Run All Night, Cinderella, October Gale

Run All Night

Cinderella



October Gale

Capsule reviews on the week's new features:

A Walk Among the Tombstones

Sometimes, before you get to an analysis of the merits of a film, you have to react as a human being.

Non-Stop

The less said, the better about the preposterous "Non-Stop."

The LEGO Movie

The only way to enjoy "The LEGO Movie" is stoned (as directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller none-too-subtly suggest).

Taken 2

“’Fruit Cart!’” – An expletive used by knowledgeable film buffs during any chase scene involving a foreign or ethnic locale, reflecting their certainty that a fruit cart will be overturned during the chase, and an angry peddler will run into the middle of the street to shake his fist at the hero’s departing vehicle.” – Roger Ebert, Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary

Not only is there an actual Fruit Cart! scene in “Taken 2,” you’ll find a bingo card’s worth of additional entries from Ebert’s Glossary in this laughably ludicrous compendium of clichés. It’s not often that a favorably disposed audience takes to hooting at the movie they’ve come to see, but sometimes there’s no pretending not to notice the stench. And whatever goodwill Neeson has accrued, he’s squandered with this sell-out, the kind of unabashed insult to the audience’s intelligence you don’t see for decades at a time.

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.

The Grey

"The Grey" is a geek show, a gruesome game of Ten Little Indians with nothing more on its mind (contrary to a number of reviews by critics who must have just filed out of Phil 101) than having wolves pick off Alaskan oil-rig workers one by one like Julie Brown's homecoming queen. To give the appearance of slightly loftier ambitions, they've paid Liam Neeson to lead the expedition, lecturing on lupine behavioral patterns like Clarissa explaining it all.