Monthly Archives: August 2013

There are funnier cartoons than the “Cars” universe of movies, and smarter ones and animated films with more heart. But there’s nothing like the “World of ‘Cars’” for toy tie-ins, or so the reasoning must have been for “Planes,” the … Continue reading →

One of the unwritten rules of summer is that no movie opens in August when it could have opened in May, June or July. In other words, action pictures, franchises, comic book films, animated movies, sci-fi, big comedies — if … Continue reading →

British actor Ben Whishaw is the quirky, brainy head of British Intelligence’s Q Division in the Daniel Craig incarnations of the James Bond movies.   He’s been at home in many a period romance and seems almost typecast as the … Continue reading →

Neill Blomkamp may be well on his way to becoming the only sci-fi writer-director who matters. And if “Elysium” is more an evolutionary leap than a revolutionary one from his break-out hit “District 9,” it still shows him in great … Continue reading →

Any thoughts that a second Percy Jackson and the Olympians film would drag Rick Riordan’s Greek Godchildren franchise out of the shadow of Harry Potter are dashed the moment Percy and his “half-blood” friends pile into a supernatural taxi in … Continue reading →

“We’re the Millers,” the last and least of the big R-rated comedies of the summer of 2013, establishes a few hard truisms for the viewer to chew on. Jennifer Aniston, playing a stripper and delivering a scantily-clad striptease in a … Continue reading →

“Lovelace,” the new film biography of the woman who starred in the most famous porn film of all time, “Deep Throat,” struggles to find novelty in a story that plays as depressingly familiar. It’s the “pretty young thing corrupted by … Continue reading →

An “innocent” religious girl who heads to Vegas to experience pleasures of the flesh, right? Russell Brand, Octavia Spencer and Nick Offerman are in the cast of this October release, which is getting a DirectTV rollout this weekend.

Director David Gordon Green makes his way back to the indie world that gave him his start, years before “Pineapple Express” and “Your Highness” turned his head with “Prince Avalanche. The comically dry dramedy smoothly fits into the career that … Continue reading →