Sinister is a decent ghost/demon horror movie. The writer/director Scott Derrickson is a horror movie maker who’s been quite busy in the genre for the passed decade or so. Sinister stars Ethan Hawke as Ellison Oswalt, a true-crime novelist. It’s been awhile since his last hit novel and he moves his family into a home that’s had a rather gruesome murder in it to help him write about what happened there. He finds a box of 8mm film in the attic which gives him huge leads on the crimes he wants to write about. It also awakens a demon that pulls Ellison and his family into the darkness of a decades long killing path, If Ellison can make it through, he has the novel of a lifetime in his hands.

Very easy on the gore front, Sinister goes more for the creepy scares. Lot’s of shadows, things that go bump in the night type of stuff. The movie is well put together and has some good ideas in it, but it’s a bit long in the tooth. It slowly builds up until the last 10 minutes or so where everything comes together. An angle with Elllison’s son is started near the beginning and then completely dropped in favor of focusing solely on Ellison. In fact after that, the son is basically forgotten for the rest of the movie. There’s some great tension build up throughout, but the “monster” of the movie looks like a professional wrestler more than a demon so his visual impact undermines his impressive stalking capabilities

I thought the end was pretty creative, but it’s an easy movie to forget when one or two of these types of demon/possession movies  come out every single year. It’s a packed field with Insidious, Mama, The Conjuring, Paranormal Activity and all of their sequels. It gets hard to remember which ones I’ve seen and which one is new.  ‘Tis the season for this kind of movie, but I found Sinister to be a middle of the road affair.

I like seeing Wes Anderson movies because no one makes them like he does. He has a unique voice and vision that is all his own. It’s like seeing a Quentin Tarantino movie, you know you are in for something unique which is half the fun. The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson’s 8th full length movie and possibly my favorite.

GBH is the tale of Gustave, a legendary concierge of the hotel between the first and second world wars. We watch as the story is relayed to a writer in the 1960’s by Zero Moustafa, the lobby boy who became Gustave’s protege and best friend. It’s a story packed with adventure, love and murder run by some of the most memorable characters (and actors) around.

This movie is an absolute joy to look at. A color palette rarely seen in this age of orange and teal combined with wild set design, crisp costumes and some of the most meticulous direction and staging. Wes Anderson sees his movies long before he films them and somehow manages to get it all out of his head for others to see. It’s almost like watching a doll house come to life. Wes has somehow come up with this style that is like live action animation.  His actors seem to move in a special way for his films.

As much as I gush about the visual brilliance of GBH, the acting (and amazing characters) need just as much praise. Wes Anderson likes using the same actors from project to project and quite a few return for bit parts (Ed Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson). Ralph Fiennes as Gustave is simply brilliant. The manic pace and line delivery never stops with him. F. Murray Abraham as the grown Zero holds a certain gentlemanly glow and pride that Gustave would have been over the moon about. Tony Revolori as young Zero is the epitome of a Wes Anderson character actor. While Gustave and Zero are the stars of this universe, they are surrounded by greatness. Willem Dafoe as the murderous Jopling, Adrien Brody as the angry and hilarious Dmitri and the always lovely cadence of Jeff Goldblum as Kovacs.

Wes Anderson movies are very polarizing. You either love it or hate it. You understand what it is or you don’t get it at all. The Grand Budapest Hotel hits all my marks with phenomenal dialog, distinct and memorable characters and actors who can pull it all off. Unique production that shows what masters of the craft can do and sumptuous directing. A story that is new, weird, funny and touching. Love every bit of it, I know I’ll be coming back to The Grand Budapest Hotel for years to come.

Four movies into this franchise and it’s more of an endurance test to get to the end. The quality has always been all over the place, from a decent start, to a horrific sequel to a much better third movie. Age of Extinction feels tired and dragged out in every conceivable way.

The set up is mostly the same. The Autobots are in hiding after the events of the last movie as the battle in Chicago turned the nation against these aliens. When a new threat arises, the Autobots are needed to fight again. Most of the human cast is new with cookie cutter characters who more or less just run and scream when necessary.

Everything feels very paint by numbers, it follows the Transformers mold without anything really added to it. Sure there are new characters, but they all do the same thing. One city is replaced by another for the last action scene. Optimus Prime is completely unstoppable as he repeatedly gets up from devastating damage. Massive liberties with the laws of physics. Action scenes that are like watching a circus as there is so much going on at once that you don’t know what your supposed to be looking at. Computer generated images just running into each other. It gets exhausting. The quality of CG also varies quite a bit. The third movie has some truly stunning work from start to finish while Age tends to have compositing issues. While the robots usually blend and match well with the live action, it can get sloppy which is distracting. Direction wise, it’s Michael Bay so you know exactly what to expect (there are some sweet explosions).

Somehow they managed to stretch this out to over 2 and a half hours when it has no business going passed 2. It just keeps going and going and going.  I think not making a movie as bad as the second one is an achievement, but there’s nothing here worth paying attention to. Somehow they keep pulling in massive amount of money, so until more people get bored and move on, I don’t think there’s an end in sight.

Jack the Giant Slayer is the retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk (somethings were changed from how most of us have heard the  fairy tale) with director Bryan Singer at the helm. Starring Nicholas Hoult as the title character, Slayer is a solid interpretation of this age old tale.

Giants are legend, a story told to children at bedtime. When Jack runs into a monk who is quick to make a deal, it’s not long before Jack and mankind come to realize that Giants are real when the beanstalk stretches into the sky and the two worlds collide.

This movie has it all, a reluctant hero, a tough princess on a mission, a bad guy hell bent on power and an army of Giants ready to crush anything in their way. When this movie finally came out, it was basically met with shrugs and a box office take that was way below it’s budget. It’s a good movie, I’m not too sure why it was met with such apathy. I guess the popularity of this fable is pretty low.

I’m a fan of Nicholas Hoult since seeing him in the UK show Skins and he’s great as Jack. The whole movie is cast with great actors. It’s a fun story, some good action scenes, a runtime that’s just right and a great storybook ending.

I think the biggest knock would be the Giants themselves. They always look like they’re computer generated, but they still look and animate really well. There’s a ton of CG from start to finish and most of it is very good. It’s also rated PG-13 with most of the violence not shown on camera (Giants do like eating people). The battles get pretty intense and there is death shown, so younger kids could get frightened.

I was pleasantly surprised by this one.

Godzilla starts really strong, but some puzzling decisions later on mare the monster movie experience

The beginning and set up are far and away the best part of this 2 hour movie. Bryan Cranston is great, as usual, it’s exciting and suspenseful half hour or so. They tease each of the active monsters really well and the reveals are terrific. The monster designs are really cool and the sense of scale is perfect. Godzilla looks and sounds awesome, his blue fire breath a sight to behold!

The problem is the constant cutting away from Godzilla when it really matters. What starts as effective teasing and foreshadowing turns into annoying and confusing edits. For example, when Godzilla first confronts the winged monster, they growl at each other, Godzilla starts to approach and…they cut away to what some humans are doing. We miss the entire confrontation and have to figure out what happened between them. It doesn’t make any sense. At that point we have a good impression that Godzilla is a protector, his goal is to throw down and the other monster knows that. They have a biological history, the animal kingdom with beasts bigger than skyscrapers. Why didn’t they show Wings quickly fend off Godzilla and get away (at this point Wings is on a mission, but we don’t know what it is. He avoids a direct Godzilla confrontation for a reason). This happens more than once where we are robbed of what we want to see and get “aftermath” shots of the path the monster took to get away instead.

Then, we get the final fight which is great, but it was super dark at times so it’s hard to see and again we get these long cuts away from the fight to see what the “hero” humans are doing. The whole megaton bomb angle was completely mishandled (stick with the diffusing, the boat to sea is implausible nonsense) which upped to the stupid factor to an unnecessary level. There is a lot of stupid things going on actually. The “monsters checking out the hero” thing was really awkward too. Sorry, I don’t think these things are going to notice and pick out a person who is the size of an ant and eyeball him like it’s something out of The Lion King (and he’s everywhere! He reaches the most important places at the exact right time and survives multiple war zones that kill hundreds). Then there is a scene where a group goes to check on a object that’s in nuclear waste storage near Las Vegas. They go door to door and come to a vault with light pouring out of it. They open it up and the entire back of this buried facility has been obliterated. A gigantic crater with tracks leading away from it. No one noticed that happening? It went down before the group showed up (no hint of the destruction in progress) so they went into a half building without even thinking, “that’s weird”. It’s stupid.

For everything Godzilla get’s right, there’s a dumb decision that pulls it back. I have to put Pacific Rim head and shoulders above this one. Disappointing.

As a videogame to movie adaptation, Need for Speed is successful. But that videogame tie in also what holds the movie back from being really great. There’s a lot of try-hard to be cool dialog that can be hard to put up with and an overall goofy tone that takes away from the experience.

In my typical review framing, I’ll talk about what I liked the most. It’s a great looking and sounding movie. Kinetic and clean direction, eye catching cinematography with gorgeous cars and locations. I really appreciate and admire all of the practical car stunt driving with the added CG to sweeten things up a bit. The races and action scenes are a blast to watch.

They pulled a lot of visuals right from the game, the final race travels through many of the locations that you blast through in some of the videogames recent releases. The movie gets the feel of the games and runs with it. Which is also it’s biggest problem.

The movie is basically a revenge picture with all around good guy Tobey vs the colossal jerk Dino. The drama is all set up with Tobey being the underdog with his lovable (and talkative) friends surrounding him. They always rally around their friend to help him out. The driving in the Need for Speed games is really amped up stuff with cops, planes, helicopters, barricades and a pack of drivers in the most exotic cars on earth trying to run you off the road. They transfer all of that into the movie so airplanes and choppers constantly appear out of nowhere. The way drivers get messages and the GUI of the pause screen is almost directly lifted from the games into the movie too. It’s hard to take anything seriously…a lot like a Michael Bay movie.

There’s nothing truly bad about Need for Speed, it just goes through the motions. The plot is nothing special and the characters are nothing special. I think car nuts will really like the action scenes as those are done really well and what Need for Speed is for anyway. It’s one of those movies that you don’t seek out, but if you see it on HBO, you’ll check out because you have nothing better to do.

This marks the 2nd cinematic take on Stephen King’s novel, Carrie (1976, with a sequel in 1999 and a TV movie in 2002). With the brilliant Chloe Grace Moretz in the title role, this tale of telepathic revenge has a lot going for it (how cool is that poster? Great idea).

I’ve seen parts of the 1976 Carrie and have been meaning to read the book for ages (I’m well overdue to dipping my toes back into King’s waters) so I go into this knowing the basics and don’t know what was changed from the book. The most obvious is bringing the story closer to present day with cell phone use. Despite seeing iPhones and such in the hands of teenagers, the time period of the movie felt like it was taking place sometime in the 1990’s.

It’s a really straight forward movie. Carrie White is an outsider at her school because of her mother (home schooling, super religious). She doesn’t have any friends and does come off as bit weird (she does have telekinetic powers, but no one knows it and she’s just trying to understand them herself). But she is a good girl. She wants to belong and just be a normal kid. After a humiliating experience in the showers after gym class, Carrie is at her lowest. Sue, who was part of the mob mentality in the showers, regrets what she did and wants to make up for it. She decides she’s going to skip prom, asking her boyfriend to take Carrie instead. Show her a good time, make a positive memory from her high school days. Carrie’s mother is completely against it (to say the least) and tries to stop Carrie from going. In the infamous prom scene, Carrie is humiliated again by one of her classmates. She snaps, cleaning house in the process.

I think this is promoted as a horror movie (and Carrie does obliterate quite a few people), but I didn’t find this scary at all. It is really sad. Carrie is a girl who never got a fair shake at life. It’s easy to paint her mother, Margaret (Julianne Moore) as the villain, but her past is wrought with tragedy as well. The real problem is Chris. That girl is grade A lunatic. The movie ends on a total downer to boot.

I think the weakest part of the movie is that it feels a little thin. Small glimpses at character backgrounds and Chris is such a nutter it’s hard to believe she does what she does. They insinuate she’s a spoiled brat, but the murderous glee she shows is something else. Aside from that, it’s a well made movie. Chloe keeps knocking her roles out of the park, she’s such a great actress. Really believable, she’s a major asset to any movie she chooses to work on. It’s well shot (aside from one camera shot/edit during a fight with Carrie and her mother that I’m pretty sure makes no sense physically) and the special effects are really good. Lots of practical work mixed in with CG and the deaths in the final act are  creative and well done.

While I think they hit all the right marks…was this reboot necessary? Aside from adding social networking to the bullying angle, it’s really no different. I’d say it’s worth a watch if you are interested.

Much like Spider-Man swinging through NYC, this movie has a ton of peaks and valleys. The great moments are often followed by an odd scene of awkwardness, dullness, confusion and a sense that something is missing despite a long 2 hour and 20 minute run time.

I’ll start with what I like. Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker and Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy are nearly perfect. They have a real on screen chemistry and they both look and act their parts true to their comic book characters. Much of the visual work is really, really well done. I like Marc Webb’s direction and there are some beautiful shots from start to finish. I liked the overall tone of the movie that mixes hope, despair, fun and fear in equal measure. The plight of a hero and the darkness of the world that often surrounds him.  There’s some great character beats with Spider-Man (i.e. the small scenes with the kid) and the fight with Hobgoblin in the clock tower leads to arguably the biggest and heaviest moment of the movie franchise. That climax had some real weight to it and was done really well. A lot of people moaned about Rhino’s placement, but I like how it bookends the movie. He’s a goofy C level villain anyway so I think it’s rather fitting that he’s shown as more or less a speed bump.

Now the bits that weigh it down. Some really weird soundtrack choices. The chanting bit for Electro is bizarre and sounds really out of place. The villains suffer from Iron Man 2 syndrome, which mostly wasted potential. Their M.O.s are paper thin. Poorly thought out reasoning and all too brief usage. There’s not enough substance to them to make you care about them. They are far too simple and their turn to villainy is far too fast. It’s like a flick of a switch and “Here’s you antagonist!” While the movie looks great, some terrible CG work on Rhino at the end is real eyesore. The acting sometimes spins out of control (namely between Peter and Harry Osborn). I think the biggest problem is how disjointed the movie feels, like a lot was cut out and moved around. It seems like when everything was shot, a lot of heavy editing went down to wrangle all the plot points into a cohesive story. You have a few villains, a tumultuous relationship and family issues (of those living and dead) all being juggled around. All the pieces doesn’t fit together quite right. It also feels like this story is a linking piece, that something bigger and more important is going to happen next. It’s as if they want you to sit tight and hang on until they get to real point they want to make in the next movie.

Spider-Man 2 (2004) is still the best movie, this one feels like it got too wiggly to hold for the filmmakers at times. It does a lot right, but the faults are too many and great to ignore. Thankfully Amazing 2 is far better than the disaster that is Spider-Man 3. Hopefully no one (comic book or otherwise) will plunge to that depth ever again.