TRAVIS BYRAM'S MOVIE REVIEWS

Before I go any further, the BAFTAs were today, and I'd like to congratulate 12 Years a Slave on its wins for Best Actor and Best Film, surprise winner Barkhad Abdi winning for Best Supporting Actor for Captain Phillips , and Gravity on its impressive six wins, including Best Director! I'm enjoying the McConaissance as much as anyone, but this is a step in the right direction for Chiwetel Ejiofor to take home Oscar gold in two weeks! Now that I've got my awards season geeking out of the way, I must tell you something I'm sure you're already aware of: The Lego Movie  is astonishing. It mixes breathtaking visuals of what appear to be stop-motion Legos shifting, transforming and swiftly moving before your eyes, which made me wonder how they did it all. That is its first accomplishment: the art of mystery. Like Gravity , you felt high above in the clouds in outer space, peering down at Earth below like an enormous blue-green marble. Here you're sucked in to a wor...

Let me confess my full love of and practice of magic before I continue this review. Magic, well for me mostly card tricks, was a huge part of my life in fifth grade. I got my friends and I to pull them off, amazing (or at least slightly surprising) my peers and adults who were patient enough to tolerate as I carefully balanced where their card was going to be. I even performed a card trick (with a deck of Power Ranger cards, no less) for my sixth grade talent day. Of course, as seventh grade hit, puberty pulled off the evilest trick on me: making my love of card tricks disappear. So I've always been enamored with magic, especially the act Penn & Teller, who aren't afraid to show you how some of their tricks are performed. Unlike Penn & Teller, or me at my sixth grade performance, "Now You See Me" doesn't blow you away with the big reveal. It leaves you confused and mad you sat down for such a long...trick. The Hollywood dazzle, and product placements (...

People are calling "The Dark Knight Rises," the conclusion of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy "the most anticipated movie of the summer."  I'd like to think they're underplaying it a little bit, so let me be the fanboy who hypes/hams it up: "The Dark Knight" is arguably the best superhero ever made, some say one of the greatest period, Heath Ledger won on ACADEMY AWARD for playing the Joker, something that would've sounded bizarre but made so much sense after you watched the film, and America has been teased with whatever dental-wear we thought Bane had going on, the debate if Anne Hathaway was sexy enough which will make you feel dirty after watching "The Princess Diaries," and wondering if the trailers, posters and reviews of this film will ever succeed the unreachable mountain standards set by that Oscar-snubbed film in 2008? Well, it has.  I won't pretend I liked it better than "The Dark Knight," but as a...