, think a gated dirt lot, a cluster of booths peddling culinary delights, and a parade of V-necks. This waistline-challenging...

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