You can’t wear white until after Memorial Day, but the Summer Movie season is already in full swing, as this week Men In Black 3 joins The Avengers and Battleship in the blows-up-real-good sweepstakes.
Our man Philip Martin finds it “almost exactly what you might expect: The writing is uneven, the jokes are hit-and-miss and the computer effects are antiseptically perfect” but he enjoyed Josh Brolin’s Tommy Lee Jones’ impression and thought the film’s third act was even — sniff — kind of touching. Ah.
Martin liked the subtitled foreign films We Have a Pope and Monsieur Lazhar quite a bit better than MIB3 however, locating in the former — about a runaway pontiff — “graceful and generous comedy ... accessible to a general audience” and in the latter (which is about an Algerian immigrant who takes over a Montreal grade school class after a tragedy) “a temperate, generous and deeply affecting experience.” Martin also previews America’s Parking Lot — the film that will open next week’s Little Rock Film Festival. But wait, there’s more!
Dan Lybarger finds the crowd-pleasing The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, the story of down and out British expatriates trying to stretch their retirement funds in India, “enchanting,” and credits it to the company of experienced British thespians, most of whom seem to have collected titles.
And maybe the best movie opening this week is Richard Linklater’s Bernie, which the San Francisco Chronicle says “one of the best films so far this year.”
Read more in tomorrow's MovieStyle section of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.