Lincoln

Rating: 3

Spielberg seems to have replaced all his scrappiness with sanctimony. I wish he'd stick to sharks & aliens and move slowly away from historical figures and ham-fisted morality plays. All around blech.

Life of Pi

Rating: 6.5

Magical realism and a beautiful look into the world of animals make the movie. I had to willfully ignore some of the heavy-handed spirituality. It was worth it for that fantastic tiger. The meerkats were pretty great too.

Silver Linings Playbook

Rating: 8.5

Another one I didn't expect to like as much as I did. Heartfelt but not sappy, quirky but not cutesy.

Savages

Rating: 7

I can't say I enjoyed it considering the amount of explicit murder and torture, but it's a pretty darn good movie.

Anna Karenina

Rating: 9

It's the perfect Thanksgiving day movie: lavish, overindulgent and enormously satisfying.

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Rating: 10

I knew very little about Ai Weiwei going in, and now he is my favorite and most respected artist.  Just because of the movie!  That's saying something.

Bernie

Rating: 9

I once heard Jack Black say in an interview that he isn't really an actor, he just plays versions of himself. He's wrong. His performance in Bernie is as good as any I've seen.  The story is based on a true incident and the movie does something completely unique that I'm not going to spoil here.  If you can, please see it.

Prometheus

Rating: 9

There's a huge gap of movies I can't remember during the time I neglected the blog but I'm catching up on a few that stood out and deserve a mention. First: Prometheus.

It totally lived up to my expectation which is a feat since there were six months of trailers leading up to it. Ridley Scott turned me into a SciFi fan with Alien and Blade Runner and is a master of most genres.  Prometheus is horrifying and beautiful.

Flight

Rating: 9

Methinks it will get some Oscars, and methinks it deserves some.

Cloud Atlas

Rating: 7

The good: The sci-fi / future sequences are mesmerizing and it's a wonderful vehicle for Tom Hanks. Certainly the best I've seen him in a long time. All the actors play multiple characters and they seem to be having a blast.  The bad: Enough with the face prosthetics! They are nothing but distracting("Hey, that's Susan Sarandon with a fake nose!! Wait, is it just a fake nose or a fake chin too? What does her real nose look like? Perky, as I recall...." etc, etc, says Hilary's brain about a frillion times during Cloud Atlas) and until technology catches up which I'm sure it will eventually and quite frankly I can't figure out why we're not there yet except maybe we are and this is just a personal pet peeve I can't get over, which is my friend Edge's theory.

All in all, worth seeing.

Argo

Rating: 8

Almost as good as The Town, with bonus appearance by Walter White!

Sinister

Rating: 9

Not perfect but still scared the crap out of me.

The Master

Rating: 6

Sad to day how disappointed I was.  As a devoted PT Anderson fan and closet Scientology conspiracy theory observer I guess my hopes were a bit high.  Having said that, cinematography was stellar, music gorgeous and performances captivating.  Though Joaquin is getting high props for his work, his presence was so unpleasant I couldn't wait for him to exit the screen. The jury's still out on whether that constitutes a great performance or an overwrought one.

Looper

Rating: 8

Enjoyed everything about the movie except JGL's distracting face prosthetics.  For more on this topic, see my review of Cloud Atlas.