Seven Psychopaths, Pitch Perfect

Seven Psychopaths

Pitch Perfect

Martin McDonagh's "Seven Psychopaths" is the latest in a seemingly endless stream of ultraviolent comedies with high-toned, non-sequitur dialogue between the bloody murders. Despite the presence of "In Bruges" star Colin Farrell, only rarely does "Seven" attain the farcical momentum or genial ingratiation of that, McDonagh's best film. Too often the writing aims for an epic, "Usual Suspects" grandeur while achieving only occasional absurdist laughs. Christopher Walken turns in a toned-down, effective performance, and Woody Harrelson makes an excellent psychopath-among-psychopaths, but "Seven" remains more a concept than a fully inhabited film.

Argo

Ben Affleck's "Argo" gets 4 stars the same way Barack Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago: for future promise as much as for current accomplishment. To be sure, "Argo" is a terrific movie, a crowd-pleaser that seems to please every single person in the crowd. (It received an average CinemaScore grade of A+). It might well win the Oscar for, inter alia, Best Picture. But it's not perfect.

Smashed

"Smashed" is about a young elementary teacher who happens to be morbidly alcoholic. Kate Hannah (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) scours the cabinets of the Highland Park home she shares with her dipso husband Charlie (hirtellous Aaron Gray), a freelance music critic with family money, for the last swig from any near-empty bottle. She takes a nip in the school parking lot, where her colleague Mr. Davies (Nick Offerman), himself a recovering alkie, catches her and without pressure offers to introduce her to his AA meeting.

The Paperboy, The Oranges

The Paperboy

The Oranges

Both have been trashed by critics, but I'm going to recommend "The Paperboy" and "The Oranges," two films with nothing in common but a strong sense of self. They know exactly what they mean to do, and do it.

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.

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?

Stars in Shorts

Shorts HD has released an anthology of seven short films with the highly imaginative title “Stars in Shorts” (maybe it is imaginative – has Julia Stiles been a star anytime in the last 15 years?). It’s all downhill after the first short, a mildly amusing trifle called “The Procession” with Lily Tomlin and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as a mother and son reluctantly at...tending the funeral of a friend of Ferguson’s sister that neither of them knew. (Perhaps nobody else could give quite the same line reading when Ferguson asks, “Oh, that’s terrible. I’m sorry…who is Susan?”) When a red light leaves half the procession too far ahead for them to find and half blindly following them, all they want to do is exit stage left.