Movie Reviews

After nearly a month of lackluster offerings, leave it to the writer of Training Day to spice up theaters with the cop thriller End of Watch, a gritty, entertaining and emotional action-drama that fires on all cylinders.

Read FilmJabber’s full End of Watch movie review.

Chico & Rita is an epic romantic drama that follows the lives of two Cuban lovers as they fall in and out of love with one another over several decades. Emotional and engaging, the movie features a strong story and compelling characters. It is also an animated film.

Read FilmJabber’s full Chico & Rita movie review.

One of the best movies of 2012 debuts on DVD and Blu-ray this week, and that movie is Cabin in the Woods. What looks like a stereotypical horror movie about a group of young stupid things who go to – you guessed it – a cabin in the woods only to get dismembered one by one is anything but, but to say anything more than that would ruin what makes it so good in the first place.

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From the director of American History X, Detachment puts a new spin on the teacher-in-an-inner-city-school subgenre. Adrian Brody plays a no-nonsense-badger-don’t-give-a-f**k substitute teacher who pushes himself through life with few emotional connections. Until he decides to help a teenage prostitute.

Read FilmJabber’s full Detachment movie review.

Eva Mendes stars in the drama-comedy Girl in Progress, now available on DVD and Blu-ray. In the movie, Mendes plays a single mom trying to juggle her job, bills and an affair with a married man… her daughter is of lower priority. Girl in Progress is a film that has a lot of positive elements, but that never hits its stride.  It’s a film I wanted to like more than I did…

Read our full Girl in Progress movie review.

Winning an Oscar, especially one as prestigious as Best Foreign Language Picture, automatically sets expectations sky high. Recent winners include The Sea Inside, The Lives of Others, The Counterfeiters and The Secret in Their Eyes, all exceptional films. Unfortunately, the most recent recipient of the award, the Iranian drama A Separation, falls short of “exceptional”.

Read FilmJabber’s full A Separation movie review.

The Words is a movie of many stories, of a story within a story within a story, of layers, each different from the next with varying degrees of quality, at times hypnotic, other times drawn out, well acted by some, horribly by others. It also has an ending so bad it’s worth calling out in the opening paragraph of this movie review.

Read our full The Words movie review.

While lawyers, policemen and doctors get television show after television show, bike messengers get nada. Hell, truck drivers in Alaska get a television show. Packrats do, too. How many shows are there about bike messengers? A big fat zero. Not anymore! Bike messengers finally get their day in the spotlight, and not on television – in a big-screen movie starring big-screen actors, depicting just how awesome their low-paid jobs are. Especially when corrupt cops and Chinese smugglers are involved.

Read FilmJabber’s full Premium Rush movie review.

The Lord of the Rings is one of the greatest trilogies of all time, not only because of its sweeping story arcs and extraordinary production values but because it was filmed as one, long movie that happened to be split into three parts. There is also little argument that the extended versions of the three movies, with over two hours of additional footage, are superior to the theatrical releases. In fact, it’s hard to think of not watching the extended versions.

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Judgment Day has yet to come (though the Republic National Convention might be the latest sign of our impending doom), but Warner Brothers is giving fans yet another opportunity to spend their hard-earned cash to watch the world perish in a fiery blaze, and buy movies they already own.

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Jason Statham is back in the generically titled Safe, a generic action movie that is a weak entry even by his standards. Statham, who even when acting in subpar material exudes an incredible degree of energy and charisma, seems to realize early on that he signed onto a stinker; he’s as forgettable as the movie.

Read FilmJabber’s full Safe movie review.

The late summer doldrums end with a bang as Lawless rolls into theaters, a dramatized true story of moonshining brothers who are pitted against a ruthless police officer. Despite featuring great performances and a violent story, however, Lawless fails to be the sum of its part.

Read FilmJabber’s full Lawless movie review.