Review: 'Monsters University' doesn't scare up any surprises

By Steve Persall

Times Movie Critic

Let's agree from the start that it's practically impossible for Pixar to make a bad animated movie. There's simply too much talent there, and too much Disney money supporting it, to result in junk.

But there's a point at which creative security can become complacency, and that's where Pixar finds itself with Monsters University, which isn't a bad movie at all. But it's disappointing. The movie is mostly fun and ultimately disposable, which is a letdown after Pixar's previous greatness. On the Pixar curve, a B grade doesn't pass. ...

Review: 'The Bling Ring,' about shallow teens, feels like a ripoff

The Bling Ring (R) (90 min.) — Our celebrity obsessions get a frisky poke but not the skewering they deserve in Sofia Coppola's movie, based on a true story. In 2008, a clique of Los Angeles teenagers feeling entitled to lives they envied started casing and burglarizing the homes of stars like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.

The fact that we hang star status on Lohan and Hilton says a lot about what's wrong with modern society that The Bling Ring barely covers. Perhaps Coppola is too close to that circle to stick a needle deep enough; Hilton allowed her friend to re-create the invasions of her privacy in her spacious home, so how invaded was she? It feels like just another means of Hilton's consumption being conspicuous....

Review: Joss Whedon mixes old, new in 'Much Ado About Nothing'

Much Ado About Nothing (PG-13) (107 min.) — Hey, Joss Whedon, you just unleashed upon the world The Avengers, the third-highest grossing movie of all time. What're you going to do now, go to Disney World?

Not even close. Faced with all the opportunities his share of $1.5 billion brought last year, Whedon decided to spend a little time at home with friends, taking their occasional dinner party entertainment to a new level. Whedon and his wife, Kai Cole, often lead guests through readings of William Shakespeare's plays but this time they spent 12 days making a movie as different from the The Avengers as possible....

Review: All signs point to 'The East' for thrilling mystery

The East (PG-13) (116 min.) — Debate sparked by recent National Security Agency leaks — is Edward Snowden a traitor or hero? — is coincidentally echoed in The East, the second collaboration between director Zal Batmanglij and his co-writer-star Brit Marling.

The East is also about a cult of sorts, named for an anarchist collective waging ecoterrorism on corporations endangering the public. Their first act of protest is simple trespassing and vandalism, dumping crude oil in the home of an industrialist after a BP-level spill. Later the group's tactics turn toward the deadly, as stakes rise with chemical and pharmaceutical poisonings. An eye for an eye, as the East's credo proclaims....

Get your 'Spring Breakers' DVDs July 9, y'all

Get your 'Spring Breakers' DVDs on July 9, y'all

This is the bleepin' Tampa Bay dream, ya'll! All this news coming out about Spring Breakers, that movie that was filmed here, so much cool (bleep) that it makes you start typing like James Franco talks in the movie, all strange and (bleep) like his drugged-up character Alien, whose real name is Al but, truth be told, he's not from this planet. Anyway, Spring Breakers drops July 9 on Blu-ray and DVD, with all kinds of extras including deleted scenes, outtakes and behind-the-scenes (bleep). Now everyone can brag: "I got Spring Breakers. On repeat! Spring Breakers ON REPEAT! Constant, ya'll," like Alien does Scarface. To prepare for this digital slice of heaven, check out Twitter for @aliengatsby, hilariously moshing dialogue from Spring Breakers and The Great Gatsby like bikinis and big booties, ya'll. Mix it up with your Calvin Klein Escape and Calvin Klein Be and smell nice. — Steve Persall, Times movie critic...

Review: 'Man of Steel' revitalizes the Superman legend

At first blush Man of Steel is everything about Superman we've seen in movies before: the infant Kal-El's exodus to Earth from Krypton, his Midwest maturation as Clark Kent, his settling into his role as world protector from arch-villains. Marlon Brando always played his dad.

Man of Steel does things differently, with director Zack Snyder retelling the myth with intimately hand-held cameras and deep-meaning conflicts. Russell Crowe steps in as the father. Superman becomes something of an art house action hero, embodied by the appropriately dimpled and chiseled Henry Cavill. This is not your father's Superman, but he could be your mom's....

'Man of Steel:' Superman, the savior?

Rising from the dead — 2006's dull reboot — like someone else we know, Superman returns as mankind's savior in Man of Steel.

Comparisons to Jesus may be sacrilegious but are unavoidable in the movie's moments of comic book deification, when crucifix poses are struck, other cheeks are turned and something like Tebowing precedes taking off in flight. There's a church scene with a stained-glass messiah peeking over Superman's shoulder, faith established in disbelievers and the superhero having two fathers, one who art in the heavens. ...

Review: Hawke, Delpy all talked out in 'Before Midnight'

Before Midnight (R) (108 min.) — Eighteen years have passed since Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, an indie romance that became an art house hit through the courage of its own pretensions. It was a chance encounter in Vienna between two young, loquacious strangers on a train, an American tourist named Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and a French student named Celine (Julie Delpy), made for each other with only one night to realize it. Personally, I wasn't impressed....

Review: 'Stories We Tell' chases family secrets

Stories We Tell (PG-13) (108 min.) — Sarah Polley is an accomplished actor and filmmaker who grew up in Toronto with a stage-struck, free-spirited mother and a father whose involvement is explained in this achingly candid documentary. Stories We Tell is an expression of emotions roiled regularly on daytime scandal TV shows although with much less composure and intelligence.

Polley directed Away From Her and Take This Waltz, movies about women finding comfort with men other than their husbands, and who couldn't be faulted for doing that. Her documentary suggests those characters were closer to Polley's experiences than anyone should expect, poignantly underlined through the writings and voice of an unlikely narrator, her father Michael....

Review: 'This is the End' an outrageous way to go out

This Is the End proves what we've always suspected: Seth Rogen is down with playing the same guy in movies each time, James Franco has a creepy man crush on him, Jonah Hill is Rosemary's baby all grown up and Danny McBride is a cannibal. Oh, yeah, and Michael Cera's sweet face masks a raging coke head sex addict who'd slap Rihanna's butt and dig the smack back.

Funny how everyone's true colors come out at Armageddon. Seriously, it's funny even if these show biz character assassinations aren't true. This Is the End isn't a documentary, thank god, or else we'd all be beamed to heaven or dunked in hell by now. It really isn't much of a movie in the traditional sense; even Harold & Kumar's similar adventures are more artistically tied together....

Review: 'The Internship' gets the job done

Another title for The Internship would be Google Crashers except that makes Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson sound like hackers.

"You mean, like, serial killers, like Freddy Krueger hacking up babysitters during summer camp?" they'd ask, mixing meanings and metaphors until logic is wadded and tossed, and protests that a point is being missed get drowned out by more distracting double talk. That's their motor-mouthed style — '80s Bill Murray times two — and eight years after Wedding Crashers it still works....

Tampa Theatre named No. 3 in the world

Come on, Motion Picture Association of America. Tell us something we don't know. The MPAA's news site TheCredits.org named historic Tampa Theatre one of the 10 best movie venues in the world, one of only two U.S. theaters on the list. The 86-year-old movie palace is ranked third behind the top-ranked State Theater in Traverse City, Mich. — restored by Oscar winner Michael Moore — and Cine 32 in Auch, France. Other countries with ranked theaters include South Korea, Australia, India, Greece, Thailand and Spain. MPAA reporter Bill Keith singled out Tampa Theatre's "overly ornate Mediterranean courtyard literally (setting) the stage" and preshow performances on the Mighty Wurlitzer Organ. — Steve Persall, Times movie critic...

Review: 'Now You See Me' has the magic touch

A common ploy for illusionists is a card force, using sleight of hand to ensure the mark will choose a particular playing card from the deck. Then shuffle, distract, do whatever you want but a successfully forced card can, as ads for magic kits promise, amaze and astonish your friends.

I've been fooled by forced cards plenty of times but never when the trick was performed by a movie. That is, until the opening minutes of Now You See Me, when the card I silently picked from a full deck offered by Jesse Eisenberg's character was the right one for his illusion to succeed....

Review: 'After Earth' crashes and burns

By Steve Persall

Times Movie Critic

The twist to M. Night Shyamalan's After Earth is that there is no twist, unless you count every ounce of personality being drained from Will Smith and most from his usually charismatic son Jaden. That's more surprising than The Sixth Sense's late fake-out that made Shyamalan's career and each one since that ruined it.

By comparison, After Earth is spoiler-proof since nothing happens that isn't telegraphed in the first 20 minutes. It's elemental science fiction that truth would be stranger than, lacking any sense of allegory or wonder separating wheat from chaff within the genre....