“Jack Reacher," based on the Lee Child novel “One Shot," begins chillingly enough with the stigma of the recent tragedy in Connecticut. A sniper looks through his scope and guns down five people in cold blood. But while “Reacher” is far from perfection it doesn’t deserve this kind of relevance, either. The shooting inquiry brings Reacher (Tom Cruise) to Pittsburgh. He’s an investigative officer acquainted with the suspect believed to be

"Zero Dark Thirty" may be the best unentertaining movie I've seen this year. This is Kathryn Bigelow’s second film based on the war on terror, and it is just as much of an imperfect as it is an interesting take on the past decade as “The Hurt Locker,” and has roughly the same type of main character in it. “Zero” is very easy to follow, comes off impeccably well-researched and has a terrific performance sure to get some award consideration

“This is 40”, the“sorta” sequel to “Knocked up”, is “sorta”terrible and when I say sorta, I mean a lot. So many movies, TV shows, and even prior Judd Apatow films have tried to sitcomize the pitfalls of marriage to the point where it’s been done to death. Being that this was an Apatow flick, I was hoping he would have a fresh take, but this is without question his worse film and one of the worse of the year, too. Paul Rudd and Leslie play Pete

“The Guilt Trip” is the kind of film you'd want to take your aunt to in order to make up for not calling her often enough during the year. Or anyone who enjoys predictable and fluff entertainment, for that matter. "Breezy," "cute," and "nice" apply, with Barbara Streisand and Seth Rogen doing their damndest best to make these qualifiers stick. The "Funny Girl" performer plays Joyce, a lonely widow who devotes most of her time to her only son Andy

So who’s ready for another nine plus hours of hobbits, dwarves, orcs, elves, and Gandalf? Honestly the way director Peter Jackson, taking his fourth trip to Middle Earth, has worked this first of “The Hobbit” trilogy; it will feel like it’s going by in a flash. I’m so impressed with what he’s done here; proving again that nobody could do a better job of bringing J.R.R Tolkien’s stories to the screen quite like him. This one starts with the dwarves

Ken Burns's documentary “The Central Park 5” (it was co-directed with Sarah Burns and David McMahon) begins with the recounting of the rape of a jogger in the park during April of 1989, the trigger event of a woefully tragic story. Working with his daughter and son-in-law, Burns has created a nearly flawless film about the cracks in our criminal justice system, zeroing in on the “us vs. them” mentality that became

Better movies are coming in the next couple of weeks, is what I kept repeating to myself as I sat through “Deadfall," an incredibly average thriller about people with father issues. Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde play Addison and Liza, two siblings who forged a very deep bond with one another during their young years when they’re alcoholic father put them through hell. Now they’re casino robbers on the run in the blizzard-laden count-

“Hyde Park on Hudson” wastes no time in letting us know it’s a prestige project. This is a film that takes place in a beautiful location (the New York estate of Franklin Roosevelt’s mother with its sunny view of nature, including a driving path among the flowers), has Laura Linney, as Roosevelt’s cousin Daisy, constantly butt into the film with a pretentious voiceover narration letting us know how important everything is, and has

A romantic comedy may feel like a strange new direction for director David O. Russell (“I Heart Huckabees,” “The Fighter") but his adaptation of Matthew Quick’s namesake novel is a winner, serving up equal parts romance and uplifting drama. What of Bradley Cooper 2.0? He plays a demanding role to perfection. His Pat Solatino, a bipolar Philadelphia man who spent eight months in a psych ward after a brutal beating put on

“Killing them Softly” is an expression I never understood but I'll guess that if one needed to kill softly, Brad Pitt’s Jackie would be the right man for the job. “Softly,” writer-director Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of the George V. Higgins novel “Cogan’s Trade," (itself a follow-up to “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford") is the Weinstein Company contender for an Academy Award this year. It’s not going to