Category: Reviews – Blog Only

Inside might have been a horror classic if it didn’t, at key intervals, diffuse some of its tension through easy-shortcut storytelling that calls undue attention to the director’s manipulative hand. Four months after she (but not her baby’s daddy) survived a car crash, Sarah (Alysson Paradis) prepares on Christmas Eve to deliver her child the…

At his peak, B-movie producer extraordinaire Roger Corman had an uncanny knack for melding cheap thrills with serio-comic social commentary, a gift feverishly on display in Death Race 2000, director Paul Bartel’s (Eating Raoul) action-packed saga about a future-America transcontinental car race in which participants receive points for running down citizens. Giddy, tawdry, and vigorously…

Takeshi Miike takes cinematic homage to its absurd extreme with Sukiyaki Western Django, a tribute to Spaghetti Westerns – and, specifically, Sergio Corbucci’s seminal 1966 Django – that boils the genre down to its base phrases, scenarios and iconography. In this typically gonzo Miike creation, the situation is archetypal (a mysterious cowboy arrives in a…

Despite having one of the decade’s finest horror films (Wolf Creek) on his résumé, Greg Mclean couldn’t nab his sophomore effort Rogue a full theatrical release. Given the assortment of crap made by nobody hacks crowding multiplexes each week, that alone is something of a travesty, though making matters even worse is the fact that…

Boasting a title more amusing than anything contained in its 90 minutes, Hamlet 2 concerns a failed actor-turned-high school drama teacher in Tucson, Arizona who, in order to save the school’s theater program, stages the titular story. The doofus in question is Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan), an untalented moron obsessed with inspirational-classroom movies whose obliviousness…

Endeavoring to be a buddy-action comedy, a good-natured deconstruction of buddy-action comedies, and the ultimate stoner flick, Pineapple Express is likeable but nonetheless more skunkweed than kind bud. Judd Apatow’s latest production closely hews to Superbad’s “bromance” template, charting the pseudo-romantic friendship that develops between pothead process server Dale (Seth Rogen) and his drug dealer…

Charting the deleterious effect of technology on human relations, Joe Swanberg’s LOL follows three twentysomething males whose obsession with being online or on a cell phone proves problematic for their romantic prospects. That devices designed to foster greater (and easier) communication have, in many respects, had the opposite effect is not a particularly novel notion,…

Charles Ferguson’s concise, efficient No End in Sight begins inauspiciously, detailing the build-up to the Iraq War with a swift intro marked by somewhat dubious implications and cause-effects arguments. After this initial stumble, however, his documentary proves a thorough, level-headed examination of the Bush administration’s failure to properly prepare for, and execute, the war itself,…

The title of The X-Files: I Want to Believe is apt, articulating its story’s (and the cult TV show’s) principal theme with a thudding literalism indicative of its graceless, overtly-state-everything script. Ten years after their last big-screen outing, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) live together and have left the FBI, she…

Fathers figure prominently in Hellboy II: The Golden Army – their sins, their legacies, and the responsibility that comes from turning into one. In this superlative sequel from Guillermo Del Toro, a cloud of parental duty hovers over Hellboy (Ron Perlman), who – having lost surrogate dad Trevor “Broom” Bruttenholm (John Hurt) in the 2004…