movie-review

Rating the Carnage: The Hunger Games's Violence Solution

Rich Juzwiak · 03/23/12 11:24AM

"The real sport of the Hunger Games is watching the tributes kill one another," says protagonist Katniss Everdeen in the first book of Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy. The real sport of The Hunger Games, Gary Ross's compulsively entertaining cinematic adaptation, is breezing by those murders without offending delicate sensibilities.

Immortals Is Like a Perfect Lover: Beautiful and Stupid

Brian Moylan · 11/11/11 01:37PM

We've all met them before, someone who is incredibly attractive, almost unbelievably so. It's like they were Photoshopped by nature. But then they start talking and you realize there is absolutely zero substance to them. Still, you keep talking to them, engaging with them, because it's just so damn pretty. That is exactly what watching Immortals is like.

Martha Marcy May Marlene: The Deprogramming of Elizabeth Olsen

Richard Lawson · 10/21/11 09:54AM

The first feature film from young writer/director Sean Durkin is certainly a stylistically assured debut — mysterious, moody, unbearably tense in parts — but all the style can't shroud the fact that there isn't much substance.

Footloose: Welcome to the New Millennium, Ren

Richard Lawson · 10/14/11 10:43AM

The much-dreaded (by some, at least) remake of the 1984 teen classic turns out to be, with an injection of youth, quite spry indeed. It's an old story made refreshingly new. But not too new.

Ides of March: Politics as Usual

Richard Lawson · 10/07/11 10:03AM

George Clooney's fourth feature film as a director (and co-writer and star) is a slick and entertaining, but ultimately unshocking, look at the underbelly of a progressive presidential campaign.