Fourth Row Center

Captain Marvel (2019) ★ ★ ½ Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Jude Law, Djimon Hounsou, Annette Benning. Captain Marvel burst onto the big screen in a big way this month, with a post-credits sequence setting up the titular character as a major force to be reckoned with in the upcoming Avengers: Endgame .  Having never liked the comic book, this was one Marvel movie I was not looking forward to. Having seen it, I am pleased to report that I liked it better than I thought I would, but not as much as I had hoped. Here’s what I liked: Annette Benning, chewing the scenery and looking great; Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury with two good eyes; Goose the non-cat; Agent Coulson; the sinister and creeping-looking Skrulls; Stan Lee’s inside-joke cameo as himself (the year is 1995 and Lee is seen on a train reading the script to Kevin Smith’s Mallrats , in which he had a cameo); and Brie Larson, a talented actress who holds her own in a performance with dangerously high fanboy expecta...

Operation Finale (2018) ★★ ½   Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley, Lior Raz, Mélanie Laurent, Nick Kroll, and Joe Alwyn; directed by Chris Weitz with a screenplay by Matthew Orton. Operation Finale is based on the true story of Israeli Mossad and Shin Bet agents who, in 1960, tracked down and captured Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust and one of the world’s most wanted Nazi war criminals. It’s a story I have always thought would make a great movie, and director Chris Weitz ( The Golden Compass ) sets out to do just that, though the results are mixed at best. Ben Kingsley as Adolf Eichmann in OPERATION FINALE. Metro-Goldwyn-Ma yer      The cast of Israelis, let by Oscar Isaac, is sufficient though not brilliant. Ben Kingsley, as the enigmatic Eichmann, is superb. What suffers here is the script, which not only takes some liberties with the facts, but fails to deliver the level of high-stakes drama found in films su ch as Steven Spiel...

SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY (2018) ★ ★ ★ ★ Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson; written by Lawrence and Jon Kasdan; directed by Ron Howard. Solo is not a perfect film, nor is it anywhere as space operatic as 1977’s Star Wars or its 1980 sequel, The Empire Strikes Back . What it is, though, is a dizzying romp through the galaxy with everyone’s favorite space pirate and his Wookie accomplice Chewbacca. Back, too, are Empire scribe Lawrence Kasdan, who, along with son Jon, penned this Solo adventure.   Lucasfilm/Disney Solo is a Star Wars story, and exists in the Star Wars universe referenced in A New Hope and Rogue One as opposed to the stupefying reality presented in The Last Jedi . For fans of the original trilogy, this movie feels like home. Taking the Solo reins from Harrison Ford is Alden Ehrenreich, who makes the character his own without besmirching the character created so memorably by Ford.  Solo is a solid movie if not a great one, and so much fun. It ma...

An idealistic campaign politico (Ryan Gosling) backs a presidential contender (played by George Clooney ) and finds himself immersed in a world of double-crossing dirty politics and in a morass of moral and ethical dilemmas. This is a nail-biter of a political drama, as poignant a commentary on contemporary politics as Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men or Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate . It can be taken as both a condemnation of today’s political and electoral system and as a cautionary tale about how and where we place our political trust. With writing, producing and directing chores, Clooney , nominated for an Oscar for directing Good Night and Good Luck , delivers a smart, well-paced movie that shines with a cast that includes Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a crafty career campaign manager, Evan Rachel Wood as the intern that catches Gosling’s eye, Marisa Tomei as a New York Times reporter working all the angles, and Paul Giamatti as the man who throws the wrench into the work...

The 1971 version of this film, starring Dustin Hoffman and co-written and directed by the Sam Peckinpah ( The Wild Bunch ), is a classic tale of violence visited upon the innocent, and how violence begets violence. This remake, directed by a capable Rod Lurie ( The Contender ), stars James Marsden and Kate Bosworth and is set in the rural South instead of rural England, but the story stays surprisingly close to the original. A couple of city mice move to the country, and the hubby is a fish out of water in his wife’s home (hick) town. He’s not welcomed by the locals, relationships are strained and things get ugly, his wife is brutally violated and before all is said and done the couple's home is horribly and terribly besieged, and they must fight for their very lives. Straw Dogs is one of those films that should not have been remade (at the very least with present company). Instead of improving on the original it only manages to come off as a grainy monochrome copy of a colorfu...

I have long been a fan of The Planet of the Apes , a series of movies, a television series and a Saturday morning cartoon all based on a novel by French writer Pierre Boulle. While the Apes television series from the 1970s is more or less kids’ stuff, the original 1968 film starring Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowell is a classic work of science fiction. Not only does the film make social comment in the guise of a space fantasy, but it includes one of the most memorable endings in twentieth century cinema, thanks to screenwriter Rod Serling. The subsequent Apes films became progressively poorer, and the 2001 reboot by director Tim Burton was met with mixed results. But Apes has had legs, and remains a valuable property for 20th Century Fox, so it’s no surprise that Fox has rebooted again with Rise of the Planet of the Apes , starring James Franco, Frieda Pinto, John Lithgow and Brian Cox. Hollywood loves telling “origin” stories these days ( Green Lantern, Iron Man, X-Me...

Like super heroes, not all comic book movies are equal. Marvel has done a mostly terrific job with their franchises, with a slew of super types getting ready for an Avengers movie next year. The DC hero, Green Lantern, gets the big screen treatment this year with director Martin Campbell ( Casino Royale , Edge of Darkness ) at the helm, and an A-list cast that includes Ryan Reynolds, Peter Sarsgaard, Angela Bassett, Michael Clarke Duncan, Geoffrey Rush (voice) and Tim Robbins. Martin does the best he can with what a slew of screenwriters have given him. The film looks good and Reynolds is passable as the hero, but the script is talky, predictable, clunky, and not nearly as tight as, say, Iron Man or its sequel. Sarsgaard, an actor I pay attention to, is almost unrecognizable as the nasty villain Hector, and he chews the scenery and does the best with the clichéd dialogue and one-dimensional character he’s saddled with. The once-great Tim Robbins dials in a performance as a senator who...