Isaac's Film Reviews

A heartfelt fantastical family dramedy, and one of 2012's biggest surprises thus far Full spoiler-free review by Isaac Handelman Going in to The Odd Life of Timothy Green , I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Family dramedies, especially from Disney, have a tendency to be oftentimes unbearably corny and derived from a cookie-cutter formula. That’s why it comes as a minor shock to me to report that Timothy Green is absolutely worth your time and money. It’s packed with ingenuity, strong performances, laughs and genuine emotion, and it’s a better film than many of 2012’s tentpole blockbusters.  Centering on small-town couple Cindy (Jennifer Garner) and Jim Green (Joel Edgerton), the film tells a modern fairytale of sorts. I’ll shy away from specifics as to avoid spoilers, so I’ll just say that the couple happens upon a mysterious boy named Timothy (CJ Adams) -- or rather he happens upon them. They lovingly take him in as the child they’ve always wanted but could n...

The legacy lives...for the most part. Full spoiler-free review by Isaac Handelman The Bourne Ultimatum put a definite bookend on one of the greatest espionage trilogies to grace recent cinema. But of course, those films pulled in too much money at the box office to end the franchise there, so here we are almost exactly five years later with The Bourne Legacy. It’s not a prequel or a sequel or a “spiritual successor”; Legacy tells a story that’s mostly distinct from the events of the original three Bourne films, and its relative success is thanks mostly to this smart decision on the screenwriters’ part. Much of Legacy ’s narrative runs parallel with the events of Ultimatum , but there’s not much connecting the two films as far as their base narratives go. There’s more than one mention of Jason Bourne, to be certain, but this, as aforementioned, is mostly a stand-alone experience. The film follows Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), a participant in the fledgling genetic alt...

Not as adorable as you'd think. Full spoiler-free review by Isaac Handelman As comedian Seth MacFarlane’s first motion picture following the massive success of Family Guy , Ted ’s got its work cut out for it. What’s here is much of what you’d suspect out of MacFarlane and company -- it’s crass, it’s crude, it’s immature, and, at certain points, it’s unbelievably hilarious. But MacFarlane’s inexperience in the world of cinema pops up a tad too often here, resulting in a narrative that, rather unsurprisingly, can’t sustain itself through a film’s runtime. Mark Wahlberg stars as John, who made a wish as a little boy for his Christmas gift, a teddy bear, to come to life. His wish was granted, and he’s now a thirty-five year old grown man whose best friend is still his teddy bear, albeit possessing a, ahem, rich vocabulary, some moderately filthy behavior and a brilliantly animated appearance that blends almost perfectly with the human characters; it’s often difficult to rea...

This Recall remake needs a redo. Full spoiler-free review by Isaac Handelman The black and white color scheme, identical nature and godawful aim of  Total Recall ’s robotic police force, or “synthetics”, immediately call to mind   the Stormtroopers of  Star Wars ; if only 2012’s  Total Recall  remake packed the necessary ingenuity to back up its admittedly intriguing premise would we have anything near the level of the iconic 1977 sci-fi masterpiece. That’s not the case. What’s presented here is so utterly faceless, so painfully generic that it’s oftentimes difficult to realize that the film is still reasonably entertaining. This  Total Recall  takes a detour from Mars and sets itself entirely on Earth, where chemical warfare has rendered most of the planet’s land uninhabitable. The only livable portions remaining are the United Federation of Britain and the landmass once known as Australia, now dubbed simply “The Colony”. Colin Farrell takes...