Typical Danny Boyle genre exercise, by turns beautiful and ponderous. Alex Garland's script somehow manages to come across as overthought without making a lick of sense. I think I would have preferred it if the sci-fi had remained hard and the metaphysics had remained in the margins. As it stands, the movie's velvet goldmine vision of space travel gets muddled amidst the unwelcome trappings of psychological horror. Grade: B-
Essentially a supersized episode of the television show with lightly upgraded South Korean animation ($75 million sure doesn't go as far as it used to), The Simpsons Movie, while often chuckle-worthy, never achieves the scaled-up grandeur of, say, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Where there should be gonzo joy at the liberation of the big screen, there is instead clever calculation. The canvas may be a little broader but its colors don't run particularly deep. Grade: B-
Artist: Feist. Album: The Reminder.
Artist: The Flaming Lips. Album: At War With the Mystics.
Artist: Amy Winehouse. Album: Back to Black.
Artist: Peter Bjorn and John. Album: Writer's Block.
Director David Yates brings an unexpectedly deft touch to the fourth Harry Potter sequel, delivering an entry that ranks second only the inimitable Alfonso Cuarón-driven Prisoner of Azkaban as the franchise's best chapter. Grade: B+
Artist: Feist. Album: The Reminder.
Michael Bay's first kid pic. Rest assured, there are still fake breasts in them thar hills (albeit clothed), curse words aplenty (albeit only one fleeting f-bomb), wooden, unlikable characters and a screenplay that was apparently written in crayon. Nevertheless, the nostalgia factor is sky high, and the movie's liberal theft of conceits from far better films (Terminator 2 and The Iron Giant to name only a couple) elevates it above the usual Bayhem. Grade: B-
Episodic, uneven. Good, not great. Liked it, didn't love it. Grade: B