Author: Brandon Fibbs

When I was a kid, my siblings and I would use our VHS camcorder to make movies, mocking up our garage like the cockpit of a space shuttle, blowing up model cars with leftover Fourth of July fireworks, and having slo-mo fistfights on the bluffs behind our house. Those movies, while entertaining time capsules, are,…

As far as I can tell, the moral of “Country Strong” seems to be this: Mothers, don’t let your kids grow up to sing country music. Good advice. That said, the music is easily the best part of the movie, and I don’t even like country music. “Country Strong” mines the cliches of a dozen…

Every year about this time, we critics torture ourselves (no, really, it’s quite difficult) with the impossible task of objectively categorizing works of art. Choosing the finest films of the year is an odd and ultimately unfulfilling exercise, one that invites constant second-guessing and nearly always devolves into more of a favorites list than an…

The team of Joel and Ethan Coen have long been Oscar and critical darlings, but aside from some cult favorites (“Fargo,” “The Big Lebowski”), their films have left most audiences cold. All that should change with “True Grit,” their most accessible, crowd-pleasing film to date. “True Grit” does not try to deconstruct the Western as…

Colin Firth, who should have won a Best Actor Oscar last year for “A Single Man,” will very likely claim the prize this year for “The King’s Speech,” a beautifully crafted, sturdily constructed, sublimely written story shimmering with robust humanity and impish wit. “The King’s Speech” is the story of King George VI (Colin Firth),…

The team of Joel and Ethan Coen have long been Oscar and critical darlings, but aside from some cult favorites (“Fargo,” “The Big Lebowski”), their films have left most audiences cold. All that should change with “True Grit,” their most accessible, crowd-pleasing film to date.“True Grit” does not try to deconstruct the Western as one…

Yogi always was “smarter than the average bear.” But parents and grandparents dragging tykes along to the 3-D, big-screen “Yogi Bear” will probably remember him as funnier than the average bear, too. Or funnier than this. A computer animated Yogi and Boo Boo inhabit a real-world Jellystone Park with the unfunny Tom Cavanagh as Ranger…

Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” is the stillborn offspring of “The Red Shoes” and Hieronymus Bosch—both magnificent and magnificently disturbing. Art, obsession and mental fragility coalesce into something dark, gnarled and hallucinatory. How can something so repulsive be so beautiful?   “Black Swan’s” stage is the renowned New York City ballet, upon which a young, newly…

Watching “Tron: Legacy” is like witnessing a thermonuclear explosion from inside the mushroom cloud—white hot, dazzlingly intense, and indescribably overpowering. Pure, unblemished spectacle, “Tron: Legacy” is cinematic escapism at its most thrilling and satisfying—pop art unlike any you’ve ever seen before.   27-year-old Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) is the headstrong but ultimately directionless billionaire son…