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The Killer Inside Me (2010): C+
Translating a novel’s first-person narrative to the screen is a tricky task Michael Winterbottom isn’t up to with The Killer Inside Me. Based on Jim Thompson’s 1952 pulp classic about a small-town West Texas deputy sheriff named Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) with a penchant for cold-blooded brutality, Winterbottom’s adaptation does its best to approximate the…
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Splice (2010): B-
A twisted science-run-amok horror film that doubles as a cautionary tale about parental devotion (and, perhaps also, a role-reversal take on the abortion debate), Splice follows superstar geneticist couple Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) as they disobey their employers’ orders and create an animal-human hybrid. The result is a being Elsa dubs Dren…
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Winter’s Bone (2010): A-
An achingly authentic, hard-bitten portrait of survivalist determination and familial sacrifice, Winter’s Bone employs a conventional Amerindie template – cold, rural locale, parental and socio-economic tensions, plaintive soundtrack songs and evocative landscape cinematography – without ever feeling stale, forced or phony. In Missouri’s Ozarks, 17-year-old Ree (stunning newcomer Jennifer Lawrence) is informed that her crank-cooking…
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Best Worst Movie (2009): C+
Best Worst Movie is a love letter to Troll 2, that 1990 paragon of crappy cinema. And like all love letters, the documentary – directed by Troll 2’s child star, Michael Stephenson – is a warm, jovial and decidedly uncritical look at both the film and its rabid fans. Italian director Claudio Fragasso’s pseudo horror…
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Robin Hood (2010): C-
An unwavering melding of substance and style, Robin Hood is colorless through and through. Ridley Scott’s retelling of the famed archer’s legend is (groan) an origin story that, on the basis of its conclusion, seems designed to kick-start a franchise, a repellent possibility in light of this saga’s wretched dullness. Shot in flat grays and…
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A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010): C-
A rotten retread in the vein of Platinum Dunes’ Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th do-overs, A Nightmare on Elm Street regurgitates key visuals from Wes Craven’s iconic original but nonetheless fails to mimic or update with any competence. Helmed by Samuel Bayer (director of Nirvana’s classic “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video), the story…
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Hot Tub Time Machine (2010): B-
As amusingly stupid as advertised, Hot Tub Time Machine milks the ‘80s for laughs but gets most of its comedic mileage out of a more general strain of boys-being-morons insanity. In Steve Pink’s visually cruddy film, Adam (John Cusack) is reunited with friend Nick (Craig Robinson) when their high-school buddy Lou (Rob Corddry) almost kills…
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The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009): B-
Body horror of a most repulsive kind, The Human Centipede (First Sequence) pushes at, and finally barrels straight through, the boundaries of modern cinematic shock-imagery. Tom Six’s exploitation film is designed to elicit not simply revulsion but urgent questions of “why?”, as his story – about two American tourists who fall victim to a German…
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The Losers (2010): C
Based on a popular comic book series, The Losers approximates the macho guns-blazing fantasies peddled by not only its source material but also countless run-of-the-mill Xbox and PS3 shoot-‘em-ups. Director Sylvain White’s saga involves an A-Team-ish squad of soldiers who, after being framed and left for dead during a Bolivian drug raid by mysterious spook…
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In the Mouth of Madness (1994): B
John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness has heady ideas it’s incapable of fully working out, but its tale – about John Trent (Sam Neill), an insurance investigator hired by a publishing firm to look into the disappearance of Stephen King-ish horror author Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow) – is finely attuned to the disquieting realm…
