MOVIE REVIEW: Inception

Inception may go down as his masterpiece someday, with its ability to take such a huge, wild, and suspenseful concept and pace it was such a deeply affecting emotional story. The powerful relationship between DiCaprio and Cotillard successfully overcomes the heist action to great effectiveness. Between Inception and his continuing work with Martin Scorsese (Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, and Shutter Island earlier this year), DiCaprio is building an impressive resume of compelling psychological performances. He hasn't been that teen heartthrob from Growing Pains, Romeo + Juliet, and Titanic for a long time and it's time for people to take notice, because he might be the best young actor working today.

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MOVIE REVIEW: The Last Airbender

With The Last Airbender, I thought M. Night was going to break his losing streak.  The previews looked promising and didn't emphasize his usual weirdness.  I thought by taking on and adapting a name-brand project from a place like Nickelodeon that he would shake off the rust.  I thought that doing essentially a kid's film he didn't obscurely write himself would ignore both his signature tendency to drop scary twists for the sake of twists and also the itch to create an R-rated picture like 2008's The Happening. Boy, was I wrong. 

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MOVIE REVIEW: The A-Team

The movie and Smokin' Aces director Joe Carnahan amp up the signature action of the original series in every way possible.  Instead of the same staged Hollywood car flips and rolls, we get parachuting tanks.  Instead of badly reused helicopter stock footage from cop shows, we have the power of CGI effects.  Despite the overused style of queasy-shaky action camera shots and choppy, hypercutted editing that's been an unfortunate action movie standard since Michael Bay made it cool over a decade ago, all of it creates and absolute blast of a movie experience!  Sure, the action may be physically and mechanically preposterous,  but that's the point and that over-the-top spirit matches the B-movie style of the original show perfectly.

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