Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Gyllenhaal gets his raging bull on in “Southpaw”

Posted by Duane Dudek
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Describing something as Golden Globe caliber is damning it with faint praise.

It also means “not Oscar worthy.” Which can be said of the punch-drunk love story “Southpaw.”

It has all the right moves and pushes the right buttons but in pedantic and melodramatic service of past fight  films.

Jake Gyllenhaal is having a Matthew McConaughey year.

He was the creepily obsessive guy in last year’s “Nightcrawler” for which he WAS nominated for a Golden Globe. And he has his raging bull on here as a boxer who wins fights by taking a beating.

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“Ant-Man” big box Marvel film in smaller package

Posted by Duane Dudek
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“Ant-Man” is another Marvel movie with an avuncular leading man, like “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

Marvel Comic superheroes weren’t square jaw, straight arrow types. They had misfit, class clown DNA – like their wiseacre teenage readers – that was usually altered by some kind of chemical accident or cosmic ray.

Ant-Man is no exception. The same goes for Paul Rudd, the comic actor playing him, who invited everyone to his mother’s house for a kegger after Kansas City made the World Series.

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McKellen plays late in life Sherlock in “Mr. Holmes”

Posted by Duane Dudek
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Sherlock Holmes will never die as the television actors reinventing him as a modern day character attest.

But had he been real Holmes, could have conceivably lived through the first half of the 20th century and seen the invention of radio, watched films about himself and lived through World War II.

That is the premise of “Mr. Holmes,” in which the 93-year old sleuth lives out his days on a farm where he tends bees, still haunted by his final case 35-years earlier.

His misanthropy and analytic tendencies have calcified into a profound melancholy. He loses more and more of his memory each day and as he recalls bits and pieces of that final case he jots them down in a story. He must have done something terrible in it, he tells himself, to cause him to retire.

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“Infinitely Polar Bear” biting tale of mental illness and family

Posted by Duane Dudek
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Do we raise our kids? Or do they raise us?

There’s some of both going on in “Infinitely Polar Bear,” a semi-autobiographical tale of kids growing up in the shadow of their father’s mental illness.

Kenosha native Mark Ruffalo plays the bipolar husband of long suffering Zoe Saldana. We meet them long after his impulsive and eccentric qualities blossomed into a mental illness that intrudes on their lives and that of their two daughters.

But after receiving treatment and being prescribed Lithium he becomes their sole caregiver, when their mother moves from Boston to New York to attend business school.

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Earnest “Testament of Youth” not another glossy BBC period piece

Posted by Duane Dudek
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Do not mistake “Testament of Youth” as another glossy “Masterpiece Theater” caliber British drama for the “Far From Madding Crowd” crowd.

What sets it apart, ennobles it really, is that it’s the true story of a remarkable woman, the feminist and pacifist Vera Brittain, and is based on her 1933 memoir, still cited as a powerful anti-war statement.

It is also elevated by the performers: Alicia Vikander, of “Ex Machina” in the title role, with Kit Harington of “Game of Thrones,” as her fiance and Emily Watson and Dominic West in small roles as her parents.

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“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” turns teen movie cliches on their head

Posted by Duane Dudek
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Greg, the teenage boy in “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” skates across the surface of high school life without causing a ripple.

He is on nodding terms with all the cliques, but is a party of one.

He even calls his best friend Earl – collaborator on the short films they’ve been making since they were kids – his “co-worker.”

But when his mother forces him to befriend a classmate diagnosed with leukemia and whom he hardly knows, the experience deepens his worldview even as it darkens it.

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Magical realism and artistry in “When Marnie Was There”

Posted by Duane Dudek
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“When Marnie Was There” is about a 12-year old girl who goes off the rails.

Any similarities to “Inside Out,” about the emotional turbulence of an 11-year old girl, stop there (though that both open Friday is worthy of note).

“Marnie” from the Japanese Studio Ghibli, home of acclaimed animator Hayao Miyazakil was directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi a key animator on Miyazaki masterpieces like “Howl’s Moving Castle,” “Spirited Away” and “The Wind Rises,” said to be Miyazaki’s final film.

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Intelligent, amusing “Inside Out” plays on, and with, our emotions

Posted by Duane Dudek
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The trouble with Pixar is that they set the bar too high.

How to you top “Up” or trump “Toy Story”?

If “Inside Out” is any indication, you do so by making them again. The new Pixar film by Pete Docter, who directed “Up” and “Monster’s Inc” and wrote “Toy Story” inevitably begs comparison to Pixar’s greatest hits. And like those films “Inside Out” plays on our emotions, this time literally.

Ostensibly about a hockey loving 11-year old girl whose life is thrown into turmoil when her family moves across country, “Inside Out” is really about the voices in her, and our, heads.

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“The Connection” is the French version of gritty classic

Posted by Duane Dudek
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Rarely has the thin line between good and evil been so ambiguous.

Not morally. Just physically.

You don’t need a scorecard to tell good from bad in “The Connection,” but the resemblance – sharp jutting profile, flared sideburns, Roman nose, devilishly handsome – between two archetypes is just one of the odd details in this retelling of “The French Connection” from the French point of view.

The gritty 1971 thriller with a classic car chase and an indelible anti-hero Popeye Doyle, played by Oscar winner Gene Hackman was the stuff of suspense and momentum. The French version is a procedural and personal affair, and perhaps closer to what actually occurred in this “true” story.

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In ‘Jurassic World’ “more teeth” means more of the same

Posted by Duane Dudek
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Imagine what a film with the word “Jurassic” in the title might be like, and that’s “Jurassic World.”

“Jurassic Park” – four movies and 22 years ago – is a genre classic.

It is so old that it used robots and models for close-ups, but it also was a pioneer in the digital imaging common today.

So common that “Jurassic World” feels like nothing special. The first film  had terrifically staged bursts of terror by Steven Spielberg, who also gave us “Jaws.”

The creatures, I wrote were so vivid “you can smell the stench of their last meal.”

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