Les Swing and Les Miss

by Ryan Syrek

Les Miserables

Two minutes in: You can do this, Ryan. Sure, a three-hour film version of a Broadway musical is a dry way to waterboard you, but people say Les Misérables is the best adaptation yet. Maybe this is the one that finally changes your mind.

Five minutes in: No. No, It isn’t. This is hell. This is my personal hell.

Twenty minutes in: If anyone finds this message, please get word to director Tom...

Cotillard’s Coattails

by Ryan Syrek

Rust and Bone

Given that France is America’s go-to national punching bag for milquetoast xenophobic jokes, it is a testimony to her towering talent that Marion Cotillard is an Oscar-winning box office draw. Even reducing her physical presence by a third in her latest, Rust and Bone, does nothing to stunt her on-screen magnetism, or what the French call “Le, daaaamn!”

Writer/director Jacques Audiard and...

Poor 2013

by Ryan Syrek

Listen, 2013, you look cool. You really do, with your new Superman movie and lack of Twilight. It’s just…well, your older sibling (2012) was super crazy awesome. It’s not easy being odd, especially with a number so feared it gets its own phobia named after it. But chin up, I’m sure it won’t be that bad…I mean, other than that sequel to Adam Sandler’s Grown Ups that’s coming. Here are some...

Antebellum Antiheroism

by Ryan Syrek

Django Unchained

Oh, Quentin Tarantino, you’ve really done it this time, haven’t you? Nobody really cared when you fantasized that Hitler didn’t end his reign of terror with one last murder (his own), placing therapeutic cinematic release into the hands of machine-gun toting Jews blasting the bogeyman back to hell in Inglourious Basterds. But slavery? This ain’t Europe, QT; here in America, we like to judge...

Sherlock Homeless

by Ryan Syrek

Jack Reacher

Jack Reacher, the hero of Jack Reacher (in case you were confused), is a drifter with nothing to lose. We know this because that is exactly what Tom Cruise says he is while yelling at a bad guy on the phone, Taken-style. Reacher is novelist Lee Child’s six-foot-five, fictional meal ticket beloved by millions who were outraged at the casting of the Lilliputian Cruise. Honestly, Cruise’s...

2012, Will You Marry Me?

by Ryan Syrek

I want the 2012 year in film to have my babies. Heck, I’ll have its babies; it has been so durn good I’d totally go seahorse for it. Before I reduce a year that renewed my cinematic soul to a series of arbitrary numbers and rankings, a quick caveat: Because deadlines are soulless, and because major movie studios are the only things less concerned about Nebraska than presidential candidates, I...

Dwarfing Expectations

by Ryan Syrek

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

We are masters of cynicism, proudly sporting a black-belt in backlash. If this generation of critics, pseudo-critics and armchair-article-writing audience members given the bully pulpit of social media has any legacy, it will be bitching for bitching’s sake.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is awesome by the literal definition of the word, in that its relentless action, staggeringly nuanced...