THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS balances a vibrant cacophony of action with a criminally flabby script that takes far too long to get where it needs to go. It is a triumph of forthright, even giddy, self-awareness and nostalgia as Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) once again enters the Matrix as a neophyte taking us along for the… Read More »
ANGEL HAS FALLEN
The word is carnage. ANGEL HAS FALLEN never goes more than a few minutes without someone or something being taken out. Sometimes in multiples. Often with a fiery conflagration. Very often. This third in the series featuring dogged Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) finds our hero happily settled into blissful domesticity with wife… Read More »
MAGIC MIKE XXL: Flash and Dazzle
Steven Soderbergh is an executive producer of MAGIC MIKE XXL, but that is the only trace of that director to be found in this sequel that is more about joy than angst. Channing Tatum, returning as the eponymous male stripper, has taken the fun and dazzle from the original and eschewed most of the cerebral… Read More »
MADAGASCAR — ESCAPE 2 AFRICA
MADAGASCAR 2 ESCAPE TO AFRICA begins with a backstory, the better to set up the forestory of this animated piece. Alex (Ben Stiller), the dancing king of New York, was not always an inhabitant of the Central Park Zoo. Nor was always an inhabitant of the New World, for that matter. No, when he was… Read More »
MADAGASCAR
As I was watching MADAGASCAR, the new animated flick from Dreamworks, it occurred to me that there just aren’t enough lemurs in films of any kind and that’s a darn shame. Not just because as primates they’re our cousins, distantly, but also because there is something intrinsically and compellingly absurd in their large eyes and… Read More »
REIGN OVER ME
Sooner or later a film was bound to make 9/11 a glib plot point and with REIGN OVER ME, so it has come to pass. The good news is that this is one-half of a terrific film. The bad news is that Adam Sandler is in the other half. The worse news is that 9/11… Read More »