Movie Reviews
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Star Trek Into Darkness
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
It's lame and sort of geeky to compare franchise apples to oranges. Oh, well. "Star Trek Into Darkness" does everything "Iron Man 3" tries to do, in the realm of global terrorism imagery reprocessed for popcorn kicks, but with a little more style, a dash more brio and invention. Yes, the film culminates in a vicious fistfight that goes on slightly longer than forever. Yes, it's brazenly dependent on our collective (and justified) fond memories of the best of the first-roun... (read more)
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Peeples
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
"Peeples" is an African-American "Meet the Parents" that slips funnyman Craig Robinson into the Ben Stiller role. Casting the musically minded Robinson in this formula comedy about screwing up your first encounter with your potential in-laws is like replacing Stiller's Greg Focker with Jack Black. Yeah, that might work. And here, formulaic or not, it's funny. Robinson plays Wade, an entertainer for kids who sings about learning to "use your words" and not mess yo... (read more)
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Arthur Newman
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips A wee movie of comparable interest, "Arthur Newman" is a road-tripping seriocomedy featuring Colin Firth as a depressive identity thief and former pro golfer, opposite Emily Blunt in the role of a suicidal kleptomaniac. Together they find love, while embarking on escapades involving breaking into people's homes and trying on different clothes and personalities. They're incomplete, and in need of a resting place and som... (read more)
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Pain & Gain
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
In America, you're either a "doer" or a "don't-er." So says the hostile motivational speaker played by Ken Jeong, one of several supporting sleazebags tipping around the edges of director Michael Bay's "Pain & Gain." What the self-help guru is selling, bodybuilder and gym manager Danny Lugo, played by Mark Wahlberg, is buying with a vengeance. The movie, based on the true story of a truly stupid group of pumped-up kidnappers and killers, wallows in steroidally ja... (read more)
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The Big Wedding
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The diversions in the ensemble comedy "The Big Wedding" (that title flat enough for you?) are strictly actor-related, which is usually the case at the movies. For example, the way Diane Keaton selects an asparagus spear at a country club buffet while delivering some dutiful expositional something or other. Or the rumpled panache with which Robert De Niro, playing the Keaton character's ex-husband, adapts to a different sort of role than he's used to playing: that of the unreliable h... (read more)
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42
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"42," writer-director Brian Helgeland's carefully tended portrait of Jackie Robinson, treats its now-mythic Brooklyn Dodger with respect, reverence and love. But who's in there, underneath the mythology? Has the movie made Robinson, a man who endured so much in the name of breaking Major League Baseball's color barrier and then died before his 54th birthday, something less than three-dimensionally human? I'm afraid so. This is a smooth-edged treatment of a life full of sharp, painfu... (read more)
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To the Wonder
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips In the spirit of a Terrence Malick screenplay, certain rhetorical questions to be spoken in hushed voice-over present themselves regarding Malick's latest, "To the Wonder." Can we ever see enough sunsets as filmed by Malick and his mighty cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki? Is serious spiritual yearning even worth attempting to capture in a series of moving images? And will Malick ever tire of the look of tall grass in ... (read more)
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Evil Dead
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
In the "Book of the Dead," the barbed-wire-wrapped volume causing the fuss in "Evil Dead," one lavishly illustrated page states that after the forest demon "feasts on five souls, the sky will bleed again." Translated into franchise terms: If this grim, outlandish remake of the 1983 Sam Raimi film makes $50 million or more, which it will, the multiplex screens will weep once more with crimson tears. Sequel! "Evil Dead" offers the core audience for modern... (read more)
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The Company You Keep
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips Some actors are lucky. In the third act of their careers, they become dream versions of their own parents, or grandparents. Paul Newman did that. So did Katharine Hepburn. We got to know them, and love them, at one age; then, against every Hollywood dictum, they were allowed to mature, to mellow, as they acquired a few more years. They weren't competing with their iconic youthful images so much as putting our memories of those e... (read more)
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The Place Beyond the Pines
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
In director Derek Cianfrance's previous feature, "Blue Valentine," pretension found itself in a stern deadlock with dramatic honesty. Thanks to the performance of Michelle Williams, opposite the flashier, more contrived flourishes of Ryan Gosling, the results were worth seeing. Now, however, Cianfrance has stepped up with "The Place Beyond the Pines," a more sprawling and ambitiously structured story, again co-starring Gosling. It is a better, more fully felt and moving pi... (read more)
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G.I. Joe: Retaliation
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Right in the middle of "G.I. Joe: Retaliation," which is one sort of action movie, there's another, better one that lasts five or six very good minutes. We're in the Himalayas, where the fancy ninjas such as Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee) and Snake Eyes (Ray Park) go for a little me-time and to brush up on their training. With a sword to my head, I couldn't tell you who was fighting whom, but on the face of a mountainside, with dozens of ninjas hooked up to mountain-climbing ropes, th... (read more)
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Gimme the Loot
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips In Adam Leon's "Gimme the Loot," a loose, beguiling bit of larceny, a pair of teenage graffiti artistes from the Bronx -- Malcolm, played by Ty Hickson, and Sofia, played by Tashiana Washington -- spend an eventful summer weekend in side-winding pursuit of their dream. The dream? To "bomb" the New York Mets home run apple in the stadium formerly known as Shea. This is the holy grail for taggers, the most elus... (read more)
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Olympus Has Fallen
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
For those who thought the last Bruce Willis movie was a little light on the casualty list, "Olympus Has Fallen" arrives, toting the biggest body count since "Die Hard II." Bystanders and tourists, soldiers, cops and Secret Service agents fall by the score in a movie about the unthinkable: a terrorist ground assault on Washington. (Hollywood is providing two such "unthinkable" assaults this year, with "White House Down" due out this summer.) This is &quo... (read more)
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Spring Breakers
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
No animals were harmed during the making of "Spring Breakers." But plenty of impressionable young and older minds will assuredly experience feelings of disorientation watching writer-director Harmony Korine's candy-colored clown of a movie, which starts out like a salacious, rump-centric and blithely bare-breasted hip-hop video and ends up in the realm of scary and inspired trash. That's not meant negatively. Korine is a resolute sleaze monger, whose nightmarish daydreams include &q... (read more)
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The Croods
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
It's "Ice Age" with humans and less ice. "The Croods" began life nearly a decade ago as "Crood Awakening," a collaboration of DreamWorks Animation and Aardman Studios, with a script co-written by John Cleese. Then Aardman, creators of the great Wallace & Gromit and the very good "Chicken Run," fell out of the development. Years later, here we are: Another DreamWorks movie perpetually on the run, desperately full of action because slapstick violence tran... (read more)
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The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Steve Carell. Steve Buscemi. Jim Carrey. Alan Arkin. James Gandolfini. Olivia Wilde. Good start, right? But the more you like the performers featured in "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone," the harder it is to sit back, relax and enjoy. The comedy about Las Vegas illusionists on the rocks is thin, weak and sour. The typical gags involve burnt flesh and the sight of someone pretending to crush a puppy to death. It's not a comedy; it's a wince-edy. No magic here. "The Incredible Bu... (read more)
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Beyond the Hills
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips Of all the movies culminating in a rite of exorcism, Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu's remarkable "Beyond the Hills" stands alone. It is a different sort of horror movie, focused on character and on the precarious emotional state of lovers whose affair has come to an abrupt close. The film's formal rigor is marked by long, meticulously composed shots often with six or eight or more characters jostling for atte... (read more)
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Oz the Great and Powerful
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
In show business, like all business, very often you spend money to make money. Director Sam Raimi's "Oz: The Great and Powerful" is Disney's latest attempt to spend $200 million to make a billion worldwide, on the order of Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland." Shot in 3-D on soundstages in Pontiac, Mich., the movie carries a heavy load of expectation-based freight and stockholder-oriented imperatives, enough to make it pretty hard on Raimi and company to achieve anything tru... (read more)
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21 and Over
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
Oh, for those innocent days of yore, when "The Hangover" was a malady and not a movie. It seems like millennia since the binge comedy became the new normal. But here comes "21 and Over," taking rude to a new level of crude, a post-racial romp through one epic night on one Asian-American collegian's 21st birthday. A couple of "Hangover" scribes co-wrote and directed this sometimes inspired, often funny and occasionally psychotic pub crawl through the long dark nig... (read more)
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Jack the Giant Slayer
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Most modern fantasy adventures are distinguished, if that's the right word, by shot after shot of actors gaping at amazements -- beanstalks busting out of the ground, for example, or flaming trees being flung as weapons at the king's castle -- along with actors running away yelling "Look out!" or "Aaaggghhhhh!!!" while being pursued, say, by a digitally animated giant with two heads. The movies have been into such trickery across the medium's entire life span, back to Geor... (read more)
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Phantom
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
On March 8, 1968, about 1,800 miles northwest of Oahu in the Pacific Ocean, the diesel-powered Soviet submarine K-129 exceeded its crush depth and imploded, for mysterious reasons a screenwriter would find intriguing on which to speculate. All 98 of its crew members died. The sub sank with three ballistic nuclear missiles as well as two nuclear torpedoes. How close did the world come to a serious, serious problem that day? What really happened? Did the commander go rogue, and why? Regarding &... (read more)
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Like Someone in Love
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips In "Certified Copy," from Iranian writer-director Abbas Kiarostami, a relationship blossoms and then fades under the Tuscan sun, though the story keeps changing its rules of engagement. The couple at the center, we presume, are strangers getting to know each other, but halfway through the exquisite riddle of a picture they "become" (or pretend to become) husband and wife. Nothing so tricky occurs in "Lik... (read more)
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A Good Day to Die Hard
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"A Good Day to Die Hard" isn't just the weakest of the "Die Hard" pictures; it's a lousy action movie on its own terms, even without comparing it to the adored 1988 franchise launch starring Bruce Willis as John McClane, the New York cop who's a carnage magnet for all the terrorists and a supercool symbol of American might, right and muttered wisecrack. Here, Willis barely gets a piece of his own noisy, zero-attention-span movie, and he suffers the usual indignity of any a... (read more)
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Safe Haven
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The new Nicholas Sparks movie, "Safe Haven," takes place in Southport, in the novelist's adopted home state of North Carolina. Southport is near the mouth of the Cape Fear River. So you know a murderous stalker will eventually arrive, in honor of Robert Mitchum in "Cape Fear." It's a new wrinkle to have a Sparks plot so dependent on thriller and mystery elements, some of them surprise-dependent and therefore off-limits for the purposes of the latest two-star review of the ... (read more)
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Identity Thief
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Debilitatingly witless, "Identity Thief" strands Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman on the shoulder of its own road-trip premise, an artificial construct reminiscent of "Due Date." Remember "Due Date," that sour thing with Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis? Neither do Downey and Galifianakis. The screenwriter of "Identity Thief," Craig Mazin, gave us "The Hangover Part II." All these pictures belong to the same realm of exhausted, mean-s... (read more)
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Side Effects
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
A sly one, "Side Effects" is a movie in which the main character's pharmacological state of mind is never entirely certain. In such a role it's critical to have someone who can keep an audience guessing as to the state of that mind, moment to moment. How dim, how smart, how foggy, how alert is she supposed to be at any given point in the story? With the right actress those questions take you somewhere, even if you're blindfolded. With Rooney Mara as the woman in question -- a poised... (read more)
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Bullet to the Head
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
We've been here before. The Sylvester Stallone vehicle "Bullet to the Head" concludes with an ax fight featuring Stallone against his sneering, murderous adversary, played by Jason Momoa, going at it like maniacs in the bowels of an abandoned power plant, the sort of cavernous industrial space featured in a hundred different movies starring Jean-Claude Van Damme or Jason Statham. Or Vin Diesel. I believe it was also used by Scarlett Johansson in "The Avengers." Director Wa... (read more)
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Stand Up Guys
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
A writer must eat, which is why most playwrights eventually try their hands at screenwriting. "Stand Up Guys," starring Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin, comes from the stage-trained Noah Haidle, whose story premise sounds like a sure (if derivative) thing for a trio of well-worn, well-liked mugs. We know these mugs well enough to call them by their first names. After a 28-year prison sentence, small-time hoodlum Val, played by Al, and Al's nutty hair, is greeted at the ... (read more)
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Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
An R-rated horror action comedy fairy tale -- how's that for genre bending? "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters" is more Gatling guns and grenades than the Brothers Grimm. It takes the kidnapped kiddies into adulthood, where they've parlayed their fame at cooking a witch's goose into a business. Got a witch problem? Call H & G, the extermination experts. High concept pitch or no, the movie doesn't really work. They were shooting for sort of a witch-hunting "Zombieland," an F-b... (read more)
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Mama
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
"Mama" breaks a lot of horror movie rules, right off the proverbial bat. It gives us a long back-story opening, and brings up much more back story as the tale progresses. It overexplains. It reveals its supernatural menace, not just in glimpses, but full on, and early on. There's never any idea that this might be all in somebody's head. But "Mama" is a reminder that the best chills don't involve chainsaws, blood and guts. Horror is a product of empathy -- in this case, fea... (read more)
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The Last Stand
Cary Darling, Chicago Tribune
The question with "The Last Stand," Arnold Schwarzenegger's return to the big screen (not counting "The Expendables 2") after being the governor of California and at the heart of a messy marital scandal, is this: Does he pick up where he left off as an action hero, or is it an embarrassment, hurtling him down the road to cinematic obsolescence? The answer falls somewhere squarely in the middle. For sure, "The Last Stand" is no "Terminator," but it is a ... (read more)
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Gangster Squad
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
A triumph of production design but a pretty dull kill-'em-up otherwise, the post-World War II-set "Gangster Squad" comes from the director of "Zombieland," Ruben Fleischer. It's clear Fleischer, who also made "30 Minutes or Less," hadn't worked through his "Zombieland" jones by the time he got to his latest film. I liked "Zombieland," which made a strong case for its brand of viscera and wisecracks. But "Gangster Squad" is a differen... (read more)
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Quartet
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips Murder most foul is one thing. Murder most fair is another. The veteran hambones starring in "Quartet" get away with murder most fair, through eye-bugging delight in a double-entendre in close-up (Billy Connolly); charmingly distracted line readings (Pauline Collins); underplaying so dry it becomes a form of overstatement (Tom Courtenay); and an air of unconquerable hauteur, leavened by tinges of regret (Maggie Smith).... (read more)
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Zero Dark Thirty
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
To consider what director Kathryn Bigelow has accomplished in "Zero Dark Thirty," imagine the events depicted by the story if they'd been given the "Argo" treatment. Not to take anything away from that rousing true(-ish) story of hostages freed and rights wronged and, in every sense, Hollywood triumphant. But think about it. If Ben Affleck or a lesser Ben Affleck had directed "Zero Dark Thirty," a film concluding with the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abb... (read more)
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Django Unchained
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
In "Django Unchained," which has its moments of devilish glee in and among dubious wallows in numbing slaughter, writer-director-trash compactor Quentin Tarantino delivers a mashup of several hundred of his favorite movies, all hanging, like barnacles, onto a story of a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) and his bounty-hunter savior (Christoph Waltz) out to rescue Django's wife (Kerry Washington) from a venal plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio). The plantation's "house slave" (Samu... (read more)
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The Impossible
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Everything that was false about the tsunami sequence in the recent Clint Eastwood film "Hereafter" -- the bland overview perspectives, the lack of human immediacy -- is corrected, terrifyingly, by the first half-hour of director J.A. Bayona's nerve-shredding docudrama "The Impossible." In real life, the family was Spanish; in the film written by Sergio G. Sanchez, it's an Anglo family based in Japan but vacationing in Thailand, headed by a Scot, Ewan McGregor, and the Brit... (read more)
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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"The Hobbit," the first of three movies to be yanked out of J.R.R. Tolkien's single novel, comes from Mister Middle-earth: Peter Jackson, who thrilled Tolkien fans worldwide with his lavish screen version of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. It's a moderately engaging launch to the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, the homey fellow temperamentally ill-suited to quests involving dragons and goblins and orcs. The many-hands screenplay by Jackson, Guillermo del Toro (originally sla... (read more)
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Hyde Park on Hudson
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips The music's the best thing about the peculiar, demurely prurient "Hyde Park on Hudson," starring Bill Murray as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Laura Linney as his spinster fifth cousin, Daisy Suckley. Setting the scene, and the mood, for this anecdotal account of FDR's pre-war sexual escapades one weekend in 1939, composer Jeremy Sams soaks the movie in a sly and charming recurring theme, a habanera rather like a button... (read more)
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Rise of the Guardians
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg recently lamented the dearth of holiday-themed movies headed to your multiplex this year. But in foisting "Rise of the Guardians" upon unsuspecting audiences for the holidays, it's clear he just wanted to take some of the pressure off this joyless, soul-dead piffle. "Guardians" is the worst animated movie to ever wear the DreamWorks logo. It's based on William Joyce's "The Guardians of Childhood" books, about a team tha... (read more)
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Silver Linings Playbook
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips Hollywood movies, and even off-Hollywood independent films, have long encouraged us to empathize with unstable or psychologically troubled characters only if they're "kooky" for a little while, as a prelude to more palatable, normalized levels of craziness. You know. The charming kind. Happy ending, followed by a fade to a sunny shade of black. This helps to explain why Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master" nev... (read more)
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Argo
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The propulsive hostage thriller "Argo," the third feature directed by Ben Affleck, just plain works. It's heartening to encounter a film, based on fact but happy to include all sorts of exciting fictions to amp up the suspense, whose entertainment intentions are clear. The execution is clean, sharp and rock-solid. It's as apolitical as a political crisis story set in Iran can get. But "the first rule in any deception operation is to understand who your audience is." So wro... (read more)
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ParaNorman
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Here's the historical designation of the new animated film ``ParaNorman: It's the third feature made in the painstaking stop-motion process - consciously unrealistic, herky-jerky and rough-hewn, in the George Pal ``Puppetoons or Tim Burton ``Corpse Bride vein - as well as in stereoscopic 3-D. The first two to do so were the very fine ``Coraline and the noisy, bustling ``The Pirates! Band of Misfits. The other distinction worth noting: In this summer of 2012, ``ParaNorman is one of the good mo... (read more)
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Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Why are the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" movies so much less fun, and funny, than the best of the books created by Jeff Kinney? On the page, Kinney's illustrations, those stick-figure humiliations and angsty margin doodles allegedly drawn by the exasperated protagonist, Greg Heffley, hold the key to why "Wimpy Kid" took off with so many millions of young and angsty seekers of humiliation comedy. Perpetual, grinding setbacks and massive, why-me? preteen injustices are more amusin... (read more)
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Ice Age: Continental Drift
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
First came the God particle, the Higgs boson. Then came ``Ice Age (2002). Then, ``Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006). Then ``Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009). And now arrives ``Ice Age: Continental Drift, informally known as ``Ice Age 4, also known as a paycheck and a likely haul for all involved at Blue Sky Studios and 20th Century Fox. The new picture contains a valuable lesson in recycling. It opens with what I believe is a slightly abridged version of ``Scrat's Continental Crack-Up, the ``... (read more)
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Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
Colin Covert, Chicago Tribune
"Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted" is one of the fanciest, most carefully assembled cartoons ever put on the screen. The jokes come so fast that they're nearly subliminal. Plot points whiz by, and when things threaten to blur, there's a crazy musical number or a tightly worked out physical comedy routine involving a hippo or a penguin. Then it's back on the bullet train. Your brain goes breathless and giddy struggling to keep up. Like the last "Madagascar" installment, t... (read more)
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The Pirates! Band of Misfits
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Maniacally inventive and tightly packed, if not overpacked, "The Pirates! Band of Misfits" comes from the Aardman animation folks behind "Wallace & Gromit," "Chicken Run" and, more recently, "Arthur Christmas." Their latest may be easier to admire than to love; it's more tone-funny and incidental-muttered-aside funny than, for example, your average DreamWorks smash, where every other comic beat ends with a cartoon animal getting bashed in the nethers an... (read more)
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Chimpanzee
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips Disney's 2012 movie offering for Earth Day is a gorgeous and technically dazzling look inside the world of chimpanzees -- their use of tools, their nurturing instincts, their means of organization during fights and hunts for smaller monkeys, which they sometimes eat. But "Chimpanzee" is also a throwback, a documentary that follows a baby chimp named Oscar as he struggles to learn the ways of his tribe and to survive in... (read more)
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The Cabin in the Woods
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
A peppy horror mash-up with existential airs, "The Cabin in the Woods" goes completely nuts in its final half-hour and is all the better for it. Writers lie about this sort of thing constantly, but according to screenwriters Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, who cut their eyeteeth on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" among other credits, the script came together in three days, in the spirit of "Let's try that, too." Goddard, making his feature directorial debut, plays aroun... (read more)
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The Kid With a Bike
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips Emotionally full to bursting, "The Kid With a Bike"comes from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgian brothers and masters of poetic realism whose movies, as they unfold, have the knack of fooling an audience that the artistry must've been easy to achieve. But think about it. How many so-called slices of life have ended up lifeless -- death by earnestness -- on screen? The Dardennes' latest is one of their best, a memora... (read more)
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Dr. Seuss' the Lorax
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The new animated feature "The Lorax," known in its entirety as "Dr. Seuss' The Lorax" to keep it straight from "John Grisham's The Lorax," does a few smaller things right but the bigger things not quite. I've come to fear these movies. I love Seuss so much, even his second-shelf works. Who doesn't feel protective of authors and illustrators they love? And not just because we were young when we made their acquaintance. As with "Horton Hears a Who!" four ... (read more)
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Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
A Sarah Palin joke? A Charlie Sheen wisecrack? Is this a Chipmunks movie or a Letterman monologue? As current as a Lady Gaga cover, if not quite as relevant, Alvin and the Chipmunks "Munk Up" for their third digitally animated turn on the big screen -- "Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked," a "Cast Away" takeoff that parks the three chipmunks, their three Chipette counterparts and their human family on a deserted island. Most adults would sooner gouge their ears... (read more)
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Happy Feet Two
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
I admired much of the original "Happy Feet" (2006), but five years later, I'm still considering suing its makers for emotional distreess. Certainly the most sadistic aspects of its storyline make it a film one doesn't easily revisit, either for me or my son. "Here's my review," the Young Him, not quite 5, whispered during the "Shock Corridor" climax of the first film, after Mumble the Emperor Penguin had been captured and confined. "Movie, please be over.&qu... (read more)
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The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The fourth film in the "Twilight" series reveals a flash or two of real filmmaking (mostly in a suggestively grotesque birthing sequence), enough to save it from pure lousiness. But a significant number of its 117 minutes do seem like hours, and whenever certain actors take the lead and set the pace of the dialogue, time itself begins to crawl backward and the breaking dawn begins to feel like yesterday's breaking dawn, or last Tuesday's. How did this happen? Quite apart from the so... (read more)
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Puss in Boots
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
DreamWorks' cunning casting of the silky Spaniard Antonio Banderas as a swashbuckling Puss in Boots pays off, brilliantly, in "Puss in Boots," a star vehicle for the nursery rhyme kitty cat from the "Shrek" movies. Thanks to Banderas and his Corinthian-leather purr and writers who know how to use it, "Puss" is the best animated film of 2011. This is no mere "Shrek" sequel. There is sex appeal in every syllable, swagger in every line. And even kids get t... (read more)
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Footloose
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The country-twang remake of "Footloose" strives to give us a more down-home experience than the original film. But is a more authentic "Footloose" -- with less dancing, yet -- really the way to go? The first one's fun largely because it's hooey, as synthetic as most of the fabrics worn by Kevin Bacon. It boasts genuinely charming things like the dancing-feet opening credits sequence, and "Let's Hear It for the Boy" (Bacon teaching Christopher Penn about rhythm). ... (read more)
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The Skin I Live In
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Part of the payoff of the new Pedro Almodovar movie, "The Skin I Live In," comes in seeing Antonio Banderas reunite, after two decades, with the director whose flamboyant black comedies launched Banderas into stardom. The last film they made together was "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" In "The Skin I Live In," despite its psychosexual figure eights and risky medical procedures, Banderas keeps a tight seal on his usual ebullience, anchoring with a meticulously straight ... (read more)
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Dolphin Tale
Michaelk Phillips, Chicago Tribune
I'll be honest, in the spirit of the honestly shameless heartwarmer "Dolphin Tale." I saw it in a somewhat distracted, agitated state. Forty-five seconds into the opening credits, I'm watching ocean-dwelling dolphins nosing around all sorts of potential dangers (a rusty fishing tackle box, a fateful metal crab trap), and the film's in 3-D so the dangers loom with exceptional emphasis, and the picture's premise depends on putting the eventually tailless protagonist -- a real-life dol... (read more)
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Higher Ground
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
We envy the will and passion of others; we're only human. In the fine, searching, new independent film "Higher Ground," director and star Vera Farmiga plays Corinne, a member of a fervent evangelical Christian church somewhere in the Midwest. It's not the key relationship in the film -- that would be the one between Corinne's own selves, looking for resolution -- but Corinne's most significant friendship is with Annika, the charismatic earth-mother played by Dagmara Dominczyk. With ... (read more)
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The Tree of Life
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
In 1975 writer-director Terrence Malick told a writer from Sight and Sound magazine: "There's something about growing up in the Midwest. There's no check on you. People imagine it's the kind of place where your behavior is under constant observation, where you really have to toe the line. They got that idea from Sinclair Lewis. But people can really get ignored there and fall into bad soil." In Malick's first feature, "Badlands" (1973), that soil produced the serial killer... (read more)
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Rio
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Midway through one in a manic string of chase sequences in the animated "Rio," the uptight macaw voiced by Jesse Eisenberg says, "I would love to go five minutes without almost getting killed." This is the movie's strategy: near-perpetual peril, dialogue that's ... almost funny and an extremely bright color palette, plus the musical supervision of the great Sergio Mendes, whose LPs I still have in the house somewhere, my tastes' not having changed much since 1966. Re-heari... (read more)
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Hop
Robert Abele, Chicago Tribune
When it comes to notable secular Easter movies, there's Fred Astaire at the parade with Judy Garland and little else. But with the seasonal ubiquity of candy, eggs and bunnies, it's hardly a shock that an animation company would wring some type of festive, sentimental kids flick out of so commercially tinged and cute animal-friendly a holiday. The animation/live-action ``Hop - from the producing-writing team behind last year's ``Despicable Me,'' and director Tim Hill, of ``Alvin and the Chipm... (read more)
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Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Released a year ago, the first "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" movie captured remarkably little of the sly charm of the Jeff Kinney books that line my son's bookshelf. The film did, however, capture enough of the fan base to warrant a sequel. And here we are. And it's a little better. With "Wimpy Kid I," I couldn't get past the blech factor of snot, mold and gross-out gags laid out, flatly, in a stilted live-action feature spiced with a few transitional animated sequences. Maybe I'... (read more)
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Black Swan
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Mainlining Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" ballet score like a drug addict, "Black Swan" pushes its protagonist, a Manhattan ballerina devoted (and then some) to her craft, to the brink of insanity and then a couple of subway stops beyond. Director Darren Aronofsky's film is with her all the way. Its intensity risks absurdity in nearly every scene, even the ones not featuring Winona Ryder as the alcoholic castoff of the sneering ballet impresario played by Vincent Cassel. Is &qu... (read more)
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Megamind
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Earlier this year "Despicable Me" proved it: A story about a hapless villain, humanized, is good for a few laughs and a half-billion worldwide. That figure would very likely be A-OK with the makers of the new DreamWorks animated feature "Megamind," also about a hapless villain, humanized. This villain's blue. Moderately funny though immoderately derivative, the film is no "How to Train Your Dragon" or "Kung Fu Panda," DreamWorks' recent high points, and... (read more)
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Detestable Moi 3D Numerique
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
An agreeable jumble, the animated feature "Despicable Me" sells its 3-D in ways you wouldn't call sophisticated or witty. But you certainly notice it. Front car in a roller coaster, up, up, up, then down, down, down -- aaaaahhhhAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!!! Like that. And now and then, I like it like that, no matter how dubious this second coming of 3-D is starting to smell. Compared with the restrained sophistication of Pixar's approach to the technology, and in sharp contrast to such murky,... (read more)
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Marmaduke
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
"If you're a teenager and the world doesn't fit you, you're totally hosed." And if you're making a movie about a chatty, teenaged Great Dane, you might as well give him the voice of Owen Wilson. "Marmaduke," the comic strip about life with a 200-pound canine, earns a dull but harmless big-screen comedy aimed at the youngest moviegoers. Got kids? Be thankful this isn't in pricey 3D. And be thrilled that unlike "Beverly Hills Chihuahua," nobody will want to stop at... (read more)
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Shrek Forever After 3D
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
Dreamworks seems bored with the ogre who laid the golden egg. "Shrek Forever After," the fourth film in the lucrative franchise, barely tampers with the Shrek formula (one-liners, flatulence jokes, pop tunes) and not enough to breathe life into the exhausted series. Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers) is feeling buried under the celebrity, the diapers and the playdates with Donkey's dragon-donkey toddlers. "I used to be an ogre. Now I'm a jolly green joke," he complains to Fiona ... (read more)
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Oceans
Kenneth Turan, Chicago Tribune
First "Microcosmos" examined the insect universe, then "Winged Migration" flew with birds and "Planet Earth" took us to the remotest corners of the world. So it is no shock that the visual splendors of "Oceans" are up next, reaching theaters, not by coincidence, on the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. But if the existence of a documentary that records the vastness and diversity of the ocean is hardly unexpected, what French filmmakers and "Winged Mig... (read more)
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Kick-Ass
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
In a new introduction to the eight-part comic book series "Kick-Ass," which was created in tandem with the film version, Image Comics co-founder Rob Liefeld describes the chief strength of Mark Millar's superhero lark as extolling "hyper-real super-violence," "so far over the top it has to be seen to be believed ... it makes you cringe and wince and ultimately leaves you with your slack-jawed mouth scraping the bottom of the floor." A tasty image, especially if y... (read more)
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How to Train Your Dragon: An IMAX 3D Experience
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The swoops and dives of the exuberant 3-D DreamWorks Animation feature "How to Train Your Dragon," in which the teenage hero breaks all the Viking rules and befriends the winged enemy, should prove as addicting to its target audience as similar scenes have in a little something called "Avatar." Freely adapted from the books by Cressida Cowell, "How to Train Your Dragon" exists to support its flying sequences, just as last year's animated DreamWorks offering, &quo... (read more)
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The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Kenneth Turan, Chicago Tribune
"The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" is as unusual and idiosyncratic as its title. You'd expect no less from Terry Gilliam, and admirers of this singular filmmaker will be pleased to know that "Imaginarium" is one of his most original and accessible works. Though "Imaginarium's" head-spinning plot resists easy summation, the film, co-written by Charles McKeown, has a backstory no one is likely to forget. When actor Heath Ledger died, this was the project he left... (read more)
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Avatar: An IMAX Experience
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Blue is the new green, if the billion-or-more box-office predictions come true for James Cameron's first feature since "Titanic" 12 years ago. So. How is it? Does it look like a billion? It does, yes. But folks, I haven't experienced such a clear dividing line within a blockbuster in years. The first 90 minutes of "Avatar" are pretty terrific -- a full-immersion technological wonder with wonders to spare. The other 72 minutes, less and less terrific. Cameron's story, which... (read more)
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Fantastic Mr. Fox
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
So many careful and clever visual felicities dot the landscape of Wes Anderson's animated feature "Fantastic Mr. Fox," from the catastrophically inclined watercolors painted by Mrs. Fox to the autumn breezes ruffling various species of animals' fur just so, I'm flummoxed as to why the movie left me feeling up in the air, as opposed to over the moon. Partly, I think, it's a matter of how Anderson's sense of humor rubs up against that of the book's author, Roald Dahl. It's also a mat... (read more)
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Antichrist
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" has among its cast of characters a deer, seen briefly picking at its own dangling innards, foreshadowing some rough human behavior to come. Also there is a fox who speaks at one point. "Chaos reigns," it says to the character played by Willem Dafoe. I'm inclined to agree with a colleague who told me he could swing with "Antichrist" when it was simply unstable but couldn't go with it when it turned insane. It's a useful distinction. ... (read more)
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Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Fairly inventive and exceedingly manic, "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" comes from the 1978 picture book by Judi Barrett and Ron Barrett. To say the title helped sell the kids story is an understatement, certainly the only understatement involved with the movie version. Still, there's a semblance of a comic personality at work. Plenty of middle-ground (or worse) animated features feel like timid corporate entities. This one, which is certainly fresher than "Ice Age 3,"... (read more)
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Moon
Betsy Sharkey, Chicago Tribune
Another name for "Moon" might be, and I mean this only slightly facetiously, "2009: A Space (Spacey?) Odyssey," as it's virtually impossible not to be reminded of Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece between Kevin Spacey's soothing ministrations as a computer named Gerty and Sam Rockwell's efforts to cope as the lone occupant of a lunar outpost. The film, the first for director Duncan Jones, is certainly reaching for the same stars, the ones that his dad, David Bowie, shot throu... (read more)
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Drag Me to Hell
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Director Sam Raimi gets back to his disreputable roots with "Drag Me to Hell," a title never to be confused with "Spider-Man 4" (which Raimi is preparing; let's hope it's closer in quality to "Spider-Man 2" than "Spider-Man 3"). This hellaciously effective B-movie comes with a handy moral tucked inside its scares, laughs and Raimi's specialty, the scare/laugh hybrid. Moral: Be nice to people. More specifically: Do not foreclose on the old Gypsy woman, o... (read more)
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Star Trek: The IMAX Experience
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
After "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," which exists primarily for its 7-Eleven Slurpee tie-in, the world needed a better franchise product, one that works with an audience rather than simply working it over. Here it is. The new "Star Trek" motion picture, not to be confused with "Star Trek - the Motion Picture" (1979), seeks to extend a lucrative brand with a young demographic. But it's a real movie - breathlessly paced bordering on manic, but propulsively entertainin... (read more)
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Earth
Kenneth Turan, Chicago Tribune
It would be Pollyannish to pretend that the documentary "Earth" is without its problems, but the bottom line is, difficulties be damned, it shouldn't be missed. What it does well is so remarkable that by the time the credits roll you likely won't want it to end. Walt Disney Co. is hoping people feel that way because it has a lot invested in this documentary from a corporate point of view, so much so that it has promised to plant a tree in honor of every moviegoer who goes to see it.... (read more)
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Sleep Dealer
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Present-day Tijuana is one of the most compelling places on earth, and even among border cities (what few I've seen, anyway) it represents a spectacular welter of rich possibility and crushing limitation. It's a symbol of the push-pull co-dependency of America and Mexico, a city defined by a fence that runs straight down the beach, into the Pacific Ocean. Alex Rivera's overstuffed but intriguing feature debut "Sleep Dealer" takes a speculative leap into Tijuana's near future, imag... (read more)
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Fast & Furious
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
If you're in the mood for a lot of vroom, vroom, thump, thump, "Fast & Furious," the fourth edition of that metal-twisting series, should leave you satiated for a very long time. "The Fast and the Furious" pit crew, or most of it, is back, led by Vin Diesel's Dom - all ripped muscles and fast cars and evil deeds. He's as enigmatic as ever, and still with girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), the only one who's ever been able to push past Dom's "auto" erotic zone... (read more)
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Coraline
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"Coraline" may not be for all tastes and it's certainly not for all kids, given its macabre premise. But writer-director Henry Selick's animated feature advances the stop-motion animation genre through that most heartening of attributes: quality. It pulls audiences into a meticulously detailed universe, familiar in many respects, whacked and menacing in many others. Unlike other recent films shot in 3-D ("Bolt" comes to mind), this one takes rich advantage of the process, ... (read more)
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Hotel for Dogs
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
So many canines are going potty in the nation's multiplexes this month, what with "Marley & Me" and now the ensemble bowser adventure "Hotel for Dogs," I wouldn't be surprised if Lars Von Trier re-released "Dogville" just for fun. He'd make $10 million before the kids knew what hit 'em. I love dogs. My kind of animal. They understand my needs, and their owners are kinder, more humane, more intelligent and better-looking than the average non-dog-owning citizenry. ... (read more)
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The Tale of Despereaux
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The chipper cynicism of the "Shrek" movies ($2.2 billion in grosses worldwide) is a popular commodity indeed because so many cultures share the same fairy tale tropes and enjoy seeing them shot at with a pea shooter. The success of those films makes it doubly hard for a more earnest, emotional number such as "The Tale of Despereaux" to gain traction with a mass audience, particularly a mass audience of preteens for whom DreamWorks and Nickelodeon-fed sarcasm is the default... (read more)
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The Dark Knight: The IMAX Experience
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Sensational, grandly sinister and not for the kids, "The Dark Knight" elevates pulp to a very high level. Heath Ledger's Joker takes it higher still, and the 28-year-old actor's death earlier this year of an accidental overdose lends the film an air of a funeral and a rollicking, out-of-control wake mixed together. In "The Dark Knight," Ledger makes all other comic-book screen villains look like Baby Huey. Like Shakespeare's Iago or Richard III, like Anthony Hopkins' Hanni... (read more)
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Iron Man
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Surviving his own private Afghanistan hostage drama, billionaire industrialist Tony Stark returns home, as he terms it, "conflicted." You could say the same about "Iron Man," in which a war profiteer develops a conscience, an off-and-on politicized streak and a titanium alloy flying suit, with jets of flame shooting out of his palms. As big-budget comic book adaptations go, this one's a gratifying freak - the right kind of conflicted, as well as quick-witted. It's a lot of... (read more)
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Shine a Light
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The ads for the new Rolling Stones concert picture "Shine a Light" come at you like a three-way heavyweight title bout. There's also an undeniably corporate air to the packaging: three well-known brands converging for an event, a concert by the Stones performed in 2006 at New York's Beacon Theatre, apropos of nothing except a chance to be captured for posterity for fun and profit, en route to the next tour stop. But who needs an excuse for a party? This one's a lot of fun. Director... (read more)
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Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Someday, if we're all good little boys and girls, the world will hand us a Dr. Seuss film half as wonderful as one of the books. Meantime we have the competent, clinical computer animation and relative inoffensiveness of "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!" to pass the time. Graced with some rich voice talent led by a sweetly restrained Jim Carrey, the film is far less grating than the big-budget versions of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (big hit) and "The Cat in the H... (read more)
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U2 3D
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
It takes a seriously pretentious band to maximize the digital IMAX 3-D format. U2 is that band. And while "U2 3D" doesn't rank with "Stop Making Sense" or "The Last Waltz" in the realm of top-shelf concert films, it's enjoyable and a fine fat eyeful. Bono's sunglasses alone justify the visual showcase. The U2 "Vertigo" tour was large to begin with. Co-directors Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington and crew shot 100-plus hours of footage, as Bono, The Ed... (read more)
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Alvin and the Chipmunks
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
How to explain the appeal of Alvin and the Chipmunks?the old ones, the ones who hit it big in 1958 with "Witch Doctor" and, more indelibly, "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)"? Very simple: Helium voices. People think helium voices are funny. (Creator Ross Bagdasarian, who died in 1972, did all the voices, including Dave, the short-tempered father figure.) Also, Dave screaming out "Alvin!!!!" on cue?that was funny too, or at least "funny enough.&qu... (read more)
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Stardust
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"Stardust" has its moments, most of them plot-unrelated. The highlight is a patter routine wherein Robert De Niro, as a cross-dressing pirate, haggles over the price of some fenced goods with a disreputable fellow played by Ricky Gervais. The way these two negotiate back and forth it's like Faerie Kingdom vaudeville, a distant cousin to the Billy Crystal and Carol Kane routines in "The Princess Bride." Most of "Stardust," alas, has no time for such detours. The ... (read more)
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The Simpsons Movie
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"For once the rich white man is in control!" Mr. Burns, incomparable plutocratic sniveler voiced by the (BEGIN ITALICS) real (END ITALICS) star of "The Simpsons Movie," Harry Shearer, hasn't much screen time in this adaptation - a good one; a little disappointing, but good - of the animated television series created by Matt Groening. But Shearer does get to snivel that line, one of many lines by 11 credited writers that does its job, deftly, and then skitters out of the wa... (read more)
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The Host
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"The Host" is for people who couldn't handle the whirlwind pace of events in the "Twilight" trilogy and who prefer a love triangle unafraid to redefine, for a new generation, the word "lollygag." It features several shots of Diane Kruger (as a capital-S Seeker alien, middle-managing the takeover of Earth) standing around in the desert, next to her shiny alien sports car of the near future, waiting around for a stray human to show up and make her day. The film may... (read more)
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Charlotte's Web
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The E.B. White wonder known as "Charlotte's Web" is told in such simple, beautiful language that any film version is bound to come up a little runty by comparison. Yet if you don't expect the moon or any directorial distinction, the new adaptation of the 1952 classic works on its own terms while respecting the original. I liked it. I didn't love it the way I love the book, but the book ... well, that is some book. The last "Charlotte's Web" on film was the animated 1973 Ha... (read more)
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Happy Feet
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
A dancing-penguin epic with more mood swings than "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Terms of Endearment" put together, "Happy Feet" also claims the distinction of being the grimmest film with the word "happy" in its title since "Happy Birthday, Wanda June." This is merely a fact, not a dismissal. Far from it: A lot of director George Miller's film is gorgeous and exciting. Its craftsmanship and ambition put it a continent ahead of nearly every othe... (read more)
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The Departed
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
After the dolled-up theatrics of his last few features, from "Casino" (1995) up through "The Aviator" (2004), it's a kick to find director Martin Scorsese back in prime form, at least in the terrific first half of "The Departed." The second half of this Boston-set thriller, based on the sleek, more sparingly brutal 2002 Hong Kong export "Infernal Affairs," can't quite match it, despite a few bursts of startling violence handled as only a first-rate dire... (read more)
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The Science of Sleep
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
It's a tonic to see a film, however uneven, obsessed with the question of what young love is, exactly, while detailing the stupid stuff that makes people act like jerks over someone. Michel Gondry's romantically besotted dreamscape "The Science of Sleep" is one of those movies. It only works about half the time, but it's an interesting half. Following his father's death, the Franco-Mexican illustrator Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) returns to Paris and his parents' apartment building... (read more)
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Deep Sea 3D
Michael Esposito, Chicago Tribune
Director Howard Hall (?Into the Deep,? ?Island of the Sharks?) and the underwater IMAX film team do their usual splendid job of making the sea and its often-hungry denizens look beautiful in ?Deep Sea 3D.? While the film spans the oceans, much of it takes place in near-shore areas such as coral reefs and kelp forests - areas teeming with life from minuscule plankton to a hefty (though still youthful) right whale, not to mention rays, eels, a multitude of crustaceans, anemones, seastars, barra... (read more)
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Ballets Russes
Sid Smith, Chicago Tribune
?Ballets Russes? may not be the greatest dance documentary ever made, but it could well be the most accessible and touching. It tells the straightforward history of the renowned Ballets Russes troupe from 1929 until its demise in 1962, providing ample commentary, wit and whimsy, as well as tidbits on ballet aesthetics, backstage gossip and clip after clip of rare footage. But it also, almost slyly, does something else, arguably as important. Taking the cue from its opening line of narration -... (read more)
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The Squid and the Whale
Allison Benedikt, Chicago Tribune
I remember writhing around on the floor of my family room as a child, sobbing hysterically as I watched a VHS tape of Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep duking it out in ?Kramer vs. Kramer,? their shattered marriage and custody battle far more frightening to me than any invisible monster under the bed. Divorce, I knew even then, is scary stuff, especially for a kid whose whole identity is wrapped up in that idealized view of mom and dad as the fixers, the protectors, the expert providers of unco... (read more)
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