So you think a job where you’re required to watch lots of movies is a breeze. Well… you’re right! It’s a pretty good gig, no question. Or at least it is most of the time. You see, moviegoers such as yourself have the option – the right — to not see a movie. I suppose we critics do too, but we’re often left feeling guilty about enacting that right. And [...]

It’s 2012 now, in case you didn’t notice, so before the world comes to an end and Roland Emmerich can say “I told you so!”, I think it’s best we reflect on the year that was.

Speaking for myself here – and not for Tom Clift, whose list is also below — 2011 was one of those years where the average quality of movies was quite high, [...]

My comrades over at the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) — of which I’m a voting member — recently announced the winners of the society’s 15th annual awards, and to little surprise (given its seven nominations), the top honours went to Terrence Malick’s arthouse opus The Tree of Life. For the sake of comparison, the title of best film last year [...]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film – live action or animated – quite like Happy Feet Two, and I don’t mean that in a good way. If the original Happy Feet were a whirlwind adventure, this manic sequel is a Category 5 hurricane, the intent being to sweep audiences off their feet, but the result being more  in line with taking a flying brick to the face. Director [...]

The bitter cynic within me — located just left of the pancreas, if we’re being precise — would want nothing more than to rip into the manipulative emotional rollercoaster that is Cameron Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo, the kind of on-rails Hallmark drama where every ascent is followed by a predictable fall. Yet preventing such a scathing report is my inner romantic, a resident of the heart who shows up [...]

Now that we’ve collectively agreed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull never happened, let us return to fawning over Steven Spielberg for that kind of “gee whiz, let’s do that again!” giddiness you get from watching movies like The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. The director might be working from a collection of mid-20^th century comics by Belgian artist Hergé, but this is undeniably [...]

This year, we’ve seen superheroes, aliens and boy wizards explode onto the big screen, but where have all the real action movies been? I’m talking about the ones featuring people, not pixels. The ones where the actor dangles perilously from the world’s tallest building, and not from a wire in front the world’s widest green screen. What happened to those action movies? Don’t they get made any more?

Well, it turns [...]

Eddie Murphy has been stealing from the pockets of moviegoers for over a decade now – how else would you describe the experience of watching Pluto Nash or Imagine That? – so it’s not without a sense of irony that he gives his best performances in years as a petty thief in Tower Heist. Murphy not only steals scenes from his co-star Ben Stiller, he actually [...]