- Film critic
Wesley Morris
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Movie review: 'Texas Chainsaw 3D' demonstrates how to massacre $16
1/2 Texas Chainsaw 3D For $16 you can watch a movie care only that it got your money. For about $3, you can rent the 1974 original that spawned it. (95 min., R) (Wesley Morris) ( 01/05/2013 6:09 AM )
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'Bestiaire' captures behavior: beastly and otherwise
**1/2 Bestiaire In this documentary, the fine Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté views animals at a Quebec safari attraction, their holding facilities, their human caretakers, and paying visitors with a watchfulness that's always exquisitely framed even as a knowing cruelty accompanies that beauty. But Côté applies his hand too heavily. The very act of spending an entire movie behind the scenes at a zoo is indictment enough. (72 min., Unrated) (Wesley Morris) ( 01/03/2013 1:38 PM )
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Tarantino blows up the spaghetti western in 'Django Unchained'
***1/2 Django Unchained In Quentin Tarantino's clear-eyed and completely out of its mind exploitation western, Jamie Foxx plays a freed slave in 1853 on the way to rescue his wife (Kerry Washington) from a Mississippi plantation. Tarantino has never been more himself than he is here: grisly kitsch rigged for shock in a way that refuses to cheapen the atrocity of its subject. With Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, and an audacious Samuel L. Jackson. (165 min., R) (Wesley Morris) ( 12/27/2012 4:49 PM )
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Movie review: 'Les Misérables'
**1/2 Les Misérables What's great about the first half of Tom Hooper's gigantic film of the musical is the balance it strikes between the misérable and the miz. After two-and-a-half hours, the movie becomes a bowl of trail mix - you're picking out the nuts you don't like and hoping the next bite doesn't contain any craisins. With Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, who are wonderful, and Russell Crowe, who's not and it breaks your heart (and hurts your ears). (157 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris) ( 12/24/2012 4:06 PM )
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'Parental Guidance' is a family movie -- sort of
** Parental Guidance You really can make a bad family movie less terrible. The people responsible for this bland exercise in sentimentality and rambunctiousness have done an honorable enough job, chiefly through casting. Bette Midler and Billy Crystal babysit for Marisa Tomei and Tom Everett Scott, and their limits to humiliation are kind of a relief. It's: "I'll do anything for this movie, but I won't do that." (96 min., PG) (Wesley Morris)( 12/24/2012 3:15 PM )
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Movie review: 'Barbara' is one film to watch
*** Barbara An exiled East Berlin physician (Nina Hoss) has just arrived in a provincial hamlet on the Baltic Sea, where she quietly plots her escape to West Berlin while seeing patients and avoiding the advances of a brawny doctor (Ronald Zehrfeld), who's been conscripted by the Stasi to pass along intelligence on her. The movie's quiet power comes from its air of meticulously maintained suspicion. In German, with subtitles. (105 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris) ( 12/20/2012 2:42 PM )
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Timing is off on a dull 'Jack Reacher'
The movies don't always have the best timing. Sometimes they arrive when you need them least. The opening sequence of "Jack Reacher" asks us to watch through a sniper's crosshairs as people stroll past. It then asks us to watch them die and later replays the sequence for purposes of forensics. ( 12/20/2012 1:12 PM )
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Not much to cheer in this banal 'Wedding'
** Cheerful Weather for the Wedding If you simply can't wait for the third season of "Downton Abbey" to begin, and you need to experience English people all clenched up on the day of two people's nuptials, try Julia Strachey's novel about a bride-to-be (Felicity Jones) and her cold feet. This movie adaptation has a lot of nattering but little tension, wit, or heat. With the usually wonderful Elizabeth McGovern, so-so as the brides's mother. (92 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris) ( 12/13/2012 3:36 PM )
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'Central Park Five' a lesson in injustice
***½ The Central Park Five A scrupulous, singeing documentary by Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah, and her husband, David McMahon, that reconstructs the notorious series of events that occurred in the spring of 1989 after a young white investment banker was beaten and raped while running in Central Park. The film focuses the five teenagers -- four black, one Hispanic -- who were rounded up, sentenced, and convicted after falsely confessing to the crime. (119 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris) ( 12/13/2012 3:27 PM )
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'The Comedy' is another spin on the funny fat guy
**1/2 The Comedy Rick Alverson continues the movies' long tradition of funny fat guys, except that his putative star, Tim Heidecker, is merely fattish and funny only to himself. Heidecker plays a rich 35-year-old whose boredom leaves him only leisure-class provocation. The movie, which is set mostly in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, N.Y., is a critique of white-guy privilege, of hipsterism, of how men conduct themselves in comedies. It's apt and smart. But it's small. (94 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris) ( 12/07/2012 3:42 AM )
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'Playing for Keeps' a mis-prioritized romantic comedy
*1/2 Playing for Keeps A lousy, mis-prioritized romantic comedy with Gerard Butler as a washed up Scottish sports star who drives mothers crazy when he begins coaching his son's soccer team. All he wants is another shot at his ex (Jessica Biel), who's not nearly as lively as Judy Greer, Uma Thurman, or Catherine Zeta-Jones, who play the lusty moms. (95 min., PG-13) ( 12/06/2012 10:43 PM )
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'Waiting for Help' captures a medical facility in full operation
***1/2 The Waiting Room Peter Nicks's observant but warm documentary spends 24 hours in Highland Hospital, which serves Oakland's Alameda County. It's a public-service facility and, according to a nurse, a place of last resort. What's captured is a great deal of stress and worry and wincing - and that's just on the faces of the staff. Nicks isn't lobbying. He's storytelling. The aggregation of those stories are their own editorial. (82 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris) ( 12/06/2012 3:10 PM )
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Movie review: 'My Worst Nightmare' a dream union of high art and sleaze?
**1/2 My Worst Nightmare Isabelle Huppert plays an icy museum director who falls in love with the Belgian sleazebag -- played by Benoit Poelvoorde -- who's done repair work on her palatial Paris apartment. A movie like this needs almost no further explanation since, as movie-comedy love goes, this is old-testament ancient. But the movie has more writing than you'd get in an American version of similar material. In French, with subtitles. (99 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris) ( 12/06/2012 3:06 PM )
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Borrowed parts don't add up in 'The Collection'
** The Collection This horror sequel to 2009's "The Collector" doesn't make five seconds of sense and most of what's here is borrowed -- from movies, music videos, and art installations. The resident boogeyman is made up of so many other maniacs and boogeymen that, even by the loose standards of horror-movie sloppiness, he's a mess. To that end, "The Collection" is an honest title. This is just a lot of other people's greatest hits. (88 min., R) (Wesley Morris) ( 11/29/2012 4:37 PM )
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In 'The Flat,' families' secrets reveal uncomfortable pasts
*** The Flat A documentary in which the Israeli director Arnon Goldfinger attempts to understand the nature of his late grandparents' friendship with a Nazi propagandist. There's something touching about the way Goldfinger obeys his moral compass. He doesn't seem at all happy with this generational luxury of truth seeking. It's simply a burden by a different name. In English, German, and Hebrew, with subtitles. (97 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris) ( 11/29/2012 4:34 PM )
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A blunt stab at 'Hitchcock'
*1/2 Hitchcock The best way to better understand the man who made some of our greatest movies is simply to see them. There's no case to be made for a mangy shortcut like this. All surface and formula, it takes Stephen Rebello's invaluable 1990 account of the making of "Psycho" and implodes as it tries to turn the book into camp. Anthony Hopkins plays the director as a creepy parade float. Helen Mirren is his long-suffering wife (98 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris) ( 11/22/2012 12:33 PM )
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Movie review: 'Silver Linings Playbook'
***1/2 Silver Linings Playbook Bradley Cooper finally gets a role that gives his oily charm some vulnerability. He plays a mental patient living in Philadelphia with his parents, hung up on his estranged wife and spending time with an equally unstable woman (Jennifer Lawrence). The movie whizzes and stings. Its director is David O. Russell, who's become Hollywood's most instinctive maker of ensemble dramatic comedies. With a never-haler Robert De Niro as Cooper's gambler dad. (122 min., R) (Wesley Morris) ( 11/16/2012 5:22 PM )
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Take 2 reviews and podcast
Look for new reviews by Ty Burr and Wesley Morris at the end of each week in multiple formats.
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