Author Archives: Dann Gire

Aisha (Zoe Saldana) and Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) enjoy a hot time in the action thriller “The Losers.” The action-packed, DC-comic-book-inspired “The Losers” has apparently been created for young male viewers with attention-span deficiencies, an aversion to intimacy with women and a need to have everything in a movie spelled out on a 10-year-old’s level. […]

Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) clobbers a villain in the horrifically violent. graphic novel-inspired action thriller. The title doesn’t lie. Here comes one Red Bull of an action film that doesn’t play nice. It combines the fantastic underpinnings of a superhero costume adventure with the excessively gory violence of a cheap martial arts exploitation film. […]

Cesar (Clifton Collins Jr.) coaches young Mexican ballplayers to a U.S. championship in the fact-based “The Perfect Game.” The title “The Perfect Game” kinda gives away the ending, don’t you think? This independent drama, directed by William Dear, tells the true story of Mexican ballplayers who won 13 straight Little League games and went on […]

Steve and Kate (David Duchovny and Demi Moore) want the world’s metaphorical neighbors to keep up with “The Joneses.” “The Joneses” begs to be a farce. It pleads to be funnier. More acerbic. More outrageous. More critical of the consumer culture that eats away at American spirituality by focusing on material possessions instead of the […]

Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci) is caught between life and death by a mysterious funeral director in the drama “After.Life.” If Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo’s dullingly un-horrific and pseudo-enlightening “After.Life” ever becomes a cult movie, it will undoubtedly be one for necrophiliacs. After all, the breathtaking Christina Ricci appears in this movie without a stitch, except for the […]

Trent (Howard Walker) undergoes a few slight changes in the demonic horror tale “The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond.” If you crossed Sam Raimi’s “The Evil Dead” with Joe Johnston’s “Jumanji,” you’d sure have a much better movie than Gabriel Bologna’s “The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond.” All the necessary exploitative elements of a sleazy […]

A married couple (Tina Fey and Steve Carell) discover cops can be dangerous in the action comedy “Date Night.” “Date Night” steals its principal plot device from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “North by Northwest,” its spectacular New York car crashes from “The Blues Brothers,” and its put-upon main characters from “The Out of Towners.” By all […]

“Avatar” star Sam Worthington stars as the demigod Perseus in the fantasy action remake of 1981’s “Clash of the Titans.” On the sandaled heels of the last silly Greek mythology-themed movie – “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” – comes yet a sillier, clunkier, and more dramatically laughable new Greek gods adventure called […]

“I am Not an Animal!” Join Dann Gire (film critic of Chicago’s suburban newspaper THE DAILY HERALD, as well as the founder and president of the Chicago Film Critics Association, and adjunct instructor at Aurora and Harper Colleges in Illinois) and Raymond Benson (novelist, author of 20 books, former official author of James Bond books, […]

Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), left, joins Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) in “The Runaways,” based on the all-girl rock group. “The Runaways” tells that oh-so-familiar tale of a promising, cutting-edge rock band created in a messy birth of ego and opportunism before hitting the heights of fame and fortune, only to slowly implode from drugs and […]