Category: Reviews – Blog Only

Stephen Chow goes down an E.T. route with CJ7, a cute and cuddly family film that not only fails to generate the exhilarating cartoon zaniness of his heralded Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle but, more importantly, lacks any convincing magic or heart. Living in a cramped little shack with his construction worker father Ti…

From every perspective, Vantage Point is a wholesale disaster. Director Pete Travis and screenwriter Barry Levy’s fractured political thriller was reportedly inspired by Rashomon, which means that the filmmakers don’t understand Akira Kurosawa’s classic, as instead of utilizing their multiple-viewpoint tale to investigate the unknowability of truth, they merely provide different angles on the same…

Paulo Morelli’s City of Men revisits the Rio de Janeiro favelas of Fernando Meirellas’ City of God, and like that supremely over-heralded 2002 film, it utilizes its slum locale not for inquisitive sociological inquiry but blah melodrama and stereotypical gangster histrionics. Morelli ostensibly wants to place greater emphasis on his characters than Meirellas did, meaning…

What’s the point of making a horror film if you can’t even manage a single scare or unsettling moment? That’s the only intriguing topic of conversation prompted by The Messengers, the derivative-at-every-turn English-language debut of The Pang Brothers (Bangkok Dangerous, The Eye). Thanks to older daughter Jess’ (Kristen Stewart) unspecified bad behavior, a father (Dylan…

According to an interview included in the film’s press notes, 79-year-old Jacques Rivette sought a visual style for The Duchess of Langeais (aka Don’t Touch the Axe) that mirrored the prose style of his source material, a novella by Andre Balzac. Not being a specialist on the acclaimed realist author, I can’t assess whether this…

Mario Bava pays respect to his influential horror forefathers by having Boris Karloff act as host for – and star in one segment of – Black Sabbath (aka The Three Faces of Fear), a triptych of terrifying tales that reportedly was the Italian director’s favorite work. It’s certainly his most well known, and with good…

Less a fourth installment in his illustrious zombie series than a parallel-universe reboot, George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead depicts a modern-day outbreak of hungry undead through the prism of film student Jason Creed’s (Joshua Close) video camera. Comparisons to the 9/11-exploiting Cloverfield are inevitable but the more cogent analogy is with Brian DePalma’s…

A crossbreed of Universal’s 1930s scarefests and Hammer Films’ then-contemporary monster mashes, 1960’s Black Sunday (aka The Mask of Satan) introduced the world to Italian maestro Mario Bava and screen siren Barbara Steele, and remains one of the cinema’s preeminent examples of gothic horror. Bava’s first directorial effort after years working as cinematographer to, among…

The idea of having a troupe of performers stage King Arthur-style Renaissance Fair dramas on motorcycles is a lot less cool now than it must have seemed – to writer/director George A. Romero, at least – in 1981. Nonetheless, if one can get past the somewhat silly premise, as well as a lot of filler…

The Stepfather is, in one respect, simply another 1980s horror film, albeit one buoyed by a strong lead performance by Terry O’Quinn as a stepdad who likes to murder his adopted family once they cease living up to his expectations. And yet Joseph Ruben’s surprisingly resonant and durable tale also cannily reflects, in a larger…