Review: Man on a Ledge
Man on a Ledge is an adequate at best thriller that has an impressive cast, but is seemingly too guided by the studio hand to excel in any area of the filmmaking process. The film is a smorgasbord of ideas and genres, but it is all watered down and filled with one note characters. Take the film’s villain played by Ed →
Review: Red Tails
Red Tails is a long gestating project from George Lucas about the Tuskegee Airmen during WWII and the results are a good ole fashion war movie that overcomes its shortcomings through a likable cast and great action. George Lucas didn’t direct this film, that would be Anthony Hemingway, but he has been talking about making this for years, having a real →
Now Playing Review – Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
A few years back it became a hobby to make fun of the trend in marketing to describe things as extreme. Extreme sports are one thing (you aren’t going to see me jumping out of a helicopter into the middle of circling sharks while wearing a suit of meat with the goal of safely swimming back to shore. Way too →
Review: Beauty and the Beast 3D
Beauty and the Beast is back in theaters with the Disney 3D treatment and it is pretty much a success all around. The film is a deserved classic in the Disney cannon though it has never been my favorite from the era. Beauty and the Beast was part of the early 90’s resurgence for the company’s animation studio and while very →
Review: Joyful Noise
Joyful Noise is the first movie of 2012 I have reviewed and it is already in the running for the year’s worst. The film is an unbearable slog of a film that shows no craft whatsoever in both its filmmaking and musical performances. At two hours, the film felt like a freaking eternity and the filmmakers show no sense of pace →
HST Reviews: Contraband
Zac: So Lauren, you and I both saw Contraband this week, the new film staring Mark Wahlberg, Kate Beckinsale, Ben Foster and Giovanni Ribisi about a bunch of smugglers trying to iron out a family debt; what did you think? Lauren: I think that I am rather impressed with how easily you were able to narrow down that plot. Smuggling is →
For Your Renting Pleasure
As the year winds down to an end, I find myself trying to squeeze in a bunch of films that I haven't seen from the past year, all while rewatching some of the highlight films in order to compile a best of list (Be on the look out for those to start the first week of January!). Click more to →
Review: War Horse
War Horse is a beautiful and emotional look at war and the affect it has on just about everyone and everything around it. The film starts off a slowly as we get to know Joey, our protagonist horse, and his relationship with his owner, Albert. Albert is lower class and his family has always struggled to get by, but the situation →
For Your Renting Pleasure
A few weeks have passed since my last compilation post of movie rentals, and I should be ashamed at my lack of movie watching, but I have still spent a large percentage of my time wisely! We're talking playing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword on that stupid Wii and rewatching all three previous seasons of Parks and Recreation on →
Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the definitive version of this internationally renowned source material, besting both the book and the Swedish film of the same name. As we follow our protagonists, Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, on separate, yet intertwined, paths, we get to uncover a murder mystery surrounding an affluent Swedish family, The Vanger’s, and ingest →
Review: The Adventures of Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin is a wonderful action-adventure that allows director Steven Spielberg to unleash every action beat/camera move he has never been able to do with the freedom of motion capture. Our protagonist is Tintin, a young and respected journalist who ends up on crazy globetrotting adventures that endlessly puts him in the face of danger. When Tintin purchases a →
Review of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Before going on to the review, I must warn a vast majority of you all that are interested in seeing David Fincher's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's book series The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. If you cannot handle any sort of ultra-violence, which includes pictures of brutal murders and a couple of scenes of rape and torture, then →
Review: Young Adult
Jason Reitman's latest is another strong, yet lesser, effort from the young director and he gets a great performance out of his lead, Charlize Theron, who makes the most of Diablo Cody’s sharp screenplay. Theron plays Mavis Gary, a ghost writer for a formerly prominent young adult series that is coming to its unheralded conclusion. Feeling the pressure of her coming →
Review: Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
Brad Bird makes his live action debut with Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol and the results are 2/3 of a great action movie that makes up for its minor third act missteps in the finale. Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg are the returning team members from the third film as we quickly discover Ethan Hunt is in a Russian prison. Benji, →
Review: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is a solid sequel, but doesn't really advance the story or bring much new to the series. Picking up shortly after the first film, Sherlock Holmes is still in hot pursuit of Moriarty. The mastermind has been bombing multiple locations around England and causing a lot of stress upon Europe. Meanwhile, Watson has been busy →
Review: Shame
Steve McQueen’s Shame features the best performance of the year in Michael Fassbender and might also be the best film of 2011 on top of that. Our protagonist is Brandon, an affluent sex addict in contemporary New York City who spends almost every extra moment in his life "pleasuring" himself. Whether it is sex with women, masturbating at work, using call →
Review: The Artist
The Artist is an interesting homage to the silent film era that shows the format can still entertain, but it doesn't play with the format as much as it could; especially when it seems that it wants to. The picture takes place at the turn of the silent era into talkies and follows the path of Hollywood's biggest star George Valentin. →
Soon To Be Playing – Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
I was trying to come up with a “picture this” experience to start this review to give you an idea of just how big the 4th installment of the Mission: Impossible series is, but everything is just dwarfed in comparison. It is that intense. Usually there comes a point in an action film where you just have to stop and say: →
Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the English language debut for Tomas Alfredson and the result is a marvelously acted and meticulously directed and plotted spy film that will reward those who give themselves over to the plot as it unfolds its twists and turns. When a British MI6 operation goes bad in Budapest, leaving a British agent shot, the “Circus’s” top →
Now Playing Review – Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
Though it is still debatable if Robert Downey Jr. or Wishbone makes a better Sherlock Holmes, the memorable quality of Downey’s performance two years ago as the classic detective will be impossible to forget. He made what I assumed to be a stodgy, pipe-smoking British guy eccentrically cool, something that I couldn’t help get enough of. “But Lauren, why is the →
HST Discusses: Young Adult
While discussing Young Adult after a screening a couple weeks ago, Alan and I realized that we didn’t quite see eye-to-eye on this one. Here are our (spoiler free) thoughts on this movie. Also be sure to check out Zac’s review as well to see where his opinion lines up with ours. Lauren: I hate to do this, and I should →
Review: New Year’s Eve
New Year’s Eve is a terrible movie, one you shouldn’t see, and I hope it is a giant failure so we don’t get Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Arbor Day movies over the next three years. This is coming from someone who thought Valentine’s Day was a watchable mess, but this latest entry makes that film look phenomenal. In lieu of a normal →
For Your Renting Pleasure
With giant food babies resting nicely in your stomach following Thanksgiving, renting some movies to help the lounging around become a little more entertaining sounds like a pretty good idea, right? Well, here are some ideas on what to get. (Batman: Year One; Crazy, Stupid, Love; and [Rec]2 for those too impatient to wait until after the break) Batman: Year One →
Review: The Muppets
The Muppets is a joy of a film, as it is wonderful to have the gang back, and the sheer positivity of the characters paired with the excitement of seeing them on the screen again makes it easy to forgive a few shortcomings as you grin ear to ear over almost the entirety of the runtime. The film's narrative acknowledges the →
