Bridget Jones's Baby, Snowden, Operation Avalanche, Fatima, Silicon Cowboys

Bridget Jones's Baby

Snowden



Operation Avalanche

Fatima



Silicon Cowboys

Notes from another middling week of movies:

The Top Ten Films of 2013: #3

#3

Don Jon

Uproariously funny and very sexy, "Don Jon" makes a perfect date movie and an exceptional directorial debut for its too-cute-for-words star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Lincoln

“Lincoln” is a competently made, watchable excuse for unsophisticated audiences to choke on their own virtue and applaud themselves for making it through a two-and-a-half-hour prestige drama. It’s dry as dirt, endlessly self-congratulatory, and totally lacking in intellectual and emotional depth and resonance.

Looper

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis star as younger and older versions of the same man in “Looper,” a time-travel action adventure that starts out interesting and becomes less so as it goes. It’s one of those futuristic movies in which, only thirty years from now, American life has become unrecognizable. The country is divided into five “zones” (it’s always zones in these pictures). Time travel is possible, but has been banned by the government. Oh, yeah, everybody’s downtrodden, but you knew that, right?

Premium Rush, Compliance

Premium Rush

Compliance

The bike-messenger race-against-time movie “Premium Rush” isn’t very premium – it gets every action movie cliché and stereotype stuck in its spokes – and doesn’t provide much of a rush. Having thoroughly enjoyed “Run Lola Run” and the similar Japanese import “Non-Stop,” I was surprised how little excitement this particular chase generated. The dialogue is mostly perfunctory, but some of what’s given to Michael Shannon to read borders on embarrassing. Shannon’s a talented actor, but he’s overdone it with the goggle-eyed nutbags. The time has come for him to rein it in, to find a quality role of nuance and subtlety. The leading player, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, still hasn’t found his star vehicle. He’s obviously gotten himself in great shape for this picture (homeboy looks fiiine), but the most enjoyable moments in “Premium Rush” involve watching his cheeks (all four). Its fundamental lesson is that bicyclists are as much a scourge and a plague in New York as they are here.

The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan's trilogy-concluding "The Dark Knight Rises" assaults the viewer with the unrelenting bass thump of a Hans Zimmer score (which also marred "Inception"), its queasily violent vision of a downtrodden Gotham held hostage by an unremarkable villain, and endless, nothing-special scenes of hand-to-hand combat, CGI effects, and green-screen projections. At 165 bloated minutes, it's boring beyond belief.