Movie Review

Parker is one of those standard violence thrillers, with Jason Statham as one of those heroes who can push a knife blade through the palm of his hand in order to get a grip on the villain, and Michael Chiklis, who can take six bullets in the chest at close range and not even be slowed down.

Mama is a horror movie that is not a "splatter" movie, which means it does not rely on blood and pain and sadism for its effects, and that's all to its credit. How often do you see a horror movie rated PG-13?

Those who protest the violence and brutality of the torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty are apparently not familiar with the standards set by current splatter movies like the Saw series. Those who object to the subject itself may not be considering that the government does not deny using torture so much as it denies that it worked.

Promised Land, startting Matt Damon as the agent of the energy company and John Krasinski as the environmentalist, is a fairly good introduction to the "fracking" process of getting natural gas out of the ground, but it falls a bit into the stereotypes of entertainment movies, and seriously dilutes its message about the pros and cons of the fracking process.