Movie Review: "The Girl Who Played With Fire"

5. "The Girl Who Played With Fire" is everything it's predecessor, "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," was not: boring, cliched and unsatisfying.

4. "Fire" picks up a year after "Tattoo" and finds the enemies of Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Raplace) closing in on her and investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) trying to rescue her while publishing a blockbuster investigation.

3. "Fire" takes Lisbeth's admirable ferocity from "Tattoo" and downgrades it to "The Girl Who Punched Guys In The Crotch With A Stun Gun" and Blomkvist's believable-but-flawed journalistic integrity into sensationalistic probes into the Russian white slave trade ties in Sweeden.

2. It's the kind of plot one might expect from the evil offspring of a James Bond film and a Lifetime movie of the week — "Fire" comes complete with a Bond-esque villian ("a blond tank as one character describes him") that would make Sharky grimmace and a twisted family history with an obvious "Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" reveals and a "Kill Bill 2" moment to boot.

1. "Fire" would be fine if it were a Bond movie, but it seems contrived and even silly dovetailed agains "Tattoo" and hardly serves as an invitation to see the final chapter in author Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium trilogy.

========================================
"The Girl Who Played With Fire"
Run time: 2 hours, 9 minutes
Rated R
Genre: Suspense-Thriller-Drama‎ -
Director: Daniel Alfredson
Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Lena Endre, Georgi Staykov and Sofia Ledarp
Finney's Flicks Grade: C

Movie Review: "Inception"

5. I saw "The Empire Strikes Back" when I was five years old and it blew my mind so thoroughly and left such an indelible, unshakable impression that, in some small way, every movie I've seen since then has been a vague disappointment.

4. "Inception" changed that, surpassing even the most tightly-held moments of whatever shards of a wide-eyed, awestruck kindergartner that dwells in my cynical soul.

3. Leonardo DiCapro leads a powerhouse cast through writer-director Christopher Nolan's mind-bending tale of idea thieves and dream saboteurs.

2. The movie stuns the imagination with visuals that made me feel as if I were personally navigating the live-action recreation of an M.C. Escher drawing while the story twists us through a story that is equal parts action-adventure, heist flick, character-driven drama and romantic tragedy.


1. In the modern multiplex, it is not difficult to rise above the swill released by the creativity-deprived studio system, but "Inception" rockets past that low threshold and manages to move the movie genre forward.

===================

"Inception"
Run Time: 2 hours, 28 minutes
Rated PG-13‎‎
Genre: Action-Adventure-Scifi-Fantasy‎
Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page
Finney's Flicks Grade: A+