Bond's Brave New World

Skyfall

Directed by Sam Mendes

Four Stars

If Sam Mendes’ splendid “Skyfall”, the latest installment in the James Bond franchise, reminds us of anything, it is probably that the vast majority of the Bond films we’ve seen through the years just haven’t been very good. Protected by the cloak of a durable formula, iconic score, and the innate magnetism of a transcendent cultural icon, almost always enjoyable, usually clever, though seldom thrilling, the series has existed safely in cruise control for decades. “Skyfall”, however, is thrilling. One would need to go back, way back, back through the Pierce Brosnan years, back through the Timothy Dalton years, back to perhaps Guy Hamilton’s “Live and Let Die” in 1973 to find a Bond film this heedlessly inventive and captivating.

The Wacky Antics of War Heroes

Red Tails

Directed by Anthony Hemingway

Two and One Half Stars

Perhaps a greater rebuke to racism than Anthony Hemingway’s tepid “Red Tails” is the reality that the film got made at all. George Lucas, that most notorious toymaker of the silver screen, purportedly dumped some $53 million of his own money into the film because the studios had trepidations about the marketability of a film with all black actors. I have little doubt the film will do well. That worry seems a miscalculation. But if the film does perform poorly at the box office it won’t be because of the skin color of its leads. It will be because it is a bad film. Caught between a rock and a hard place, the varying success of the effort will either validate the hesitant studios’ prophecies of lingering cultural racism or their own cynicism.

Violence In the Media Reaches its Apex

The Hunger Games

Directed by Gary Ross

Two Stars

I have not read Suzanne Collins’ young adult book series, “The Hunger Games”. Occasionally a film adaptation comes along that demands this information up front from its critics. But the multiple failings of director Gary Ross’s effort are not uniformly cinematic. They begin at the basest levels of the narrative, and indeed the central premise of the film was a pill I simply could not swallow.

The Pantheon (2012)

#1 2001: A Space Odyssey

Jon's Picks
Rollan's Picks

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1969) +1
2. The Third Man (Carole Reed, 1949) -1
3. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1944) Even
4. City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931) +1
5. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) +3
6. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1928) -2
7. Pyscho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) +19
8. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979) +1
9. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) -2
10. Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) +2