Reese Witherspoon

Rating: 1.0/5.0

CHICAGO – McG’s “This Means War” with Chris Pine, Tom Hardy, and Reese Witherspoon is an aggressively annoying movie. It isn’t just bad. It grates. It frustrates. It baffles with its incompetence. The charm of the cast helps off-set the complete failure of the horrendous script and the lackluster eye of its director, but it’s not enough. This isn’t just another romantic comedy that’s neither funny nor romantic it’s almost the direct opposite of those qualities. It’s anti-humor, anti-romance, and anti-movies.

Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – While Robert “Twilight” Pattinson has persuasively branched out beyond his typecasting of reanimated and preternatural corpses, his miscast union in the tensionless “Water for Elephants” with pin-up circus spectacle Reese Witherspoon works as well as an elephant trying to spoon a sworn-enemy lion.

Rating: 5.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Writer/Director James L. Brooks has been producing prime entertainment for nearly 50 years now, and proves he has not lost a step in ‘How Do You Know.’ This film of love, loss, power and especially romance is a great showcase for the talents of Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson and the great Jack Nicholson.

Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – Hasn’t Pixar proven that animation can be more than just concept and celebrity voice work? The problem with “Monsters vs. Aliens” is that the team behind it clearly prioritized nearly every element of the film over actual storytelling.

AUSTIN, Texas – German writer Franz Kafka meets the war on terror in “Rendition,” which is a message movie with what one would consider a self-evident message: torture is bad. We live in a political climate, though, where that isn’t self-evident.