Category: Reviews – Blog Only

Dialed up to 11 for nearly all of its bloated 138-minute runtime, Shutter Island adapts Dennis Lehane’s novel with a baroque extravagance that can’t compensate for lousy pop-lit source material and a script (by Laeta Kalogridis) that both fails to elicit engagement with its characters and invest its puzzle-box story with meta-cinema weight. In 1954,…

David Twohy doesn’t reinvent the wheel with A Perfect Getaway, the key to both the film’s minor successes and shortcomings. Interested in straightforward B-movie suspense laced with a dash of wink-wink self-awareness, Twohy’s film concerns a vacationing couple in Kauai – screenwriter Cliff (Steve Zahn) and new bride Cydney (Milla Jovovich) – who, while backpacking…

 Working in a vein similar to – if not quite as successful as – Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead do-over, replete with intro use of a Johnny Cash song (here, a cover of “We’ll Meet Again”), Breck Eisner’s remake of George A. Romero’s 1973 The Crazies is a testament to the value of understated…

Like a jaunty, boozy, fisticuffing night spent at a nineteenth-century cockney brothel, Sherlock Holmes rocks and rambles, steams and swings, bounces and blazes with the type of electricity it wasn’t clear director Guy Ritchie was capable of generating. Kickstarted by a jangly old world-new world score that oozes breathless verve, Ritchie’s vision of the renowned…

Boundless creativity can be a shortcoming if not channeled properly, a fact proven by The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus as it barrels from one extravagantly whimsical set piece to another. Terry Gilliam has never been a director prone to inhibition, and that’s increasingly become both his blessing and curse as a filmmaker, with the latter…

An unbearably taut, slow-simmering noir transposed to the vast countryside and its patient, drawn-out rhythms, Revanche (translation: Revenge) would – at least for its first two-thirds, plot-wise – be a rather standard-issue B-movie were it not for writer/director Götz Spielmann’s entrancing investigation of character, motivation and fate. In a story whose convenient coincidences would reek…

With A Single Man, renowned fashion designer Tom Ford does what he knows – shoot in an immaculately beautiful, excessively chic style that’s fit for a men’s cologne commercial. The trouble is that his film, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel, has a plot and characters rather than just pretty surfaces to gussy up with…

Impeccably formalized but rife with dissonance, The Sun charts the last days in the rule of Japanese emperor Hirohito (Issei Ogata). The third entry in Aleksandr Sokurov’s “Men of Power” series, this haunting portrait of the vanquished WWII Japanese leader is another of the Russian Ark auteur’s strange, beguiling ruminations on mortality and power, here…

The once-great Robert De Niro plummets to new lows with Everybody’s Fine, a story about listening, understanding, forgiving and other mushy platitudes that begins as merely intolerable and ends up borderline-reprehensible. In this remake of Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1990 Italian original, De Niro is Frank, a widower who decides, when his four kids cancel their plans…

Duck Season director Fernando Eimbcke continues to refine his signature style – long, static takes, rhythmic (and often transitional) cuts to black, silence pregnant with both humor and sorrow – with Lake Tahoe, another tale of a boy abandoned by adults. That narrative similarity, however, isn’t immediately apparent from Eimbcke’s set-up, which begins by following…