Black Hawk Clowns

by Ryan Syrek

Battle: Los Angeles

Amidst a sea of fallen comrades, facing almost certain death at the hands of an incomprehensible foe, Staff Sgt. Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart) gets inches from the face of Cpl. Jason Lockett (Cory Hardrict) and begins to bellow a five-minute rant without missing a single military cliché. Seemingly exhausted by covering every base from “good men died out there” to “Marines don’t quit,”...

Pet Project

by Ben Coffman

Rango

Citing the need to do a smaller film after his work on the bigger-than-life Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, director Gore Verbinski managed to once again rip Johnny Depp loose from Tim Burton’s greedy grasp in the hopes of creating a slightly goofy animated Western. With its painstakingly precise animation and a giant cast of vibrant characters, the film Rango turned into anything but a...

Hats Entertainment

by Ryan Syrek

The Adjustment Bureau

Although he doesn’t get name-checked, the Almighty plays an invisible supporting role in The Adjustment Bureau, the first Philip K. Dick short story adaptation to morph from science-fiction to theology-fiction. Despite the illusion of crushing doom promoted by the dour, oppressive orchestral music in the trailers, writer/director George Nolfi’s fable is actually a sweetly simple,...

Middle Aged Kids

by Justin Senkbile

Hall Pass

It’s a time-tested formula: take some stars, sex, a bit of compassion and an absurd plot device, filter it through the mind of a 12-year-old boy, and you’ve got a Farrelly brothers picture. Bobby and Peter, creators of There's Something About Mary, are back with Hall Pass. Depending on how you like your jokes, that’s mildly good or very bad news.

Rick (Owen Wilson) is a mostly content,...

Glass Case of Emotion

by Ryan Syrek

DVD Discovery: Fish Tank

If Miley Cyrus were around 12 times as edgy as her calculatedly smutty videos suggest, Mia Williams (Katie Jarvis) would still eat that priss for breakfast and put a cigarette out on her eye. With a tongue that links staggering expletives into a nonstop chain of filth, Mia is 15-year-old trailer-trash living in an Essex estate in not-so-great Britain. Dispelling the concept that the...

German Engineering

by Ben Coffman

Unknown

Forget Harley-Davidsons and 20-something girlfriends — the newest trend for male leads having their second mid-life crisis is action films. Two years ago, 50-something Liam Neeson starred in the surprisingly OK Taken, a high-body-count revenge flick that had him practicing his “combat roll and reload” sequences. His latest foray is Unknown, a good-enough-for-February film that doesn’t...

Death and Debt

by Justin Senkbile

Biutiful

Set in a dismal-looking Barcelona and following a character with amazingly bad luck, Biutiful slathers on the misery like few other movies do. But misery is nothing new for its director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, the man behind several other bleak pictures, including Amores Perros and 21 Grams. Biutiful is a big movie that's slightly overloaded with ideas and impressions but held together...