Movie Review: Hanna

What if you grew up as an assassin?

Remove all romantic notions of such a life from your mind, and try to imagine that your combat skills were the foremost thing you understood about the world. Concepts such as love and innocence would be foreign to you, and you would have to learn to appreciate the vast difference between intellect and experience.

Hanna is an uneven but conceptually remarkable story of a teenager who embarks on a journey to discover what there is to see and do in the world outside of her unfortunate upbringing. Does this sound like a fairy tale? In a way it is, if the late Tom Clancy had penned it. The film is almost as much of an old-fashioned but realistic “fantasy” as a modern-day thriller, and the clash of moods and settings makes for a fairly creative product.

Movie Review: RoboCop (1987)

The original RoboCop is a delight of an action film that boasts total mastery over its tone and intent from moment to moment. It knows when to be subtle and to be excessive. It knows when to be exciting, thought-provoking, or even heartbreaking. It revels in unsophisticated fun and at times becomes downright goofy, but the movie is always well aware of its purpose, which it simply keeps on expanding. It likely won’t appeal to viewers who shun depictions of intense violence (which are present even in the edited-for-television version, which was my only viewing option at the time), but moviegoers who can accept these gruesome yet exaggerated moments may indeed find themselves laughing.

Movie Review: How to Train Your Dragon (mild spoilers)

Numerous tasks and technical issues have prevented me from being able to cover all of the movies I’d planned to get to, so I am going to end my spotlight on computer-generated films on a high note, with my favorite entry from DreamWorks and one of the best examples of the medium I’ve ever seen. How to Train Your Dragon, despite its narrative issues, is a wondrously crafted movie that is as enjoyable as it is gorgeous.