Category: Reviews – Blog Only

King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is yet another in a recent string of quirky subculture documentaries, yet part of what distinguishes this non-fiction film from its brethren is a story brimming with I-can’t-believe-they’re-real people straight out of a cheesy Hollywood underdog story. Seth Gordon’s doc charts the battle for Donkey Kong’s all-time high…

In both conception and execution, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is the perfect marriage of artist and material. Burton’s cinematic adaptation of Steven Sondheim’s famously gruesome musical is coated in ghostly pale shades punctuated by flashes of rotting yellow-green, a Sleepy Hollow-ish pallor complemented by imaginatively morose set and costume…

Jodie Foster takes back the night as a proto-feminist Batman in The Brave One, a revenge fantasy by Neil Jordan in which Foster’s Erica Bain goes all vigilante on Manhattan’s male cretins after a trio of street thugs beat her senseless and murder her fiancé (Naveen Andrews) during a nighttime stroll through Central Park. This…

Useless finds Jia Zhangke operating in something of a hybrid style, partaking in both non-fiction and fictional filmic modes for his three-part examination of China’s garment industry. It’s a line of attack at once entrancing and frustrating, as Jia’s humanistic opening documentary segment and touching semi-dramatic third portion bookend a middle verité section that never…

Juno MacGuff, the precocious protagonist of Jason Reitman’s Juno, may be sixteen, but she walks, talks and carries herself like a 30-year-old. Which she really is, since the spunky, self-confident teen at the center of this year’s Little Indie That Could (Make One Scream) doesn’t resemble a modern adolescent but, rather, 29-year-old stripper-turned-screenwriter Diablo Cody’s…

Adam Shankman’s Hairspray is efficiently staged and spiritually faithful to both the Broadway musical upon which it’s based, as well as John Waters’ 1988 film. Yet though colorful, cheery and energetic, there’s something missing from this song-and-dance routine, and it’s the wacky, transgressive, indie-posing-as-mainstream-movie vibe of Waters’ original. Presumably like the stage show, this star-studded…

P2 has quite a bit going for it, which makes its eventual reliance on inane genre gimmicks that much more disappointing. The premise of Franck Khalfoun’s thriller is promisingly lean and taut: working late on Christmas Eve, businesswoman Angela (Rachel Nichols) gets stranded in her Manhattan office complex’s underground garage and then gets stalked by…

Danish director Susanne Bier’s fondness for melodrama continues with Things We Lost in the Fire, a reasonably sturdy saga of loss, grieving and addiction buoyed by a fierce, formidable performance from Benicio Del Toro. Bier’s English-language debut concerns the aftershocks of husband and father Steven’s (David Duchovny) sudden murder, which thoroughly reconfigures the lives of…

Adam Sandler, Kevin James, and the art of mainstream cinematic comedy all realize new lows with I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, one of the year’s most stunningly feeble offerings. Directed with typical clumsiness by Dennis Dugan, Sandler’s latest – co-written by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor – is a thoroughly unfunny and generally…

Gus Van Sant continues the formal experimentation of his prior “Death Trilogy” (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days) with Paranoid Park, creating an entrancing, subjective portrait of a high school teen (Gabe Nevins’ Alex) who recounts, via writing in his journal, the events that led him to commit a grave crime. With its rewinding and fast-forwarding, its…