Category: Reviews – Blog Only

Demanding intense submission, Philip Gröning’s Into Great Silence charts the daily rituals and lives of Carthusian monks at France’s mountainside Grande Chartreuse monastery with a rigorous patience, tranquility and – per its title – silence that’s something to behold. Gröning’s film is non-fictional, but it’s less a documentary in any traditional sense than simply a…

Homer Simpson’s love affair with an oinker he dubs, during one particularly absurd prank, “Spider-Pig,” is the type of purely dumb-bizarre-ridiculous-hilarious moment that has helped make The Simpsons a cultural treasure. Woe, then, that there aren’t more such moments sprinkled throughout The Simpsons Movie, the iconic clan’s first trip to the big-screen after 18 revolutionary…

Jake Lloyd may have suffered vitriolic slings and arrows for his stilted performance as young Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace, but his successor in the role, Hayden Christensen, wasn’t any less nondescript a screen presence. Further confirmation of that assessment arrives in the form of Awake, in which Christensen sleepwalks through a ludicrous thriller…

Marion Cotillard is the only reason to sit through La Vie En Rose, a biopic that compounds its basic tediousness by fracturing its narrative in a vain effort to mask a stale rise-and-fall arc. The subject of Olivier Dahan’s film is legendary singer Edith Piaf, the “Little Sparrow,” who was born into poverty but nonetheless…

Ingeniously orchestrated action is Exiled’s prime pleasure, though Johnny To (Election, Triad Election) also surrounds his gleefully extravagant, expertly choreographed gunfights with beguiling, contemplative drama. Wo (Nick Cheung) is marked for death by the former employer, Boss Fay (Simon Yam), whom he tried to assassinate. His demise, however, is delayed when the childhood friends/gangster comrades…

There isn’t a single truly likeable character in Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, and there are quite a few that are downright intolerable. It’s an issue that Baumbach, in his follow-up to 2005’s The Squid and the Whale, never completely finds a way to overcome, as the wholesale unpleasantness of most every self-absorbed East…

With Exterminating Angels, writer/director Jean-Claude Brisseau uses an incident from his life – a case in which he was accused of sexually assaulting several young actresses by asking them to pleasure themselves during auditions for 2002’s Secret Things – and turns it into a complex, confessional examination of his twisted, thorny and ultimately ambiguous feelings…

The Bourne Ultimatum recalls The Manchurian Candidate, though it’s the nation’s critics who seem to have been brainwashed into almost unanimously praising this efficient and occasionally exciting, yet too often banal and chilly, threequel. Following up last year’s United 93, director Paul Greengrass (who also directed 2004’s slightly superior The Bourne Supremacy) once again goes…

Mike Nichols’ stagy direction and Aaron Sorkin’s talkative writing join forces for stilted War on Terror-related dramedy with Charlie Wilson’s War, a based-on-true-life tale about the East Texas senator, Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks), who almost single-handedly spearheaded American funding of Afghan rebels in their 1980s conflict against the invading Soviets. Nichols’ primary focus is comedy,…

Stately and majestic but in a decidedly lackluster way, Joe Wright’s Atonement is a lushly shot, proficiently performed, and largely stultifying period piece that invites only mild, detached admiration. Based on Ian McEwan’s acclaimed novel (which I have not read), Wright’s film concerns the 1935 affair between wealthy Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley) and the son…