Truthfully, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug didn’t have much to do to be a good movie given our reception to the last one. However, the success of the second film is based not on low expectations, but on the sheer force of good movie making. By ratcheting up the tension and delivering some of the best set pieces of the year, Pater Jackson and company manage to craft a fairly engaging tale.
Originally published at Awards Circuit When one hears about a new Disney princess film, many happy memories come to mind as well as many questions. Will it be too heavy on the love story? Will the songs be any good? What more can be gleaned from a princess tale? Luckily for audiences Disney’s newest film Frozen manages
Well they’ve climbed perhaps the biggest mountain and are now hurtling towards the finish line. Catching Fire is the lynchpin in the books written by Suzanne Collins where the subject matter gets even more mature and luckily for audiences the film version, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, is a solid enough flick to get us to the real craziness. I was on record as not really digging the first Hunger Games film so I’m happy to report those who might have been scared away should give this film a chance.
Philomena is a film in the vein of most of the Weinstein Company films: a solid movie that doesn’t do too much or too little, rests on some good performances and snappy dialogue. The movie, which is out this week, was runner up for the Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and comes out with a certain pedigree. Thankfully this small flick manages to be enjoyable, if a little bit too well meaning, on its way to a pretty good conclusion.
Two years ago Ashgar Farhadi gifted the world with a dazzling movie titled A Separation. Winning every award in sight, it announced the filmmaker to an audience he didn’t previously have, like myself. So when it was announced that the director would have his follow up film The Past at AFI I rushed out to have the opportunity to see the flick. While the movie doesn’t reach the operatic heights of his prior film, The Past is still a solid movie.
It’s so nice when a movie is so good it can defy your previously conceived notions/fear. To be honest, when I first heard about Her,I had ZERO desire to watch it. How interesting would a movie about a dude falling in love with a computer be? And given my feelings towards the other Spike Jonze films I’d seen I was skeptical of this latest effort. Even with all those misgivings, I made sure to get myself to a screening at AFI Fest to see what all the praise and affectations were about with this movie.