Category: Reviews – Blog Only

Red Riding Hood is nothing like Twilight – except, of course, for the fact that it’s directed by Catherine Hardwicke, tells a tween-targeted supernatural story of a young featureless beauty (Amanda Seyfried’s Valerie) caught in a love triangle with two bland boys (one of whom may be a werewolf who shares a special bond with…

A haunting work of loneliness, alienation, and the universal desire for companionship and meaning that’s wrapped in a guise of understated ‘80s nostalgia and head-spinning science fiction mythology, Donnie Darko defines itself through sustained mood, otherworldly intrigue and deep, abiding humanism. In a quiet suburb in October 1988, troubled teen Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) attends therapy…

Despite their gross-out reputation, Bobby and Peter Farrelly are conservative romantics at heart, a fact once again borne out by Hall Pass, the story of two horndog husbands who are given a week off from marriage by their frustrated wives. This deal strikes good-natured Rick (Owen Wilson) and slightly sleazier Fred (Jason Sudeikis) as a…

In Two-Lane Blacktop’s rural American landscapes, Monte Hellman captures an aura of existential despondence that’s married to a far less evocative (and durable) strain of counterculture romantic doom. Hellman’s cult classic road movie follows a vacant driver (James Taylor) and his equally blank passenger-seat sidekick (Dennis Wilson) as they meander about the country, looking to…

Greg Araki’s Kaboom melds sexual discovery-through-promiscuity with apocalyptic shenanigans and a pro-pansexuality brio that’s overly pleased with itself. Set at an unnamed college and in a variety of locales (dorm room, cafeteria, campus green, apartments) that deliberately look like stylized theatrical sets, the pioneering New Queer Cinema director’s genre-mash-up tale boasts a distinctly ‘90s patina,…

Utilizing a controlled aesthetic schema far more reminiscent of his subsequent Bronson and Valhalla Rising then the high-wire handheld style of his Pusher trilogy, Nicolas Wending Refn makes an unnerving if uneven transition to American shores with his generically titled U.S. debut Fear X. Refn’s grip on his deliberately paced, hallucinatory material – which was…

The whole is far less than the sum of its parts in Drive Angry, Patrick Lussier’s belligerent attempt at a disreputable B-movie. With tawdry violence as its primary goal, Lussier’s film goes overboard with sleazy cheese, from crazed carnage and gratuitous T&A – both of which peak during a sequence in which Nic Cage guns…

Capping his Pusher trilogy with its most gripping and incisive installment, Nicolas Winding Refn doesn’t provide closure to his saga with I’m the Angel of Death; rather, he expands its overarching vision of underworld nastiness, the universal yearning for escape, and the cruel hand of fate. Refn’s multi-character tale here turns its attention to Bosnian…

Nicolas Winding Refn’s handheld camerawork has lost none of its anxious bite in the years since 1996’s Pusher, as With Blood on My Hands proves a bleaker, more assured follow-up that switches its focus from Frank to his dim-witted pal Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen). Having apparently survived Frank’s beating, Tonny is released from prison and goes…

Pusher may share superficial similarities with the work of ‘90s crime-film godfather Quentin Tarantino, but Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s electrifying debut soon morphs into something far more opaque and unsettling than a mere genre retread. In a Copenhagen brimming with scumbags and whores, mid-level drug dealer Frank (Kim Bodnia) and his crony Tonny (Mads…