The Grouchy Editor

 The Station Agent

Tired of movies with world-weary, cynical points of view?  Had enough of characters who don’t speak dialogue so much as argue and snipe at each other?  Then you might dig The Station Agent, a quiet little film about quiet little people who find friendship in rural New Jersey.  Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) plays a dwarf who moves to Mayberry– er, Newfoundland, to live in an abandoned train station and, with any luck, to escape society’s jerks.  But his new neighbors (Patricia Clarkson and Bobby Cannavale) won’t leave him alone.  That’s the plot – take it or leave it.  I took it.   Release:  2003   Grade:  B

*****

Septimo

Ricardo Darin, star of Argentina’s Oscar-winning The Secret in Their Eyes, teams with Belen Rueda (The Orphanage) in a thriller about the hunt for two children who vanish from an apartment-building stairwell. I complain about Hollywood’s recent penchant for stretching every movie, no matter how deserving, to interminable runtimes, but Septimo might be one film for which 88 minutes are not enough.  After a tense opening hour, in which estranged parents Darin and Rueda deal with the apparent abduction of their kids, the ending is abrupt and leaves more than a few loose ends.   Release:  2013   Grade:  B

*****

Women Aren’t Funny

The title lies.  Some women are funny, like Bonnie McFarlane, who wrote and directed this behind-the-scenes peek at the life of a typical stand-up comic — or in this case, two comics:  McFarlane and her husband, Rich Vos.  The documentary, during which McFarlane conducts short interviews with a gaggle of American comedians, is more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s hard to diss a flick in which the writer/director/star flashes her own bare butt while strolling bottomless through a field.   Release:  2014   Grade:  B

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Gone Girl

Screenwriter Gillian Flynn’s adaptation of novelist Gillian Flynn’s bestselling book is certainly faithful to the source material, but I don’t see that as such a good thing. Flynn’s twist-filled story – I refuse to call it “clever” because there are so many far-fetched developments – follows the plight of poor Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), who becomes Suspect A when his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) goes missing.  Unfortunately, the head-scratching plot holes that marred Flynn’s book are also present in the film.  On the positive side, this is a David Fincher project, and that means silly story or not, the movie is always watchable.  Release:  2014  Grade:  B

*****

Fruitvale Station

I have no idea how accurately Fruitvale Station depicts the events of New Year’s Day 2009, in which 22-year-old Oscar Grant was slain by police responding to a disturbance at an Oakland train station.  I suspect that the filmmakers put a bit too much sunshine on Grant, portraying him as a young man who was unfailingly kind to strangers, children, dogs, and his mother.  But as a dramatized snapshot of the disconnect between two Americas — black and white, rich and poor, law and lawlessness — Fruitvale is powerful and thought-provoking.  Release:  2013    Grade:  B+

 *****

The Interview

Critics want us to believe that when they sit down to review a film, they can be open-minded and objective.  But we all have expectations, and I’ll admit that mine were low for the notorious comedy, The Interview.  The movie, in which James Franco and Seth Rogen play TV journalists asked to assassinate North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, is actually … not bad.  Not great, but not bad.  A lot of the humor is sophomoric, and a little bit of Franco’s mugging goes a long way with me, but the film looks good, its heart is in the right place, and there are some genuinely funny scenes.   Release:  2014   Grade:  B-

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 The Babadook

This low-budget chiller from Australia is more effective as a study of the trials and tribulations of single motherhood than as an exercise in horror, mostly because the “babadook” itself – when we finally see it — isn’t especially scary.  Writer-director Jennifer Kent does stage some suspenseful scenes, and star Essie Davis is quite good, but there are too many familiar elements, and that damned babadook, an evil entity haunting Davis and her son, simply isn’t up to snuff.    Release:  2014     Grade:  B

 *****

The Lego Movie

Lego certainly got its money’s worth out of this inane commercial for building blocks aimed at children (and childish adults).  What I got was 100 minutes of flashing colors and nonstop noise, punctuated with bad puns and mildly amusing pop-culture jokes.  I also nearly got nausea as the filmmakers compensated for their clichéd, simplistic story — a toy construction worker mans up to defeat the bad guy and win the girl — by bombarding the viewer with frenzied activity.  (I stopped this movie twice, just to take a break from it.)  Sure, the computer animation looks cool.  I imagine it looks cool inside a tornado, as well, but I wouldn’t care to be there.  Release:  2014   Grade:  C-

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Snowpiercer

It’s the future (again), and what’s left of mankind is crammed into a high-speed train that endlessly circles the frozen Earth.  Will the have-nots in the back of the train revolt and seek revenge on the elite at the front?  Snowpiercer suffers badly from comic-book-movie disease:  It takes itself much, much too seriously.  The dialogue is trite and the character development nonexistent, yet the movie wants us to care about the fate of its cardboard characters.  There are, however, some cool-looking sets aboard the train.  Release:  2013  Grade:  B

*****

Frozen

It’s a cynical world, but you wouldn’t know it from watching Disney’s charming Frozen.  What’s not to like?  For starters, Kristen Bell brings spunk and humor to the heroine, a determined princess named Anna.  The animation is startlingly good and the songs are … satisfactory.  There are some lapses of logic in the story (loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”), but hey, this is a fairy tale and double-hey, isn’t this movie supposed to be for kids?  Release:  2013  Grade:  B+

*****

Nebraska

The rubes who populate Nebraska are a bit stereotyped, but it’s a pleasure to watch 76-year-old Bruce Dern and Will Forte as a father and son making a cross-country trip to claim what Dad thinks is a sweepstakes prize.  This isn’t director Alexander Payne’s best work, but his trademark gentle humor is on full display, and so is the Midwest – for better or worse.  Release:  2013   Grade:  B

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