Category: Reviews – Blog Only

There goes the reboot. Picking up where its predecessor left off in terms of plot but not skillfulness, Quantum of Solace squanders most of the potential generated by 2006’s Casino Royale, providing a brisk, grim story that might as well have been called Monotony of Tone. Tormented by the death of lover-betrayer Vesper Lynd (Eva…

A shot out of a moving car’s rear window, and the subsequent one of purchased goods forming a cluttered trail on the ground after falling out of the vehicle’s trunk, subtly presages the messy consequences that follow an ordinary man’s binocular-gazing in Timecrimes. Nacho Vigalondo’s swift head-spinner concerns Hector (Karra Elejalde), who while staying at…

Kurt Kuenne’s documentary Dear Zachary: A Letter To a Son About His Father is many things – a tribute to a murdered friend, a historical record for the deceased’s child, a portrait of near-unfathomable love and devotion, and an evisceration of a country’s judicial and child protective services systems. It’s also a manipulative, tearjerking thriller…

Making one long for his dreadful Saw II, III, and IV, director Darren Lynn Bousman’s Repo! The Genetic Opera rips off heavy metal and horror aesthetics to absolutely dismal effect. With junky comic book-paneled sequences, musical numbers marked by graceless, strident melodies and generic chunk-chunk guitars, and a goth style drenched in gore, Bousman’s rock-opera…

Kevin Smith blatantly invades Judd Apatow territory with Zack and Miri Make a Porno, which not only blends the bawdy with the unabashedly sentimental (a vein Smith has himself, admittedly, tapped before in the superior Chasing Amy), but also borrows Apatow’s favorite everyman in portly, scruffy Seth Rogen. It’s not an altogether unsuccessful tack to…

Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In transports vampire legend to the realm of tween romance, melding genres with a haunting poignancy that’s mildly undercut by a script that, during its last act, bounces around like a jeep on a dirt road. Alfredson doesn’t shy away from supernatural lore (sunlight and stakes to the heart…

Oliver Stone has both Brezhnev and Kissinger state, on separate occasions, that Richard Nixon’s tale is a tragedy, and his Nixon certainly assumes an empathetic position on its disgraced presidential subject. This does not, however, mean that it’s a particularly kind portrait, as Stone’s epic – charting the 40th commander-in-chief’s childhood, early career, and Oval…

Modern China’s gradual shift from collectivism to free-market economics forms the backbone of Jia Zhangke’s 24 City, a beguiling documentary/fiction hybrid in which the Still Life director examines the transition of munitions manufacturing plant 420, located in Southwest China’s Chengdu city, into a futuristic complex for commercial and residential businesses as well as apartment high-rises.…

Synecdoche, New York may commence with the drab realism of an Arthur Miller play – such as, say, Death of a Salesman, the production being staged by perpetually glum regional-theater playwright Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) – but since this is the directorial debut of mad genius screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, the film soon reveals its…

There’s exactly one brilliant scene in Smiley Face, in which Ana Farris’ insanely stoned Jane ruminates, with hilariously authentic scattered-train-of-thought, on her fondness for lasagna. The rest of Greg Araki’s film, however, is not only a limp, unfunny time-waster, but it seems barely familiar with the actual experience of being high, indulging in one sequence…