Mini-Review: Well, he's still really good at wartime action scenes.

Mini-Review: Although Bird proves he can pull off action sequences live as great as he does in animated features, it doesn't save the film from it's far-fetched script which serves only to set-up these sequences, characters be damned! The film squeaks in a line about how America views all potential terrorists as terrorists, but it otherwise doesn't have much to say at all. I appreciated Renner questioning Cruise's seemingly infallible methods, and would have preferred more of this self-aware dialogue.

Mini-Review: Everything the critics of this film think is gold is shit. The problem here is that we are given 4 possible suspects for who is the mole, and yet the film decides that it is unimportant to distinguish them apart from each other in any way. A fake suspense is built over someone the audience knows nearly nothing about. It seems like this story is not meant for a 2-hour movie production, as the film spends all of its limited time being clever with plot points instead of fleshing out key characters.

Mini-Review: The film tries to portray messages about the importance of film preservation, the search for purpose in life, and the transformative power of a child's innate curiosity. The pacing ends up seeming very sporadic in order to reconcile these disparate themes, with some awfully convenient plot devices connecting the pieces. The atmosphere was great, but the plot's inconsistency failed to keep me engrossed. Fuck 3D, which continues to be purely a Hollywood gimmick to drain audiences' wallets.

Mini-Review: You'll certainly be engrossed, but mostly because of Mara's performance and the hauntingly suspenseful score. Fincher seems forced to give us a lightning-fast-edit version of a popular mystery novel, making sure to not miss any detail in order to appease the fans and the producers; for those viewers who did not read the book, certain subplots are completely arbitrary. It ends up lacking thematic focus, which Fincher proved so well at with Zodiac and Social Network.