Despite OK visual effects, a few chills and some newfangled movie monsters, writer-director Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad’s supernatural thriller “Jinn” often feels like one-half of an old grindhouse double bill. It’s a watchable if rather convoluted effort.
The titular jinn, according to Eastern mythology, are one of three races created “In the beginning…” (the other two are man and angels). Conveniently--for a horror film, anyway--the mysterious jinn are nothing if not flexible. These time- and shape-shifting beings can be good or bad, peaceful or violent, invisible or in your face (at times they resemble upright fireplaces). Whatever, you want them on your side.
Unfortunately for Shawn (Dominic Rains), a model-handsome Michigan auto designer married to the equally pretty Jasmine (Serinda Swan), he must suddenly do battle with a vicious sect of the jinn, the Shayateen, due to a family curse that stretches back to 1901. Suffice to say this ancestral history is news to Shawn and it’s delivered the old-fashioned way: on a VHS tape.
What follows is a frantic few days in which Shawn must collaborate with an unlikely trio of jinn experts--a shadowy priest (William Atherton), a protective tough guy (Ray Park) and a manacled mental patient (Faran Tahir)--to learn how to fight the fiery Shayateen at their own miserable game and, y’know, save the world. This demands that, among other things, Shawn pass an ancient ritualistic test called the Chillah (don’t ask).
Meanwhile, Jasmine, who may or may not be pregnant with Shawn’s child, has allegedly been abducted by the bad jinn. Cue the stacked deck.
Magical swords, evil doppelgangers, a sexy black muscle car, an unremarkable final showdown and lots of first-draft dialogue factor into this thankfully brief (about 80 minutes plus end credits) frightfest.
As for the film’s closing promise: “The Jinn will return”--don’t hold your breath.
In the beginning, three were created. Man made of clay. Angels made of light. And a third made of fire. For centuries, stories of angels and men have captured the imagination and been etched into history crossing all boundaries of culture, religion and time. These two races have dominated the landscape of modern mythology, shrouding the evidence that a third was ever created. This third race, born of smokeless fire, was named the jinn. Modern man has all but forgotten this third race ever existed. It is time for him to remember.
(c) Freestyle
Rating:
PG-13 (for some intense sequences of violence and terror)
“So began a battle that none had expected,” wrote JRR Tolkien in the third-from-last chapter of The Hobbit. “And it was called The Battle of the Five Armies, and it was very terrible.” Peter Jackson’s expansion of this epochal but barely-described fracas, in his third and final film from this slim book, is neither very terrible nor remotely unexpected. It’s a series of stomping footnotes in search of a climax.
In terms of story so far, it ends virtually when it starts – with super-peeved dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) raining down fiery destruction on the pitiful residents of Laketown, and facing the last-ditch heroism of an archer called Bard (Luke Evans).
Everything else is scraps, in both senses. Jackson’s one recourse is to ape the here-we-go-again war mania of The Return of the King. Humans, dwarves and elves duke it out with orcs and wild wolves. It's a whopping great grudge match, a squabble over the contents of Smaug’s mountain lair, and goodness knows what else.
The trouble is that Jackson can’t make it mean very much: when every life on Middle Earth is seemingly at stake, few individually grab our attention. There’s more aftermath than plot left, and very little of it has to do with Bilbo (Martin Freeman), who feels increasingly like a forlorn bystander in his own franchise.
The further and more competently the movie trundles on, the more it begs not to exist, really: hindsight favours a two-part adaptation at most. This isn’t to say there aren’t bright spots. However it was fudged, 92-year-old Christopher Lee doing Shaolin kung fu with his magic staff is great value. And the last third is rescued by one meaty, entertaining set piece – crumbling citadel, frozen lake, one-on-one duels between orcs and the principal cast. Freeman, and Evangeline Lilly as the not-in-Tolkien elf maiden Tauriel, inject some unforced pathos which puts many of their dewy-eyed co-stars to shame.
The bloom has come off Orlando, though, whose main achievement as Legolas – other than some ridiculous mid-air running up collapsing masonry – is to illustrate perfectly what Joey Tribbiani from Friends called “smell the fart acting”.
When the dwarf leader Thorin (Richard Armitage) imagines himself drowning in a pool of molten gold, Jackson’s pet message that Greed Is Bad rings out again – but you have to wonder if a triple-your-money release strategy is quite the seemliest context to preach it in. At 6ft 2", Armitage must be the tallest actor ever to play a dwarf. The film is the opposite: a paragraph on steroids. source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/11260252/The-Hobbit-The-Battle-of-the-Five-Armies-first-look-review-begs-not-to-exist.html
Movie Info
From Academy Award (R)-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson comes "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies," the third in a trilogy of films adapting the enduringly popular masterpiece The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies" brings to an epic conclusion the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, Thorin Oakenshield and the Company of Dwarves.
Having reclaimed their homeland from the Dragon Smaug, the Company has unwittingly unleashed a deadly force into the world. Enraged, Smaug rains his fiery wrath down upon the defenseless men, women and children of Lake-town. Obsessed above all else with his reclaimed treasure, Thorin sacrifices friendship and honor tohoard it as Bilbo's frantic attempts to make him see reason drive the Hobbit towards a desperate and dangerous choice.
But there are even greater dangers ahead. Unseen by any but the Wizard Gandalf, the great enemy Sauron has sent forth legions of Orcs in a stealth attack upon the Lonely Mountain. As darkness converges on their escalating conflict, the races of Dwarves, Elves and Men must decide - unite or be destroyed. Bilbo finds himself fighting for his life and the lives of his friends in the epic Battle of the Five Armies, as the future of Middle-earth hangs in the balance.
(c) Warner Bros
Rating: PG-13 (for extended sequences of intense fantasy action violence, and frightening images)
Genre: Action & Adventure , Science Fiction & Fantasy
Directed By: Peter Jackson
Written By: Philippa Boyens , Guillermo del Toro , Fran Walsh , J.R.R. Tolkien , Peter Jackson
In Theaters: Dec 17, 2014 Wide
On DVD: Mar 24, 2015
US Box Office: $255.1M
Runtime: 2 hr. 24 min.
Warner Bros. - Official Site
The biggest problem with the new Hunger Games movie is right there in the title: Part 1. Mockingjay, the final installment in Suzanne Collins’ best-selling YA trilogy, wasn’t conceived in two parts. That was a decision made in Hollywood by a studio looking to double down and milk every last dime out of its blockbuster franchise. The suits probably thought, ”Hey, it worked for Harry Potter and Twilight, so why not us?” You can’t blame them for wanting to keep the good times rolling. But it’s a pretty cynical business plan, and it’s led to a film that feels needlessly padded. Mockingjay—Part 1 is like a term paper with the margins enlarged and the font size jacked up to reach the assigned number of pages.
This is especially disappointing because the previous chapter, 2013’s Catching Fire, was such a pleasant surprise. While the 2012 original laid out Collins’ dystopian death-sport milieu with flair and faithfulness, it was also a bit flat. Catching Fire, on the other hand, gave the heroine, Katniss Everdeen, an adrenalized urgency. As played by Jennifer Lawrence, Katniss developed into a character who was both brainy and badass. Now, in Mockingjay—Part 1, she’s become passive. The movie picks up after the incendiary conclusion of Catching Fire’s Quarter Quell, when Katniss was rescued and brought to the rebels’ underground fortress in District 13. Here, the anti-Capitol leaders plot their next strike against President Snow (Donald Sutherland), hatching a plan to turn Katniss into the fiery symbol of the resistance and spur the powerless citizens of Panem to rise up against the Capitol. It’s a propaganda war, and she’s the secret weapon—a Che Guevara T-shirt made flesh. The rebel brain trust includes President Coin (Julianne Moore, sporting silver Cruella De Vil locks), spin-savvy strategist Plutarch (Philip Seymour Hoffman, to whom the film is dedicated), hacker Beetee (Jeffrey Wright), the newly clean and sober Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), and Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks, channeling a drag queen). They send Katniss and Gale (Liam Hemsworth) to the front lines with a guerrilla film crew that records her battlefield heroics and beams it all back to the huddled masses.
But Snow has a secret weapon of his own. Kidnapped by the nefarious president’s forces at the end of the last movie, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) reappears in the Capitol, and in a series of interviews with the sensationalist journalist Caesar (Stanley Tucci), he denounces Katniss and urges a cease-fire. The betrayal devastates her, forcing her to realize that her feelings for him weren’t a charade after all. With its Wag the Dog subplot and fist-in-the-air proletarianism, Mockingjay may be the most harmlessly Marxist movie to come out of Hollywood since Reds.
I suppose director Francis Lawrence and writers Peter Craig and Danny Strong deserve some credit for daring to sneak any political cheekiness into a movie that’s as big and corporate as this. But overall their hands are tied too tightly. While the series’ first two films captured the grandeur of the outdoors during the kill-or-be-killed competitions, Mockingjay is mostly bound to the bleak and claustrophobic bowels of a bunker. It suffocates the film. And when the story finally does manage to get interesting toward the end, it just screeches to a halt and cuts off, leaving fans wriggling on the hook for a finale they won’t get to see for another 12 months. That’s not a cliff-hanger, that’s just a tease.
The worldwide phenomenon of The Hunger Games continues to set the world on fire with The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1, which finds Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) in District 13 after she literally shatters the games forever. Under the leadership of President Coin (Julianne Moore) and the advice of her trusted friends, Katniss spreads her wings as she fights to save Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) and a nation moved by her courage. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 is directed by Francis Lawrence from a screenplay by Danny Strong and Peter Craig and produced by Nina Jacobson's Color Force in tandem with producer Jon Kilik. The novel on which the film is based is the third in a trilogy written by Suzanne Collins that has over 65 million copies in print in the U.S. alone.
(c) Lionsgate
Rating:
PG-13 (for intense sequences of violence and action, some disturbing images and thematic material)
Focus: Nicky (Will Smith) is a conman who goes about his work guided by a strict code of ethics and a set of rules. He keeps off the cop radar by preferring volume in numbers rather than single big 'tricks' that can attract unwanted attention. He meets and trains the talented, but inexperienced Jess (Margot Robbie), who is utterly impressed and somewhat besotted by him, in the art of thievery. She turns out to be way more talented than he could ever imagine.
Review
You know where you stand with a caper movie. Slippery as an eel, light as a goose-feather and populated by attractive people telling each other porkies, it will inevitably feature a seasoned grifter reciting hard-won knowledge to a scrappy upstart. “There’s hammers and nails,” Will Smith whispers to Margot Robbie in Focus. “You decide which you want to be.” Fortunately, she doesn’t ask how to figure out if you’re an electric drill.
As this exchange implies, the latest entry in the category of film that is cinéma du swindle is a rather over-familiar confection. But at least it’s rarely as generic as its thuddingly first-base title, and while the route it takes is one that’s been travelled cinematically many times before, it has enough dazzle along the way to make it worth a watch.
Smith and Robbie slip easily into their roles. Frequently cast as an authority figure, most recently in the joyless After Earth, Smith revels in the opportunity to play super-slick hustler Nicky. And Robbie gives as good as she gets, marvellously gutsy as pickpocket Jess. Part romantic comedy, part Jedi/padawan training drama, Focus is a fine showcase for their chemistry — and no doubt the reason they’ll be reunited in next year’s Suicide Squad.
Writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, the minds behind Crazy Stupid Love, manage for the most part to freshen up the formula with nifty sleight-of-hand. The opening set-piece starts with the pair meeting in conventional romcom style, and ends as something much sneakier, as Nicky and Jess put their cards on the table and recognise each other as kindred spirits. There’s a wonderful ‘ta-da!’ moment over brunch in a café as the scale of Nicky’s operation is revealed. In one standout sequence we track a villainous henchman as he goes about his business, killing time until he ambushes our heroes.
The problem is that overall, the movie is just a little too light. Gliding smoothly from one situation to the next, Nicky is a character for whom everything comes effortlessly — as a gruff, foul-mouthed enforcer snapping at his heels, Gerald McRaney displays more personality in one scene than Smith is allowed during his entire screentime. He’s a cypher: a fun companion for the ride, but difficult to root for when the guano hits the fan in the third act. Jess is more interesting, but it’s one of those films that’s only as gripping as the bit of plot-twistiness that’s going on at any given time.
Speaking of which, the highlight is a ten-minute sequence at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans. So self-contained it could work as a short film, it guest-stars BD Wong as a giggling, filthy-’tached billionaire who challenges Nicky to a high-stakes bet, and quickly spirals into a hugely suspenseful, assured piece of cinema. It’s at this point that Focus flies.
Director: Glenn Ficarra, John Requa
Cast: Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Rodrigo Santoro source:
-http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/english/movie-review/Focus/movie-review/46538629.cms -http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?FID=138841 - Movies for your Android -
"Woman in Gold" has a rich story to tell. The true account of Maria Altmann's fight to reclaim a famed Gustav Klimt painting of her aunt, "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I," first stolen by the Nazis and then appropriated by Austria after the war, is laced with riveting history, deep and complex emotion, and fascinating bureaucracy. Yet director Simon Curtis's rendering of Altmann's tale, though respectful and pretty, is somehow lifeless.
Gustav Klimt's famous painting of a dark-eyed beauty encased in shimmering gold lozenges is often dismissed by art critics as a disappointing excursion into kitsch by the avant-garde Austrian painter. But the portrait, commissioned by a wealthy Jewish family not long before the outbreak of World War II, has brought visceral pleasure to countless owners of postcards, posters and key-rings who have yet to set foot in New York's Neue Galerie, where the original hangs today. How it got there from Vienna makes for a sensational true-life tale, however staidly told in the new film Woman in Gold.
To Maria Altmann, an elderly Los Angeles Jewish dress-shop owner played in the movie by Helen Mirren, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was a precious reminder of her glamorous and beloved Aunt Adele, lost forever in the wake of Nazi art theft. Before her premature death, Bloch-Bauer had bequeathed the painting to Vienna's prestigious Belvedere art gallery. Soon after, the painting, along with many other artifacts owned by her family, was brazenly looted by Austrian Nazis; Maria was one of the few in her family who escaped death and ended up in the Untied States. After the War the painting resurfaced and remained in Vienna's prestigious Belvedere gallery for six decades until Altmann — with the help of a young attorney who happened to be the grandson of émigré composer Arnold Schoenberg, a contemporary of Klimt — returned to try to reclaim her family property.
The epic legal fight that followed is the subject of Woman in Gold, a stolidly sequential drama by British director Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn). With a directing style best described as reverently ceremonial, Curtis plods through scenic tours of the baroque architectural grandeur of Vienna today, regularly punctuated with flashbacks to the traumatic wrecking of Maria's gilded youth. Dancing the hora at Maria's wedding comes with a thudding overlay of Nazi jackboots. On the soundtrack, lest you miss the message, is "O Mary, don't you weep."
With star power more in mind than goodness of fit, the movie is hopelessly miscast. Mirren is her usual entertaining blast of acerbic brio, but here she improbably reprises her QEII testiness, accessorized with an Austrian accent. For his part Ryan Reynolds, a terrific physical comedian, is all wrong for the earnestly idealistic Randy Schoenberg, who found a novel way to help Maria sue the Austrian government for recovery of a painting it had now recast as a symbol of the country's national identity.
How they accomplished this is such a great yarn that, for all its broad brush strokes, Woman in Gold can't help but tell a moving populist parable about the will to power of an ordinary woman — one among millions, it turns out as the restitution of wartime cultural theft becomes a very big deal in the art world — taking on powerful institutions to regain a tiny fraction of her family's appalling losses.
To the credit of screenwriter Alexi Kaye Campbell and a nice turn by Daniel Bruhl as an Austrian investigative journalist with a guilty secret he is driven to expunge, Woman in Gold does not shy away from Austria's reluctance to face up to its wartime record. Instead, the film suggests that the affirmation of national pride that moved Austrian officials to fight Maria's claim tooth and nail depended on a sustained denial of its own shameful history.
After a Herculean struggle, in the end an Austrian arbitration committee did right by Altmann, who sold Klimt's Adele to cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder for a fortune and donated most of the proceeds to arts institutions and Holocaust survivors' groups. There it hangs in New York, a refugee like its rightful owner — and an enduring testament to the Austrian back-story that never made it into The Sound of Music.
WOMAN IN GOLD is the remarkable true story of one woman's journey to reclaim her heritage and seek justice for what happened to her family. Sixty years after she fled Vienna during World War II, an elderly Jewish woman, Maria Altmann (Mirren), starts her journey to retrieve family possessions seized by the Nazis, among them Klimt's famous painting 'Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I'. Together with her inexperienced but plucky young lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Reynolds), she embarks upon a major battle which takes them all the way to the heart of the Austrian establishment and the U.S. Supreme Court, and forces her to confront difficult truths about the past along the way.
(C) TWC
Rating:
PG-13 (for some thematic elements and brief strong language)
Only a hundred or so more days to go. Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) did just that. She strayed. Weighted down by guilt, anger and grief over the death of her mother, the then-22-year-old pulled up stakes and -- figuratively, at least -- she wandered, like so many tend to do in times of trouble.
For her, it became a dangerous journey, as the self-described experimentalist and habitual yes-girl wandered farther than most dare, toward heroin addiction, toward meaningless sex, toward anything to help her forget everything but the moment.
And then she found her way back.
It's that moving and inspirational journey -- to the brink of self-destruction and back again -- that she described in her best-selling 2012 memoirs, and it's the journey director Jean-Marc Vallee tells in his beautiful, soul-stirring adaptation, "Wild."
After day one of her hike up the Pacific Crest Trail—a winding path that stretches from the Mexican border all the way up the West Coast of the U.S. to the outskirts of Canada—Cheryl Strayed is seriously questioning her willpower. And her sanity.
But it was kind of a mental meltdown that got her here in the first place.
Her life has become a mess. She knows it, and everyone around her knows it. Before she set her feet down on this rough-cut trail, she had been on a self-destructive path of drug addiction and sex with strangers. It was a trek that had destroyed her marriage and sucked away her health. Maybe walking a thousand miles will set things straight.
If nothing else, this journey might give her a chance to think, to dissect the mistakes she's made, to salve the things that hurt the most. Maybe this exhausting slog filled with aching muscles, scraped knees and bloody feet will allow her to finally dig up all the stuff she's had buried down deep.
So she shrugs into her huge and agonizingly heavy pack once again. She takes the next step. She conquers the next mile. She embraces the next hour alone with her thoughts.
With only a hundred or so more days to go.
With the dissolution of her marriage and the death of her mother, Cheryl Strayed has lost all hope. After years of reckless, destructive behavior, she makes a rash decision. With absolutely no experience, driven only by sheer determination, Cheryl hikes more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, alone. WILD powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddens, strengthens, and ultimately heals her. (c) Fox Searchlight
Rating:
R (for sexual content, nudity, drug use, and language)
Alan Turing's life story is unequivocally a tragedy. The Imitation Game, a new biopic that focuses on his accomplishments as a codebreaker during World War II, manages to recognize this while celebrating his formidable legacy.
The film tells an important story. Turing, a mathematician, is considered the father of computer science and a pioneer of artificial intelligence. That alone would merit his continued recognition as a great thinker. But he also played a crucial role in World War II—so much so that Winston Churchill said Turing made the most important contribution to winning the war. He was a war hero. Perhaps the biggest war hero.
During the war, the Axis forces had no better weapon than their Enigma machines, cryptographic marvels the Nazis thought were impossible to crack. Turing and other Allied codebreakers thought differently, and built a machine to break the code. This allowed Allied forces to intercept Axis communications, enabling access to information that ultimately helped the Allied forces defeat the enemy.
The film primarily focuses on Turing's time at Bletchley Park's Hut 8. Using a police officer's investigation into Turing in 1951 as a framing device, the story is told largely in flashbacks. The film follows Turing, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, as he antagonizes and bonds with his fellow codebreakers—particularly Joan Clark, the team's brilliant, lone female member (portrayed by Keira Knightley in a subtle, unshowy performance), to whom he was briefly engaged. In the movie, as in life, Turing called off the engagement after he told her he was gay.
The Imitation Game is a good movie, but not a great one: While the actors turn in solid performances, the screenwriting relies too much on the trope of the tortured, misunderstood genius vs. the world, and the historical footage of the war seems awkwardly crammed in to make you remember that, oh shit, U-Boats were scary.
In fact, The Imitation Game is really a few different movies at once: It's a spy caper, a race-against-the-clock film, a celebration of eccentricity, and an indictment of Britain's shoddy treatment of one of her heroes. The framing device was distracting, since it asks us to imagine that Turing would confess his highly classified role to a random police officer.
And the flashbacks to Turing's formative schoolboy relationship border on schmaltzy. Though they do serve to humanize the character, they wouldn't have been necessary if the script gave Turing a more nuanced characterization. Some of his lines sound like it's just Sheldon from Big Bang Theory talking, although Cumberbatch saves much of the material from getting too paint-by-numbers-nerd.
Despite the tremendous debt Britain owes him, Turing died a convicted felon. He committed suicide at age 42, two years after his arrest for "gross indecency" after being exposed as a homosexual. He was unable to continue working with the government, and was forced to choose between chemical castration and prison, and chose castration. The man whose work helped save Britain was treated monstrously, just for being who he was.
The film touches on the tragic ending to Turing's life as the film closes, as well as the way his reputation has been (thankfully) restored in recent years. It notes that he was eventually granted a posthumous royal pardon last year. I'd be surprised if you didn't leave the theater after seeing it without agreeing with former Prime Minister Gordon Brown's apology to the (long-dead) Turing in 2009: "We're sorry. You deserved so much better."
I saw The Imitation Game at the Toronto International Film Festival, but it will have a limited wide release November 21. So spend Thanksgiving this year being thankful Alan Turing existed.
During the winter of 1952, British authorities entered the home of mathematician, cryptanalyst and war hero Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) to investigate a reported burglary. They instead ended up arresting Turing himself on charges of 'gross indecency', an accusation that would lead to his devastating conviction for the criminal offense of homosexuality - little did officials know, they were actually incriminating the pioneer of modern-day computing.
Famously leading a motley group of scholars, linguists, chess champions and intelligence officers, he was credited with cracking the so-called unbreakable codes of Germany's World War II Enigma machine. An intense and haunting portrayal of a brilliant, complicated man, THE IMITATION GAME follows a genius who under nail-biting pressure helped to shorten the war and, in turn, save thousands of lives.
(c) Weinstein
Rating:
PG-13 (for some sexual references, mature thematic material and historical smoking)
