Photo Credeit: Marvel/Disney
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Audiences will adore Iron Man 3 for the simple fact that it is a good ol’ fashioned comic book movie that doesn’t try to give its hero any grandiose or overly dark backstory a la Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. It is fun F-U-N for fun’s sake, and doesn’t take itself too seriously in an effort to make itself an out-and-out entertainer.

We all know Tony Stark by now: he’s cheeky and witty and self-aware . . . and yet somehow always blind-sided by the bad guys. The baddies this time around are the nefarious global terrorist Mandarin (expertly played by Ben Kingsley) and his partner-in-crime/uber nerd scientist Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce, in a truly memorable get-up). Together, they want to take over the world a la Pinky and the Brain, only their weapons of choice are the maimed and half-dead bodies of innocents who are turned from weak into wicked.

The movie gets a lot of laughs, especially when Stark finds himself crash-landed in Tennessee, where he really gets to go at it with his rival James Rhoades (Don Cheadle), all in that deadpan as only Robert Downey can deliver. Gwyneth Paltrow’s role as the romantic interest Pepper is mercifully restrained this time around. And all of it comes to a head in an epic showdown that any fans of the genre will say is well worth the ticket price (seriously: the climactic battle is truly a spectacle to behold).

And it goes without saying that the movie will almost assuredly find a way to rewrite box office history. A surefire blockbuster winner.

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A lot of people will begin clamoring for Michael Shannon to get an Oscar nomination for his performance as killer-for-hire Richard Kuklinski in The Iceman – and with good reason: he is fantastic in it. It’s the kind of bone-chilling, unnerving portrayal we’re used to seeing from Daniel Day-Lewis or Al Pacino. The film, while not as even as Shannon’s towering portrayal, is still a worthy endeavor.

Kuklinski story was ripped from the headlines in 1986 when the seemingly innocuous Jersey banker, husband, and father turned out to be a secret assassin who murdered more than 100 people, often in gruesome ways that would put Freddy Cougar to shame.

The film doesn’t make any attempts to humanize Kuklinski’s behavior – rather, it tries to delve deep into his psyche and examine how and why a “good boy from the neighborhood” could become such a monster. In the end, it seems to blame not only a sociopathic psyche, but a religious upbringing that unintentionally squashed whatever compassion or humanity he may have had.

All of this is expertly conveyed by Shannon, who shows Kuklinski to be as remote from himself as he is ruthless to his victims. It’s an interesting portrayal, and one that the Academy will likely reward when it comes time to hand out the next round of nominations.

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One of the best movies I’ve ever seen on the subject of divorce and its effects on children, What Maisie Knew is reimagining of the classic Henry James novel which takes the tale and moves it into the modern era where everything that was wrong with marriages of yore remains the same in the 21st century.

The film is told primarily through the perspective of the young girl at the center of the custody battle, Maisie (played by a truly astonishing young actress named Onata Aprile). Maisie is loved by her parents (Steve Coogan and Julianne Moore) but they remain, despite this very obvious love, lousy parents. They are both so juvenile and self-involved at times that you can’t help but think that they need to be parented – while in therapy and generally medicated.

Maisie’s parents both pursue relationships with much younger lovers after their divorce – and while the new step-pesudo-parents may be kindly enough, they aren’t able to understand how Maisie needs to be healed from the trauma of her parents’ break up before she can begin to form other viable relationships. This is, essentially, what the story is about: the breakdown of a young girl’s hope for what could be. Always engaging, and often times devastating, this is movie that virtually everyone can relate to and is likely to become a cult classic.

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There’s much to admire and much to be shocked by in the new film At Any Price from director Ramin Bahrani. The movie is set in the American heartland where farms and gold-hearted farmers toil to feed the nation and reap whatever’s left for their own survival. That meme, it turns out, is utter garbage.

The American Heartland has become Wall Street, replete with vulture capitalists disguised as farmers who wish to swoop in and buy up all the farms they can, creating what are in essence ‘super’ farms and turning a profit that often reaches into the billions.

One such corporate harpy is Henry Whipple (Dennis Quaid) whose family has tilled the soil for generations. Whipple isn’t interested in living through another harvest. He wants to make money – lots of it. And so he sets out to buy as many of the farms in the area as he can. He wants to build an empire and pass it on to his sons, one of whom – Dean (Zac Efron) – is more interested in becoming a race care driver while the other one is off climbing mountains on other continents. His wife and mistress are content to just watch as it all unfolds – and then collapses.

At times, the story gets a bit melodramatic, especially when Efron is called upon to play the spoiled brat/superstar wannabe who doesn’t get his father and his ambitions. But Quaid carries the picture on his own, giving Whipple a hint of Willy Loman that makes him a memorable tragic figure. If it weren’t for the fact that everything is made to turn a profit these days, Whipple might be the real tragedy of this story.

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Confession: I had both been looking forward to and dreading watching Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. Knowing Bay’s brand of mindless, over-the-top action phantasmagoric style, I assumed that the film would be a mindbending and earbusting exercise in excess. Still, being that the film is based on a true story relevant to the pervasive abuse of steroids in the modern sports world, I thought maybe it would lend itself a modicum of taste and aspire to something slightly artful.

Well, no such luck. And you can’t blame me because I gave it the benefit of the doubt. But Michael Bay being Michael Bay . . . well, it doesn’t take much to hate his movies. The story is about three steroid-addicted body builders who kidnap people for a living. Or was it for kicks? I couldn’t tell because I found it hard to believe that any such three characters could possibly be so stupid. Imagine Bugs Bunny, Goofy, and Sonic the Hedgehog juiced up and carjacking innocents. That’s what we have here.

It’s a shame, because the cast does what it can with the imbecilic material its given. Mark Wahlberg has proven that he can act when given the chance. Bay doesn’t give him the chance so he has to meathead it as much as is humanly possible . . . which isn’t easy when you’re sharing the screen with “The Rock” Dwayne Johnson. Johnson has a unique screen presence, something that Bay fails to take advantage of. Instead, all we get are shot after shot of his massive upper arms, while he grunts something about Florida and money.

I’d repeat his dialogue, but it really isn’t worth my time. Or yours.

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Robert DeNiro! Diane Keaton! Susan Sarandon! Robin Williams! Amanda Seyfried! Topher Grace! And yes, even Ice Queen Kathryn Heigl! All in one movie! About a WASP wedding gone awry! Can they manage to turn into something other than the minstrel show that is the modern romantic comedy?!

Nope. They can’t. Or they won’t. I wasn’t able to tell because this movie is such a colossal waste of so much talent that to even call it a movie is kind of a stretch. It’s more of a filmed exercise in marquee names wearing designer wedding attire. They all look very nice. Beyond that, this is pure paycheck fodder for all involved.

A divorced couple (DeNiro and Keaton) pretend to be married when their adopted son’s biological mother flies in for the big affair. She’s an ultra conservative witchy poo who fails to understand why anyone would do anything that is in the slightest bit unsavory. Why she fails to recognize her giving up her child for adoption as being in the same category is beyond me.

The film spends most of its time trying to regale the audience with sitcom level jokes about family weddings, divorces, and the ever-troublesome parent-child relationship. It’s like an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond stretched into 100 minutes. Except they forgot the laughs.

Photo Credit: Lionsgate Films
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Maybe I’m just overly fond of my days as an English major, but the story that kept traversing in and out of my mind while watching Jeff Nichols’s brilliant new film, Mud, was the beacon of American literature known as Huckleberry Finn.

Yes, I know: Mud has nothing to do with racism, the Civil War, or Reconstruction. Heck, I don’t think I even recall a single black character in the entire movie. But it does tell the fluid tale of a boy (in this case, two boys) adrift on a boat with a fugitive in the South.

The two boys at the center of the story (from whose perspective almost all of the movie is told) are just seeking out some fun on what they think is an abandoned river island. Turns out the island is inhabited by a man named Mud (Matthew McConaughey, in a near tour de force) who committed a crime to save the woman he loves. Her name is Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) and she is, according to Mud, “like a dream you don’t wanna wake up from.”

The story goes into more crevices and corners than can be justly counted in a movie review, but suffice is to say this is a portrait of America that few films dare to offer in the modern day: gritty, ugly, violent, and full of an almost perverse kind of beauty. As for McConaughey, this is easily his best work to date and should win him new hordes of fans who were previously dismissive of his acting chops (i.e. your truly).

One of the season’s best.

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“Curioser and curioser!” remarked Alice as she encountered the bizarre goings-on of the Wonderland she stumbles into after following a white rabbit down a hole. The same sense of foreboding wonder may have been plaguing the director Dante Ariola who, in his debut feature Arthur Norman, seems to be so fascinated by the concept of his story that he actually sort of forgot, well, the story. What we’re left with is a dual character study that stands (or rather wobbles) on the strength of the acting prowess of Colin Firth and Emily Blunt. Alas, it could have been so much more.

The film tells the sordid tale of a man named Wallace Avery (Firth) who seems resigned to live a life of mediocrity. There’s just nothing going on in his life that has survived the cloud of disaster that is his existence. So what does he do? Fake his death and reinvent himself as (what else?) a golf pro in Indiana. There he meets Mike (Emily Blunt) who is charming ad seductive . . . and clearly insane. She too pretends to be something she’s not, so it’s no wonder that the two of them are immediately drawn to each other. In so many ways the two of them deserve each other and nothing (and nobody) more.

The film sort of peters out a quarter of the way through because the script decides that it’s more important for us to watch them self-destruct than to show us how their self-deception wreaks havoc on the innocent. It’s an interesting concept, but one that never bothers to explain itself to anyone outside the movie. A bitter disappointment.