North & South

4 BANANAS:  Maybe it's just the Anglophile in me, but British period dramas are so much crack! North & South suffers a bit for its heroine's at-times slow uptake, and I couldn't help thinking, halfway through, that maybe the Masters of the industrial revolution were right about their workers.  Still, I like Mrs. Thornton a great deal.  She has a fierce love for her boy.  And John Thornton is a harder, even crueler Darcy, the kind of man you want the girl to get but can't imagine her laughing with -- until he finally smiles.

4 50-minute episodes

2004

BBC 

The Woman in Black

3 BANANAS:  I saw the London stage production of The Woman in Black when I was in England in the summer of 2001.  It was the first play I saw in my four weeks there, so I did what was suggested and bought my tickets at the Half-Price Ticket Booth in Leicester Square, unaware that half-price sometimes comes with a high price.  My seat was stage left, front row, right in front of the fog machines.  Which meant that I spent a good deal of the performance peering dimly through the mists, trying not to cough, cut off from the rest of the audience in a weird, delightful mirror of Arthur Kipps' isolation at Eel Marsh.  No surprise then that my favorite scenes in James Watkins' adaptation are easily those that take place outside the gates of the house, when the fog rolls in around young Mr. Kipps, it and the tide cutting him off from the village beyond -- which, turns out, isn't much safer than the house itself.

Written by Jane Goldman

Directed by James Watkins

2012

Chronicle

2 BANANAS:  Chronicle misses the opportunity to be even more than a compelling narrative about three teens with super powers.  And that's unfortunate, as its premise and several of its sequences are very good.  Maybe its makers just don't have much to say, and in place of any meaningful commentary on the loneliness of being a teenage outcast, they opt out for simplicity.  It's easier, after all, to paint in broad strokes: the weirdo as the bad guy, the handsome kid as the good guy.  The third act smacks of needless ambition, too.  Why destroy Capetown Seattle, when three kids battling alone in the sky would have sufficed?

Written by Max Landis

Directed by Josh Trank

2012

The Tree of Life

1 BANANA:  Proof that even dinosaurs can be boring.

Written and directed by Terrence "I Used to Make Good Movies" Malick

2011

      

Hugo

4 BANANAS:  We missed Hugo in 3D, and that makes me a little sad.  But movies are movies, gimmicks or none, and there was no less magic in the trick for seeing it in 2D.  Hugo is about how movies inform our lives.  How they're important.  How, even in the earliest days of the medium, it was understood that happy endings, as Georges Méliès puts it, are only for the movies.  What a lovely sentiment.   

Written by John Logan

Directed by Martin Scorcese

2011

Attack the Block

3 BANANAS:  Again, another genre piece that exists for the pure pleasure of genre.  It seems to me Attack the Block must have been a movie everyone had fun making, especially the kids -- which, in the end, is what the movie's all about.  A tight, elegant script that moves nimbly through its structure and beats and delivers on its promise:  laughs and scares.

Written and directed by Joe Cornish

2011

Haywire

4 BANANAS:  Critics seem frustrated by Haywire because they can't ascribe any higher purpose to it than Soderbergh intends (a genre exercise), so they've given it a great deal of faint praise: "...good for what it is..." and the like.  As if genre fiction needs to explain itself, to have some higher purpose.  I think we can do better than "good for what it is" and say that Haywire is a fantastic, 90-something-minute delight, featuring the debut of an actress every bit as striking and enigmatic as Godard's Anna Karina (only with thicker thighs and the ability to walk up walls).  

Written by Lem "Dark City" Dobbs

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

2011

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

3 BANANAS: One of the summer's best movies, I guess, and I didn't even see it on the big screen.  It's not surprising that Andy Serkis would turn in a great performance, but it's surprising that the screenwriters of this movie would give him such a solid, confident script to work from.  James Franco's performance and his character are both upstaged and somewhat inconsequential, but fortunately he isn't given much screen time.  I was left wondering why Serkis' name wasn't first in the end credits.  Anyway, I was honest-to-goodness emotionally invested in the mountain gorilla's attack on that helicopter!

Written by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver

Directed by Rupert Wyatt

2011

My Week with Marilyn

4 BANANAS:  There's a moment in My Week with Marilyn that pulls everything into focus: a little dance Michelle Williams does before the camera.  All alone on screen, but then there's us, the audience, in the dark.  And all alone on set, except for Olivier and the rest of the crew behind the lens.  The magnetism of the moment is undeniable and multi-layered, and in this we find the film's insight into the greatness of Marilyn Monroe: she was a natural talent.  All alone in a roomful of stars. 

Written by Adrian Hodges

Directed by Simon Curtis

2011

The Adventures of Tintin

2 BANANAS:  Tintin is plenty entertaining, at times a real delight, but Spielberg's Tintin is no Indiana Jones, and so the lack of character development creates an emptiness at the movie's center you might not even notice.  But, as Mr. Plinkett says, "Your brain did."  

Written by Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish

Directed by Steven Spielberg

2011