Articles by Mark Burns

True Grit

A teenage girl spurs eccentric lawmen in a manhunt for her father’s killer in this sharp remake of a western classic.

Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld in her feature debut) is a quick-witted and willful 14-year-old girl, come to the end of the railroad line in some dusty Arkansas town to collect her dear departed father. But she’s more interested in collecting Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin: Jonah Hex), the cur who killed him, and seeing the murderer hanged. By barter, wit and resolve she recruits crusty marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges: Tron: Legacy) and ornamented Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon:...

Article - Movie Reviews; by Mark Burns; 12/30/10

Tron: Legacy

A hacker heir apparent fights to save the real world from the digital world in this glitzy reboot.

Computer genius Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges; Crazy Heart) has been missing for 20 years. Nobody has a clue where he went off to — at least until his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund; Georgia Rule) is mysteriously paged to his dad’s hidden lab and zapped into the grid, a digital realm where programs are living figures made in the image of their creators. Ends up his pop has been stranded here all those years, trapped when his own program Clu revolted and waged genocide against digital “...

Article - Movie Reviews; by Mark Burns; 12/30/10

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn...

A moralistic adventure shines through evil fog in this allegorical fantasy.

Edmund and Lucy (Skandar Keynes and Georgie Henley: the prior two Narnia movies) are feeling pretty miserable. While the rest of the Pevensie family is off in America, these two are hunkered down with insufferable cousin Eustace (Will Poulter: Son of Rambow) — a know-it-all, curmudgeonly, 10-year-old — in wartime Oxford. The twerp’s about to get it when a painting floods the room and the three kids surface in Narnia before the bow of the royal ship Dawn Treader. Plucked...

Article - Movie Reviews; by Mark Burns; 12/16/10

The Warrior’s Way

Circus folk get squished between rogue cowboys and vengeful ninjas in this strange bit of camp.

Yang (Dong-gun Jang: The Promise) is the greatest swordsman of mankind and the deadliest assassin of the Sad Flutes, a Korean warrior clan. He has become his own clan’s worst enemy, though, after failing to take the life of a baby girl for the sake of wiping out a rival clan. Escaping retribution, Yang flees with the child to America and into western badlands. There he settles in among sad carnies in a dead town and teaches a plucky dame how to wield a blade. But just as he seems to have...

Article - Movie Reviews; by Mark Burns; 12/9/10

Love and Other Drugs

A lewd romantic dramedy with gratuitous nudity bouncing around the conceit of trying to say something profound.

What an odd little romance. Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal: Prince of Persia) is a slick electronics salesman and ladies man. When the med school dropout is canned for stockroom indiscretion, he gives pharmaceutical sales a try, and he’s not that great. Until, that is, he calls upon his certain strengths to flirt his way to sales. As he struggles for a foothold in the ethical murk of prescription pushing, he meets Maggie (Anne Hathaway: Alice in Wonderland), a willful artist and astute Parkinson...

Article - Movie Reviews; by Mark Burns; 12/2/10

Unstoppable

A veteran engineer and novice conductor race to subdue a rampaging locomotive in this fun chase.

Frank (Denzel Washington: The Book of Eli) is a veteran railroad engineer trying to train up a distracted rookie, Will (Chris Pine: Star Trek). They’ve just hit the main line when they find out a fully loaded runaway train with tankers full of highly explosive cargo — “a missile the size of the Chrysler Building” — is roaring through southern Pennsylvania towns at speeds over 70 miles per hour toward a dangerous S-curve. If somebody doesn’t stop it, the train...

Article - Movie Reviews; by Mark Burns; 11/18/10

Megamind

Evil makes good in this amusing superhero farce.

Megamind (Will Ferrell: The Other Guys) is the brainiac supervillain of Metro City. He terrorizes the town in his repetitive quest to defeat superpowered arch nemesis and golden boy Metro Man (Brad Pitt: Inglourious Basterds). That is, until the villain finally knocks the hero out of the picture. Finally, Megamind owns the town, but without a rival to challenge him the fun is gone. So Megamind creates Tighten (Jonah Hill: Get Him to the Greek) as a new super-powered foil to recharge villainy...

Article - Movie Reviews; by Mark Burns; 11/11/10

Conviction

A sister struggles to free her innocent brother in this jumbled biographical legal drama.

Betty Anne (Hilary Swank: Amelia) and Kenny (Sam Rockwell: Iron Man 2) are tight-knit siblings bound by hardship and mischief. Kenny’s a little more mischievous, though, and the favorite suspect of local cops winds up serving a life sentence without parole when they pin him for a vicious murder. Against staggering evidence, Betty Anne devotes her life to winning his freedom, eventually going to college to become a lawyer and working with new friend Abra (Minnie Driver: Take) to exonerate...

Article - Movie Reviews; by Mark Burns; 11/4/10

Hereafter

This meditative speculation on the spiritual realm is easily the quietest death-minded movie in the Cineplex this Halloween.

Three strangers are wrestling with death. Marie (Cécile De France: Mesrine: Killer Instinct), a French journalist, is revived after nearly being consumed by the Indian Ocean tsunami and emerges shaken by her brush with the afterlife. Marcus, a British schoolboy, is left rudderless when his twin brother Jason is stolen by tragedy (Frankie and George McLaren in their debut). And George (Matt Damon: Green Zone) is a genuine psychic talent who laments his burden of communing with the dead. Through...

Article - Movie Reviews; by Mark Burns; 10/28/10

Red

Superspy sages come out of retirement swinging in this snappy comic action flick.

Frank Moses (Bruce Willis: Cop Out) is a lonely guy, quietly whiling away retirement with regular phone calls to his federal pension agent, Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker: TV’s Weeds). Dimmed verve gets a jolt, though, when a hit squad comes crashing through his home in the dead of night. Suddenly he’s crisscrossing the country, fighting off a kill order and CIA hotshot William (Karl Urban: Star Trek) even while connecting with mothballed allies and assets. Together they’ll crack a...

Article - Movie Reviews; by Mark Burns; 10/21/10