Rise of the Planet of the Apes Movie Review: You Blew It Up! Damn You to Hell!

For the life of me I can’t understand why critics have been heaping praise on Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Are our standards and expectations for big-budget studio productions so low that as long as it’s not a documentary about idiots falling down we think it’s good? Have we come this far and sunk so low? Really, I don’t see what there is to appreciate in this sub-par CGI-enhanced non-spectacle that completely fails to grasp any of the subtlety or even the humor of Planet of the Apes.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger: Woody Allen Movie Review

It’s become a matter of routine clockwork that around this time every year the new film from Woody Allen finds its way to cinema screens around the United States. Usually his films open earlier in Europe, as was the case with his latest, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, his fourth London-based film.

As much as I have liked some of Allen’s recent films, none of them have made as indelible an impression on my mind as his earlier classics. I’m relieved and satisfied to accept that he seems to have permanently left behind the sad gimmicks that marred his work in the first half of the last decade: hysterical blindness; hypnosis; parallel stories, to name a few.