San Francisco Chronicle Movies
- ‘Maze Runner: The Death Cure’ is 142 minutes that you can never get back
Thursday - 01/25/2018 - 06:01 PMSo things really aren’t going well, not one bit. The apocalypse has more or less happened — or worse, it’s in the process of happening. There’s a virus going around, and three-quarters of the people on Earth are infected.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- Jessica Chastain is great, Aaron Sorkin’s ‘Molly’s Game’ not so much
Thursday - 12/21/2017 - 06:12 PMThis is not the review that will tell you not to see a Jessica Chastain movie. Chastain’s take-no-prisoners, full-throttle performances are a pleasure in themselves, and she is at a stage of her career — enjoy it; it never lasts — where she can do no wrong.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- John Cena the voice of Ferdinand, the heavy and full of brotherly love bull
Thursday - 12/14/2017 - 01:09 AMOne would think it would grow wearisome to see a 2,000-pound bull repeatedly placed in situations in which his size overwhelms his surroundings. It’s essentially the same gag, whether the title character of the new animated film “Ferdinand” squeezes into the window of a house, turns a sofa into a seesaw or navigates the proverbial china shop.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Movie review capsules, Dec. 3
Thursday - 11/30/2017 - 02:51 PMA Bad Moms Christmas This rushed sequel to “Bad Moms” (2016) feels more like a financial decision than an artistic mandate. And yet, through all its plot and editing problems, the comedy does deliver a lot of laughs — with a trio of bad grandmothers joining bad moms Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis and Kathryn Hahn.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- Enjoy Thanksgiving dinner and a movie in St. Helena
Tuesday - 11/21/2017 - 08:54 PMGoing to a movie after Thanksgiving dinner is almost as much of a tradition as pumpkin pie. But if you live in the North Bay, Cameo Cinema in St. Helena will help you combine the two.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Capsule movie reviews for Nov. 19
Wednesday - 11/15/2017 - 08:39 PMAmerican Made The movie’s light, breezy tone doesn’t quite seem right — or even make sense — for this story of a TWA pilot turned drug smuggler in the 1980s.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- Dysfunctional ‘Bad Moms Christmas’ still delivers laughs
Wednesday - 11/01/2017 - 09:48 AMComedy transpires in the most obvious places during “A Bad Moms Christmas.”
A randy grandmother goes to a strip club. A small child says the f-word, repeatedly. Even smooth jazz artist Kenny G, perhaps the easiest target on the planet, gets mocked in a cameo.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - ‘Marshall’ an entertaining look at a justice’s early years
Thursday - 10/12/2017 - 05:11 PMThose of us old enough to remember Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court of the United States remember him as a stern, heavy presence. So what a surprise to meet him again in “Marshall” and to find out that, as a young man, he was a very cool guy — fearless and charismatic, and not just brilliant but up for a good time.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - ‘American Made’: It’s about the star, not the logic
Thursday - 09/28/2017 - 12:48 AM“American Made” is entertaining and brisk; and best of all, it stars Tom Cruise, whose work ethic is always to break a sweat, in every movie and in practically every scene.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- Toronto Film Fest lineup will generate buzz, and debates
Thursday - 09/07/2017 - 05:06 PMNEW YORK — Few institutions in cinema can match the Toronto International Film Festival as a conversation-starting force. It simply has a lot of movies worth talking about.
And this year, many of the films that will parade down Toronto red carpets will hope to shift the dialogue not just in terms of awards buzz, but in other directions, too: equality in Hollywood; politics in Washington; even the nature of the movies, themselves.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- ‘Happy End’ is almost boring enough to make this review boring — almost
Thursday - 12/28/2017 - 06:06 PM“Happy End” is the latest from Michael Haneke, an uncompromising filmmaker whose work is sometimes brilliant and sometimes hard to watch, and sometimes both, but not this time. “Happy End” is just hard to watch.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - It’s an embarrassment of pitches: ‘Perfect’ sequel disappoints
Thursday - 12/21/2017 - 01:42 AMNothing squanders built-up goodwill quicker than a third film in a series that’s still making money, but is out of ideas. It’s the “Home Alone 3” effect: audience optimism turns to disappointment, before realizing there are no more stories to tell on this thin construct.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Light-hearted ‘Six Degrees of Freedom’ a piece to take seriously
Friday - 12/01/2017 - 07:50 PMArtificial intelligence, programmed behaviors, privacy and other digital-age dilemmas are at issue in “Six Degrees of Freedom,” a beguiling world premiere dance theater work by Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts. In 75 minutes that blended the playfully droll and gracefully haunting, the natteringly absurd and downright funny, this lighthearted troupe of five made a distinctive first impression at ODC Theater on Thursday, Nov.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- ‘Divine Order’ a by-the-numbers story of Swiss women’s suffrage
Thursday - 11/23/2017 - 04:31 PMMaybe it was something in the mountain air, but on the question of women’s suffrage, Switzerland lagged well behind the United States and Europe — Swiss women didn’t get the vote until 1971.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- Filmmaking artistry on first-rate display in ‘Three Billboards’
Thursday - 11/16/2017 - 12:51 AM“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” begins where most stories should begin, already in progress. The pivotal event, the tragedy from which the central character can never recover, has already happened, and what we see is the aftermath, the crazy things that take place after the world has already tipped its hand and revealed its madness.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - A successful new stab at ‘Murder on the Orient Express’
Wednesday - 11/08/2017 - 11:30 PMKenneth Branagh’s new adaptation of “Murder on the Orient Express” contains some of the best of old and new. Based on the novel by Agatha Christie, this is in many ways an old-fashioned entertainment, but it has the pace and visual richness of a modern movie.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- ‘Goodbye Christopher Robin’ a beautiful, exquisite film
Thursday - 10/19/2017 - 03:56 PM“Goodbye Christopher Robin” is an exquisite, beautiful film, and like most beautiful things, there’s something painful about it. It depicts a kind of beauty, innocence and purity that can’t be forever, whose existence forces you to stop and appreciate it now — and in the moment of appreciating it, to contemplate its future nonexistence.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - ‘My Little Pony’ movie best left for established fans
Thursday - 10/05/2017 - 06:27 PMThe streets of pony wonderland Equestria are oddly poop-free, and almost impossibly festive.
But as we’ve learned in “Trolls,” the Smurfs franchise and “The Three Amigos,” there is bound to be conflict when you build a society where there is no defense spending and 98 percent of your budget goes to party planning.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Lawrence under siege in Aronofsky’s latest extravaganza
Thursday - 09/14/2017 - 06:06 PMStarting in 1998 with “Pi,” Darren Aronofsky has directed, with mixed results, a series of dazzling and confrontational movies that combine visual virtuosity with intense probings of dark psychological themes.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- They got ‘It’ right: Behind the horror and gore lurks real artistry
Thursday - 09/07/2017 - 05:06 PMThe rebooted “It” earns the highest compliment for a horror movie:
Even if it didn’t have the homicidal clown and sink spewing blood and missing children getting yanked into sewers, what remains would still be an engaging movie.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- ‘The Commuter’ a gripping thriller in that winning Liam Neeson formula
Wednesday - 01/10/2018 - 11:36 PMLiam Neeson’s action movies have a built-in appeal, whether good (“Taken,” “Run All Night”) or only so-so (“Taken 3”), but “The Commuter” is securely in the good category. It weds all the winning aspects of the Neeson formula to a ticking-clock plot, full of tense moments and gripping sequences.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Funny nod to ’80s in ‘Jumanji,’ starring The Rock, Kevin Hart and Jack Black
Tuesday - 12/19/2017 - 04:20 PMNostalgia for the 1980s has been too narrow in scope lately, focusing on genre pieces featuring kid characters in the horror remake “It” and Netflix sci-fi series “Stranger Things.”
Other important ’80s touchstones, like John Hughes teen comedies and all those films in which a person wakes up in the wrong body — “Big” and “All of Me” were the best of them — have been overlooked as inspirations.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Capsule movie reviews, Dec. 10
Thursday - 12/07/2017 - 12:52 PMA Bad Moms Christmas This rushed sequel to “Bad Moms” (2016) feels more like a financial decision than an artistic mandate. And yet, through all its plot and editing problems, the comedy does deliver a lot of laughs — with a trio of bad grandmothers joining bad moms Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis and Kathryn Hahn.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- Capsule movie reviews, Nov. 26
Wednesday - 11/22/2017 - 05:39 PMA Bad Moms Christmas This rushed sequel to “Bad Moms” (2016) feels more like a financial decision than an artistic mandate. And yet, through all its plot and editing problems, the comedy does deliver a lot of laughs — with a trio of bad grandmothers joining bad moms Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis and Kathryn Hahn.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- ‘Man’ lets us experience ‘A Christmas Carol’ anew
Tuesday - 11/21/2017 - 06:48 PMChristmas movies thrive on the sense that we’re all in this together, “fellow passengers to the grave” as Charles Dickens put it. That sense was common in the 1940s and ’50s, an era that produced some of our best Christmas movies.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Movie review capsules, Nov. 12
Thursday - 11/02/2017 - 02:54 PMAll the Rage (Saved by Sarno) This is an advocacy film extolling the virtues of the late Dr. John Sarno’s unorthodox treatment for back pain. His idea was that much back pain has its genesis in repressed emotions from childhood, particularly anger.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- Through its flaws, ‘Thank You’ has a powerful message
Wednesday - 10/25/2017 - 04:06 PMThe makers of “Thank You for Your Service” deserve a cinematic medal of honor for getting their film to a big screen.
We’re in an age of sequels to sequels and reboots of reboots, where a well-reviewed movie that makes $400 million worldwide can be written up as a failure.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Government jobs bud as legal pot looms in Calif.
Saturday - 09/30/2017 - 07:36 PMLOS ANGELES (AP) — Recreational marijuana use becomes legal in California in 2018, and one of the things to blossom in the emerging industry isn't green and leafy - it's government jobs.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Performances highlight challenging ‘Stronger’ biopic
Thursday - 09/21/2017 - 02:36 PMYou could watch a dozen seasons of “Grey’s Anatomy” and never see a full tracheal intubation.
Most movies and television shows that deal with a medical crisis don’t linger on the removal of breathing tubes, or the first shower after a traumatic injury, or the first bar fight that breaks out around a man in a wheelchair.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - ‘Alphaville,’ ‘Stalker’ are movies for these dystopian times
Wednesday - 09/06/2017 - 03:57 PMGiven recent events, dystopian films such as “1984” and “Planet of the Apes” are seeming more and more like documentaries than flights of fancy vision.
But one thing hasn’t changed: They’re a lot of fun, even if now they might induce an extra heaping of increased panic.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share