Monthly Archives: January 2013

You don’t think of empathy as something you have to teach your child. They’re born with it, you’d guess. Or life itself will teach it to them. Laurie Bonner (Anna Gunn) didn’t take that chance. A widow and a single … Continue reading →

  “Red Dawn” is a lot funnier than you remember.

  The image of Edgar Allan Poe passed down to us is that of a dour, pale and morbid drunkard, a poet haunted by lovers who died in his arms. But he was also a playful wordsmith, an eviscerating critic, … Continue reading →

The hunters become the hunted in the blink of an eye in “The Raid: Redemption,” a neck-snapping/leg-stabbing lead and blood-spattered action overdose from Indonesia. It’s an orgy of beautifully shot and choreographed brawls, shootouts and knife fights, perhaps the cinema’s … Continue reading →

The rarefied world of classical music is the setting and the intimate “perfect square” of a string quartet the crucible for “A Late Quartet,” a melodrama of love, lust, betrayal and Beethoven. It’s a quiet film of tempestuous but predictable … Continue reading →

For much of the cinema’s history, the movies have had the good sense to keep Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis Professor Moriarty off camera, an unseen menace made all the more menacing by his absence. But Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes: A Game … Continue reading →

Megan McDonald’s third-grade spitfire Judy Moody makes her moody leap from the page to the big screen with much of the spit, if not her fire, intact. “Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer” is a mild-mannered kids’ comedy that … Continue reading →

The heft of having Robert Redford in your documentary can’t have hurt the filmmakers behind “Buck,” a somewhat superficial look at the famed horse trainer who coached Redford during the making of “The Horse Whisperer.” And where that star power … Continue reading →

Terrence Malick is still making poetry in that most prosaic of worlds, the movies. But is there a place for the director of “Days of Heaven” and “The New World” in today’s high-def, literal, ultra-realistic cinema? Judging from his ambitious, … Continue reading →