Movie Review: "Machete"

5. Fittingly released on Labor Day weekend, “Machete” represents the last of the summer movie dandelion wine and in a summer full of misfires and disappointments it comes tepid, flat and without much flavor.

4. The problem with “Machete” isn’t that it’s a bad movie, it’s that it’s not good at being bad in the way it wants to be.

3. The movie cheats on the promised gore, often quickly cutting away instead of really savoring the bloodlust a la "Dead Alive,” and though the film delivers some quality female nudity and a few laughs (most of which I think were intentional), it’s not quite bad enough to be good.

2. Nobody at the Academy planned to carve any Best Actor or Best Actress statues for “Machete,” but even Robert DeNiro is crummy and annoying in this flick.

1. If nothing else, “Machete” proves looks aren’t everything — the phony trailer that inspired this turn looked good but the finished product wasn’t, Jessica Alba looks good but can’t act and Danny Trejo may have one of Hollywood’s best faces but he’s a step down from Alba in acting.

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"Machete"
Run time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Rated R‎‎
Genre: Action-Adventure‎
Director: Ethan Maniquis
Cast: Danny Trejo, Jessica Alba, Robert De Niro, Michelle Rodriguez amd Lindsay Lohan
Finney's Flicks Grade: C-

Movie Review: "Get Low"

5. "Get Low" is a character sketch and as such, did well to cast two actors who are the embodiment of characters: Robert Duvall and Bill Murray.

4. Duvall plays crotchety recluse Felix Bush, and man who wants Murray's funeral director Frank Quinn, to throw him the biggest funeral in Tennessee history -- while he's still alive.

3. This sounds like a zany setup, but instead but becomes a study of a man's mettle -- the darkness in Bush's soul, the tension between greed and survival inside Quinn and a meditation on the nature of forgiveness and redemption.

2. "Get Low" also benefits from the sublime efforts of supporting cast, including Sissy Spacek as Quinn's jilted former lover, Lucas Black as Quinn's earnest apprentice, Gerald McRaney's local preacher, Bill Cobb as Bush's last -- and perhaps only -- friend in this world and a terrific soundtrack of 1930s period music.

1. Duvall, though, is the centerpiece and delivers one of the finest performances in a career studded with all-star appearances.
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"Get Low"
Run time: 1 hour, 40 minutes
Rated PG-13
Genre: Drama
Director: Aaron Schneider
Cast: Bill Murray, Robert Duvall, Lucas Black, Sissy Spacek, Bill Cobbs
Finney's Flicks Grade: A

Movie Review: "Winter's Bone"

5. "Winter's Bone" is set in poorest encampments of Missouri's Ozark mountains, but it may be set in Afghanistan for this is not the America most audiences know.

4. This is a bleak, washed-out and chilly encampment on the very furthest fringes of civilization with it's own language and law.

3. Ree (Jennifer Lawrence), the 17-year-old caretaker to her addled mother and two younger siblings, learns her father put the family's shanty up as collateral for his bail on methamphetamine cooking charges and the sheriff informs her that daddy is missing and foreclosure is imminent by the bail bond company.

2. Ree searches for her father and seeks the aid from his meth-making and dealing cohorts, who are also her uncles, aunts and cousins, and faces a familial Catch-22 -- does she surrender her home and watch her family split apart or risk her own death to find her father?

1. "Bone" leaves the viewer with a bone-deep chill that reminds us there are reasons we don't wander into the hills unattended nor ask too many questions of strangers and also provides one of the most compelling watches of 2010.
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"Winter's Bone"
Run time: 1 hour, 40 min‎‎utes
Rated R‎‎
Genre: Drama
Director: Debra Granik
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Lauren Sweetser, Kevin Breznahan, Isaiah Stone
Finney's Flicks Grade: A+

Movie Review: "Restrepo"

5. The most telling scene of the powerful Afghanistan war documentary "Restrepo" comes not on the battlefield but outside a small, rickety house when an overburdened U.S. Army officer attempts to talk to elders about wheat and rice crops and modern farm equipment the government wants to bring to the dusty mountain village.

4. The officer talks about the riches that will flow into the village with millions of dollars in modern farm equipment, roads and education that will benefit the poor, war-torn region.

3. The elders, however, are not interested in that: They are upset with the soldiers because they euthanized a cow that got tangled in razor wire near an Army outpost.

2. The Army offers to replace the cow or pay for it by giving the aggrieved tribesman the weight of the animal in rice and beans, but the tribesman want money, about $500, which the Army won't surrender for fear the locals will use it to buy guns or drugs.

1. And so goes America's 21st century war: Her soldiers desperately trying to pass along the riches of a modern society to a primitive culture who just want to know what will be done about their dead cow.

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"Restrepo"
Run Time: 1 hour, 32 minutes
Rated R
Genre: Documentary
Directors: Tim Heherington and Sebastian Junger
Cast: Second Platoon, B Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment (airborne) of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team
Finney's Flicks Grade: A

Movie Review: "The Other Guys"

5. "The Other Guys" is very funny — maybe the funniest movie of the year and Will Ferrell's best comedy since the terrific "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" — but the flick works on another level: It's a buddy cop send-up that happens to be the best buddy cop movie since "Lethal Weapon."

4. Ferrell plays a mild forensic accountant with a dark side partnered with Mark "Third Nipple" Wahlberg, a talented-but-angry detective who yearns for action and glory but his held by the career-limiting move of accidentally (but quite hilariously) shooting Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter before the seventh game of the World Series.

3. Both Ferrell's and Wahlberg's characters are overshadowed by flashy caricatures of muscled action heroes, played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson, who do all the things cop pals do in action movies — go on high-speed chases, wreck vintage sports cars, blow stuff up and shoot guns with great abandon — while Ferrell and Wahlberg tool around in Ferrell's Toyota Prius and investigate scaffolding permit violations.

2. "Guys" delivers the dead-pan cherubic worldview Ferrell does so well, though more restrained than some of his on-screen incarnations, while also providing a sly, stinging critique our decade-long economic woes and the greed and stupidity that led us here.

1. Another hidden gem is the closing credits, which provide a series of animated graphics about corporate greed that would almost be funny if they weren't so true.

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"The Other Guys"
Run time: 1 hour, 47 minutes
Rated PG-13‎‎
Genre: Comedy‎
Director: Adam McKay
Cast: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Keaton and Dwayne Johnson
Finney's Flicks Grade: A

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.

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"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: "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"

5. "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" is like going to a convenience store fountain and filling a Big Gulp cup with every flavor of soft drink available — what kids in my day called "suicides" — it seems like a good idea until you start drinking it.

4. This movie is what the kids these days call a mash-up: a mix of romantic comedy, video game action and comic book imagery — it sounds cool until you watch it.

3. Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a wimpy dork who plays bass in a whiny 20-something band and falls in love with a girl with issues and bad hair (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), but before their relationship can be consummated, he must defeat in video game-style battle her seven evil exes.

2. The visuals are at times stunning (this might be the most special effects in a romantic comedy ever), but like even the best video games, the action becomes repetitive and tedious (once youv'e seen one guy burst into coins after getting killed, you've seen them all).

1. The biggest problem with "Pilgrim" is the people: Winstead is wooden and uninteresting, Cera is that same guy he always plays and by the end of it all, I didn't really care whether they got together I was just looking to turn the PlayStation off.

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"Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"
Run time: 1 hour, 53 minutes
Rated PG-13‎‎
Genre: Action-Adventure‎
Director: Edgar Wright
Cast: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans and Anna Kendrick
Finney's Flicks Rating: C