The Imitation Game (2014)

“The Imitation Game” wants to be a liberal rage against the evil that was British law for a century: The criminalization of homosexuality, and the body-and-mind destruction – execution, really -- of WWII hero Alan Turing, because he was born gay. But it’s really an (sorry) ultra-straight drama that’s played so safe and virginal, my church-going parents would not blink. Benedict Cumberbatch is mesmerizing and coolly brilliant as Turing, the mathematician who is called on by Her Majesty to help break the seemingly impossible cryptic Enigma code used by the Nazis during World War II. Mr. Sherlock nails the part of the misfit thrown into the Army, where failure to fit in can get you shot or jailed. But Turing’s sexuality? Cumberbatch has nothing to work with. All sex is off screen, hidden like one of those impossible codes. Now I get Turing couldn’t act on desires during war, living under Army rule. fact. But here there is no desire. No anger. No frustration. Why? By the time onscreen Turing is forced to undergo chemical castration, one has to ask, why fret? This man, as written for the Oscar votes, seems to have been a unich all along.  B-

Tusk (2014)

“Tusk” cannot be unseen or flushed away. It deserves both. Pitched I suppose as a spoof on the “Human Centipede” flicks, once-talent Kevin Smith directs with the urgency of a fatty waving off farts as he sits alone on his watching bad TV. Justin Long plays a shock jock who gets kidnapped by a Canadian madman (Michael Parks) with a fetish for walruses. Yes, walruses. So, poor Long becomes a walrus. Yeah, Tusks in his mouth. Flippers. Funny mustache. Bodily morphed like the teens in “Centipede.” But it’s the audience eating shit here. Smith spoons it. Satirizing an OTT satire is a bad idea. Smith is all bad ideas. Halfway in, he drops in Johnny Depp as a redneck Canadian Inspector Clouseau hunting Parks’ psycho in a side plot that stops the film dead. Jokes about Canadian accents (!!) abound. (Are those still funny?) The tonal shift is so bewildering and Depp’s “performance” so wink-wink self-aware, it’s as if Smith is testing his most loyal fans’ patience: “Can you believe this shit!?!” Long gives his all. As a BFF, watch the lights go out in Haley Joel Osment’s eyes. Career panic. I can’t say Depp even cares. D-

From Russia with Love (1963) and The November Man (2014)

Sean Connery-era classic Bond “From Russia With Love” (1963) is unapologetically mean, early 1960s fun and danger, crude indeed, the absolute best of the 007 series as our hero knowingly enters a trap to snatch a top secret Enigma-code like device from the Russians. 

Except it’s not the Russians setting the trap, its SPECTRE, the terrorist group led by an unseen Blofed and fronted by a blonde thug (Robert Shaw) who seems to embody a Hitler Youth fantasy and a madwoman fascist (Lotte Lenya) with a steel-toe kick. Connery nails the film without lifting an eyebrow or breaking a sweat. His train car tussle with Shaw is one of the best fight scenes ever, and “Russia” only gets better with a boat chase, a helicopter terror hunt, and a finale inside a hotel room. It’s perfect cool. 

Now, later Bond man Pierce Brosnan goes all wrong in the forgettable, drab “The November Man” (2014) as a professional assassin who trains his protégé to never fall in love and birth children, and then secretly… well, you know. Right? I mean, here’s a spy film where you can guess every next spy-plot twist and sit back and watch it. Yawning. Brosnan is too good for this.

Russia: A November: C-

Winter’s Tale (2014)

“Winter’s Tale” is brain-killing romantic tripe with late-30s Colin Farrell as a 20-year-old (!!) street crook who falls for a young rich girl played by “Downton Abbey”’s Jessica Brown Findlay, the latter who dies of consumption in 1915. Add in time travel, a flying white horse, Russell Crowe -- awful, just awful -- as a demon with a gang of union thugs, Will Smith -- career worst awful -- as the most awkward hip-hop Satan ever, stars (as in suns, not actors) that are really souls of people, a magical princess bed that cures –- I shit you not -– little girl cancer, and none of that fuck-all mind-blow high-on-crack shit is as unbelievable as a 115-year-old NYC metro paper publisher paling around with a world famous food critic, both employed at newspapers in 2014. Shit. Really. Akavia Goldsman writes and directs, with all the talent of his “Batman and Robin” and “Avengers,” the 1998 Brit version. The ever-growing, Oscar-winning mediocre “Beautiful Mind,” making mental illness into spy game fun, seems his high point. D-

The Counselor (2013)

“The Counselor” is a stunning failure from a seemingly A-grade group behind and in front of the camera. The story comes from the pen of Greatest Living American Writer Cormac McCarthy (“Blood Meridian”). The director is Brit Ridley Scott (“Alien”). Its rising star is Michael Fassbinder, playing a criminal lawyer known to us only as “Counselor” who dives willingly into the drug trade to get cash. Why? He wants diamonds for his Sweetie Pie (Penelope Cruz). Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt are among the villains. How can all this suck? I sat mouth agape in disbelief at this train wreck, and struggle to find words. OK. Cum on a car. No, really. See, Cameron Diaz loudly plays drug lord Bardem’s evil wife, an OTT Cruella De Ville as cast by “Real Housewives of New Jersey.” In one scene, she fucks and cums on hub’s sports car windshield. Really. Now the real sticky part (sorry): The WTF navel-gazing drivel that pours from the mouths of these great actors is even worse than that vision. Everyone in this film talks nonstop gibberish about fate, chance and death, and unlike every McCarthy book I have devoured, I begged for it to end. D

Penguins of Madagascar, Big Hero Six, Earth to Echo, and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (all 2014)

“Penguins of Madagascar”  … I saw it to take my niece and nephew out. Ehh. Have you seen the “Madagascar” films from DreamWorks? The zoo animals who ditched the Bronx for Africa? Pretty funny, the first one. Since then? Yawn. Snooze. Get me out. This fourth entry and add-on to a TV series focuses on sidekick comic-relief characters of wise-ass penguins who muck about in the Marx Brothers vein. New Yorker humor abounds. This is their origin tale. Cause we need that. The Penguins join a MI6 type group led by wolf Benedict Cumberbatch to take down power-mad octopus John Malkovich and we get jokes that play on actor names: “Nicholas, Cage them!” and “Helen, hunt them down!,” and oh my God, an hour in I pled for it to end, and it would not, and my nephew and niece loved it and I Give Up! C- 

Meanwhile, Disney, with no small help from Pixar, has CGI animated film “Big Hero Six,” based on a new-to-me Marvel comic for youngsters that pings “Scooby Doo” with boots, capes and robots. Our lead hero is Hero (Ryan Potter), a teen living with his aunt and older brother in a futuristic mashup of San Francisco and Tokyo. Hero is a budding roboticist with a punk-rebel streak who graduated high school at 13 and takes on college at 14 after a minor scrape with the law for amusing back-alley robot fights, only to suffer a devastating personal loss. Brother dies in a fire. Ouch. With the help of a cute puffy robot nurse named Baymax –- who looks like Shmoo on steroids and full of air and built by the dead older sibling -– Hero investigates the fire and finds himself a super villain right out of a four-color comic book. The simple story aims young with some edgy humor (there’s a stoner kid who’s far more a stoner than ever was Shaggy) but its charms are strong and its “Stargate” references worthy of fan-fiction tribute. B

Speaking of childish films, “Earth to Echo” is a fast-paced, found-footage jumpy cam version of “E.T.” meets “Goonies” as a group of school kid pals find a robotic alien near their housing development. The one their being forced out of. (That was the kick-off of “Goonies,” recall?) Using iPhones and video cameras to record their every moment to save Echo -– he’s metallic, bur cute, chirping, and a bit void of personality -– the kids run up against Big Brother villains, find a female pal along the way, and in a funny moment, find the cool older brother asleep in a bathtub as a party. They take his car. Harmless and sweet, I think my young self would have grooved to the film’s adventure. Even if the stomach and brain of my current body fell camera seasick. One of the boys, Reese Hartwig, eerily reminds me of a school friend. B

Another flick I took the niece and nephew to is “Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb,” the third and apparently final entry in the comedy-adventure series with Ben Stiller –- he once long ago of grungy grown-up films -– as a guard at the New York Museum of Natural History. You know the drill, right? Sun goes down, the exhibits come alive, Easter Island head, dinosaur, Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), and cowboy (Owen Wilson) included, all mucking about, making “education” fun. And action packed. Here, the magical stone that powers our heroes is dying, and Stiller must zip away to London’s history museum to save the day. Why? Um, up ticket sales in Europe? It’s only mildly funny, despite a great M.C. Escher gag that plays like a classic 1980s A-Ha video and a cameo from a winking X-Man. Dan Stevens (“Downtown Abbey”) impresses as Lancelot. Williams? My heart breaks again. RIP. B-

Dear White People (2014)

“Dear White People” is the political college racial satire that was supposed to send the university where I work into gasps of “Oh, no, they didn’t!” hysterics. But most of the audience, every race and age you can dream of, chuckled nicely, sort of, while others dozed off or texted. If the best satires stay with you forever, think “Strangelove,” this is “PCU” on an Internet-sourced budget. Anyone recall “PCU”? Flick is set at some sunny liberal arts school that once served rich white kids, but still wobbles at that whole desegregation thing. Tyler James Williams -– he’s on “Walking Dead”!! -– is the closeted gay nerd trying to fit in amongst Black Power radio DJ Tessa Thompson and spoiled racist GOPer Kyle Gallner. One example why this is such a yawn: The climax has a party where white kids dress in black face to booze and laugh off slavery. The whole scene fizzles. The end credits show real images of college kids –- good Southern GOP children all, Hello, MSU -– doing the same, and I got out of my seat in rage. See? B-

300: Rise of an Empire (2014)

Not a sequel, not a prequel, more likely a tax write-off, “300: Rise of an Empire” plays like a long-ass chunk of deleted scenes from 2006’s “300,” from director Zack Snyder and Comic Book God Frank Miller. Shot in studio with buff-ass actors against green screens in an endless orgy of deft Greek violence, guts, blood, and machismo, “300” fuckin’ rocked, killing every snob film instinct I hold. Sick, depraved, baseless fun. This thing, seven years late and directed by some shit I cannot Google, plays like a junior high school knock off. I grow tired rehashing it. Eva Green (“Casino Royale”) is the conquering bad ass b*tch coming to fuck over Greece, and hero Sullivan Stapleton, whose name sounds like a law firm but he is actually an actor playing hero Themistocles, vows to stop her. Blood flies. Tons of it. Gobs of it. Gallons. This is a film seemingly made by adults that vibes like it was dreamed by my war-obsessed 12-year-old nephew who has not a clue what war and violence entails. Except he’s smarter than this lot and can call bullshit. This is bullshit. D-

Inside Man (2006)

Spike Lee goes as mainstream (mostly, kind of) in the off-kilter bank-robbery crime drama Inside Man (2006) that dares be honest about all that pent-up hostility we Americans of every stripe, color, language, religion, and tax bracket bury deep. The shit we don’t admit to. Post 9/11. It’s sizzling, like a James Ellroy book on screen, popping with glorious visuals, thank you cameraman Matthew Libatique (“Black Swan”) and music men Terence Blanchard and A.R. Rahman (well before “Slumdog Millionaire”). It’s NYC and Clive Owen has led a group of thieves into a high-end bank to rob it, holding hostages, while NYC dicks Denzel Washington and Chiwetel Ejiofor investigate and keep their careers; see, Denzel’s cop’s nose maybe is unclean. Or maybe it is. The more I watch “Inside,” the more I grove to its trickery and its commentary on America right now. Near 9 years on, it crackles fresh. It is as much a movie within a movie as “The Game.” And who exactly is the title character. Is it even a man? Hello, Jodie Foster. A

We’re the Millers (2013)

“We’re the Millers” is a stoner road-trip comedy with “SNL” vet Jason Sudeikis as a small-time pot dealer and “Friends” alumna Jennifer Anniston as a stripper hitting Mexico in an RV for drugs for cash. The two neighbors who hate each other pose as parents, painfully so, as neither could raise curtains. The flick is hilarious, raunchy, and dirty -– Anniston makes out with teen “son” Will Poulter –- until we all take an exit tour into family values and sentimentality and love conquers all hugs. Why? Here’s a rule: No one hugged at the end of “Producers” or “Blazing Saddles.” Follow it. Save the hugs for “Lifetime.” B