True Story

Review by Matt Finley

Like a warmed over diet cola version of In Cold Blood, TRUE STORY pits a half-as-eccentric author against a fractionally mysterious killer for a movie that’s as flat and artificial as the aforementioned soda.

The story, which is adapted from journalist Mike Finkel’s autobiographical book of the same name, is a bizarre and entrancing character drama. The film, directed by British theater director Rupert Goold, is a bumbling, half-cocked crime thriller, feigning intensity and pretending at brilliance while its two potentially spitfire leads languish in a mire of superficially portentous montages and lingering close-ups.

22 Jump Street

Review by Pete Roche

We didn’t catch 21 JUMP STREET in theatres in 2012.  Sure, we saw all the posters advertising the Jonah Hill / Channing Tatum police comedy, but didn’t think in a million years that a farcical movie adaptation of FOX’s hip late ‘80s crime series would fly.  

After all, the TV show (1987-1991) was a dark, edgy drama starring an up-and-coming Johnny Depp.  Both Hill and Tatum had already racked up some hot-shot cinema creds (Hill for SUPERBAD and MONEYBALL, Tatum for STEP UP and G.I. JOE:  RISE OF COBRA), but what were the chances their buddy cop caper would hit with audiences?

The Wolf of Wall Street

Review by Matt Finley

I don’t foresee anyone making a funnier three-hour film about the stock market than Martin Scorsese’s THE WOLF OF WALL STREET. In all fairness, to claim that the whip-paced, sublimely irreverent film is actually about the stock market would be like describing THE SHINING as a movie about hotel maintenance.  Wall Street is merely the stage  - the geographic center of a metastasizing empire built from money, drugs, women, and drugs.

Primarily money… but also mostly drugs.

Adapted by Boardwalk Empire showrunner Terence Winter from two memoirs by disgraced stockbroker Jordan Belfort, WOLF chronicles Belfort’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) meteoric rise and subsequent meteoric plummet from New York’s Wall Street, where he used small potato penny stocks and a motley crew of petty criminals to cheat his way to the top.

This is the End

Review by Bob Ignizio

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the writing team responsible for the extremely funny films SUPERBAD and PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (and who were also responsible for the extremely unfunny films THE GREEN HORNET and THE WATCH) have decided to apply their talents to the goal of finding the laughs in Armageddon with THIS IS THE END. The film is based on a short Rogen and Goldberg co-wrote with Jay Stone back in 2007, and as in that earlier film Rogen and his Undeclared co-star Jay Baruchel are two of the poor souls “left behind” when the rapture takes place and all the good people get lifted into Heaven. Also left behind to suffer the torments of Hell on Earth are some of the other Hollywood types Rogen calls friends, including James Franco, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Danny McBride, and Emma Watson.

The Watch

By Matt Finley

At the very least, THE WATCH, directed by The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer (HOT ROD), is sit-throughable.

Originally written by Jared Stern as a family-baiting PG-13 sci-fi comedy, the film was later re-worked into a hard-R lead-ventilated cuss generator by SUPERBAD scribes Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Certainly far less sci-fi than a connect-the-dots buddy comedy, the film lurches between the sentimental and the profane, offering plenty of comfy sit-com-recycled domestic drama as a veritable cavalcade of dick jokes tumble out beyond the point of diminishing returns.

And, yes, there are a few aliens. They look sort of like nude, off-brand Predator blow-up dolls. They show up maybe three times in limp action sequences between long stretches of intermittently funny  improvs and plot points that vacillate between completely off the wall and exactly out of that last movie you saw where a bunch of dudes hang out and have an allegedly zany adventure.

Moneyball

Review by Pete Roche

Looking for a way to get your high school athlete excited about trigonometry? 

Quadratic equations are co-stars in MONEYBALL, Bennett Miller's new based-on-a-true-story film about a budget-constrained general manager who uses pimped-out statistics to assemble a miracle baseball team.  Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) injects America's favorite pasttime with super-science—only to learn you can't take the romance out of game.