Movie Reviews

We Need to Talk About Kevin

  • Title: We Need to Talk About Kevin
  • IMDb: link

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What if your child was responsible for a horrific event that changed not just the lives of your family but scarred entire community? Guilt-ridden and unable to leave and try to start a new life elsewhere, how would you go about your daily life knowing that any sense of normalcy was impossible?

Based on the novel by Lionel Shiver, We Need to Talk About Kevin, brought to the screen by writer/director Lynne Ramsay, focuses on the life of Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) following the events of a school massacre caused by her teenage son Kevin (Ezra Miller). We watch as Eva becomes trapped in a series of events that unfold slowly destroying any chance she once had at happiness.

It’s an intriguing take that doesn’t examine the perpetrator of the crime or the specific series of events that led to the massacre, but instead gives us the perspective of the young man’s mother, who despite her love for Kevin, has known there’s something deeply wrong with her son for years.

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John Carter

  • Title: John Carter
  • IMDB: link

john-carter-posterOriginally published 100 years ago in The All Story Magazine in serialized fashion over a period of months Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ first story, A Princess of Mars, launched a career than spanned decades including several more novels in what became known as the Barsoom series and the creation of a certain Lord of the Jungle you may know by the name of Tarzan.

It’s taken a century, but Hollywood finally has its first big screen adaptation of Burroughs’ tale. (For our purposes here we’re just going to ignore the existence of the 2009 straight-to-DVD version starring Antonio Sabato Jr. and Traci Lords.) Adapted and directed by Pixar’s Oscar winning filmmaker Andrew Stanton (Wall-E, Finding Nemo, A Bug’s Life) John Carter breathes new life into the century-old work while still staying true to the Burroughs’ original novel.

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A Separation

  • Title: A Separation
  • IMDb: link

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Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film, A Separation is a study in a family’s struggles after the husband and wife separate over differences surrounding the future of their daughter. Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to move the family to America and give her daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) opportunities she will not find in Iran, but her husband Nader (Peyman Moadi) will not consent to a divorce and refuses to abandon his invalid father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi) for the promise of a better life in a country that is not his own.

When his wife moves out Nader has no other choice but to hire someone to look after his father while he is at work. Nader agrees to give the work to a husband (Shahab Hosseini) of a friend of Simin’s, but when he’s unable to take the job due to legal troubles it falls to his wife Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to take care of elderly man suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia, which proves to be a much harder task then she initially envisioned.

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Act of Valor

  • Title: Act of Valor
  • IMDB: link

act-of-valor-posterActing, it turns out, is harder than it looks. The experiment from co-directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh to cast real Navy SEALs instead of actors for the lead roles in Act of Valor produces mixed results and probably shouldn’t be repeated any time soon.

Act of Valor isn’t an awful film but it feels oddly put together. At times it films like a documentary, a pseudo-documentary, an action flick, and a hamfisted USA Armed Forces recruitment film. Despite giving us a group of impressive action sequences these pieces don’t fit together well.

It’s hard to blame the SEALs, who were chosen to showcase what the real soldiers can do in combat situations, when they are given such uneven writing to work with. It’s true, that with the possible exception of the oldest member of the team, the group certainly aren’t natural actors, but Kurt Johnstad‘s script doesn’t do them any favors with its share of awkward dialogue.

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Safe House

  • Title: Safe House
  • IMDB: link

safe-house-posterSafe House just goes to show you that Hollywood can find a way to take even one of the most boring jobs of any CIA agent would ever have and turn it into an action thriller with a horde of nameless bad guys who never seem to run out of ammunition.

The first thing you need to understand about Safe House is that very little of the film’s close to two-hour running time actually takes place in a safe house. Ryan Reynolds stars as Agent Matt Weston who has spent the last 12 months keeping an empty safe house in South Africa ready in case the CIA needs to safeguard, interrogate, or house someone in the area at a moment’s notice.

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