Drama

Grumpy Old Mr. Holmes

  • Title: Mr. Holmes
  • IMDb: link

Mr. HolmesAdapted from Mitch Cullen‘s novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, Mr. Holmes is an intriguing, if flawed, idea offering audiences a look at the retired detective fighting senility while struggling to remember the details of his final case decades before. I say flawed because despite a terrific performance from Ian McKellen removing the keen intellect from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‘s Sherlock Holmes also removes the character’s most definable trait leaving only a hollow shell in its place.

Taking place three decades after his retirement into the country to spend his time with his bees, a senile and grumpy Sherlock Holmes struggles to remember the details of his final case which he is certain Watson wrongly chronicled. His secluded existence is witnessed only by his housekeeper Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney), her son Roger (Milo Parker), and the occasional visit from Sherlock’s doctor (Roger Allam). Returning from a trip to Japan at the opening of the film, which is chronicled in flashbacks inter-cut with those of his final case and his current retirement, Holmes strikes up an unexpected friendship with Roger who helps reignite the detective’s memory.

Grumpy Old Mr. Holmes Read More »

Inside Out

  • Title: Inside Out
  • IMDb: link

Inside Out

What’s going on in an 11 year-old girl’s head? That’s the question writers/directors Pete Docter and Ronaldo Del Carmen seek to answer in Inside Out where young Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) is uprooted from her home in Minnesota to San Fransisco without warning causing chaos both inside her mind and in the real world.

In a summer loaded with sequels, franchises, and reboots, Inside Out stands out as refreshingly original. Inside Riley’s mind we meet the aptly named Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), and Disgust (Mindy Kaling) who work in concert to manage Riley’s reaction to any possible situation. When Joy and Sadness get lost in the outer region of Riley’s mind during the most tumultuous time of the young girl’s life Riley’s happiness is put at risk leaving the other three emotions to try their best to keep her on track.

The filmmakers allow the emotions to humorously interact, playing to the younger audience, while using the concept to delve into deeper themes about how a person’s mind works and what happens when something goes wrong.

Inside Out Read More »

The Age of Adaline

  • Title: The Age of Adaline
  • IMDb: link

The Age of Adaline

The Age of Adaline takes an intriguing premise about a woman who has lived for more than a century, through the rise of women’s rights, technological booms, two world wars, and the rise of an Information Age all of which it effectively turns into a Nicholas Sparks trashy romance novel. Blake Lively stars as Adaline Bowman who, through a ridiculous premise of laughable pseudo-science a narrator (Hugh Ross) is needed to help explain, stopped aging and looks the same today as she did in 1929. Hiding for most of her life with only a daughter (Ellen Burstyn) who knows her secret, Adaline sheds her identity every ten years to hide her condition. Preparing for just such a move, Adaline encounters a wealthy artist (Michiel Huisman) and, for the second time in her life, falls in love.

Despite the film’s sci-fi set-up neither director Lee Toland Krieger nor screenwriters J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz are interested in exploring the various times and lives Adaline has lived except in the most superficial of ways. It’s sad because the film casts an actress that looks at home in a variety of styles and the period set direction (what little we see) is competently done.

The Age of Adaline Read More »

Woman in Gold

  • Title: Woman in Gold
  • IMDb: link

Woman in GoldDirector Simon CurtisWoman in Gold is an odd film not good enough for awards consideration but also choosing not to become an action-suspense film about stolen Nazi art. Much more a straightforward drama, I’d compare it to 1998’s A Civil Action, a more engaging film with a similar arc of a lawyer whose money-first philosophy is changed by taking on an emotional case he can’t possibly win.

Based on the true story of Maria Altmann‘s (Helen Mirren) attempts to regain possession of her family’s lost masterpiece from the Austrian government, Woman in Gold is a slow-moving drama starring Ryan Reynolds as the lawyer hired by Maria to take on a foreign government. Reynolds and Mirren work well together as the unlikely pair to take on Austria (even if Reynolds casting seems like an odd choice). Well-acted and shot against the backdrops of Vienna and southern California, the story is intriguing if never fully engaging. Despite its cast (which also includes Katie Holmes, Tatiana Maslany, Elizabeth McGovern, and Jonathan Pryce) Woman in Gold is a good film that never fully lives up to the promise it offers flashes of early on.

Woman in Gold Read More »

Home

  • Title: Home (2015)
  • IMDb: link

HomeAlien occupation has never been so cute. Based on the children’s book The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex, Home begins with the invasion of Earth by an alien race known as the Boov who relocate the entire world’s population to suburban-style camps while taking the rest of the planet for their own.

Oh (Jim Parsons) is a likable screw-up who finds himself on the run from his own people when he accidentally discloses the location of their new home to the alien race which has been pursuing the Boov across the galaxy. After encountering another fugitive in a human girl named Gratuity “Tip” Tucci (Rihanna) the two, along with Tip’s cat Pig, are thrown together as Oh agrees to help Tip find her mother Lucy (Jennifer Lopez) while learning there’s far more to the planet and its complicated people than the Boov’s buffoonish leader Captain Smek (Steve Martin) believes. Despite the number of humans and Boov shown on screen, Home has a tiny cast list. Other than Oh and Smek the only Boov who gets any lines is traffic cop Kyle (Matt Jones), who Oh mistakenly believes is his best-friend and who is sent to track Oh down after his latest mistake.

Home Read More »