Category: Reviews – Blog Only

Insanity reigns supreme in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, a tale whose off-the-charts screwiness obscures virtually all shortcomings. Based on Patrick Süskind’s supposedly unfilmable novel, Tom Tykwer’s film concerns Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), a boy in 18th-century Paris who’s born (from the womb of a miscarriage-prone mother) underneath a filthy market stand, left to…

The Kite Runner is the type of film one would expect from Marc Forster – banal, trite and apt to ramrod simplistic symbolism down viewers’ throats. Having never read Khaled Hosseini’s acclaimed bestseller, I can’t speak to the faithfulness of Forster’s adaptation, but what he puts on screen is corny and/or offensive pap of the…

In Next, Nicolas Cage’s Cris boasts Tom Hanks’ haircut from The Da Vinci Code. He also can see two minutes into the future, but it’s debatable whether Cris’ supernatural ability is any more interesting than his strange coiffure, given the general silliness of this adventure. The special power Cris possesses makes him desirable to FBI…

James Gray is an old-school classicist whose two films – Little Odessa and The Yards – were archetypal crime dramas set in the director’s beloved New York City. We Own the Night is cut from the same cloth, as it once again finds Gray breathing gritty, electric life into a conventional tale, this time about…

Reeling from a break-up with girlfriend Desiree (Leslie Bibb), bereft Zia (Patrick Fugit) does himself in at the outset of Wristcutters: A Love Story. Rather than eternal peace, however, suicide merely lands the twenty-something in an afterlife that resembles a more mundane, dreary version of our own world. Based on Etgar Keret’s short story, Goran…

Resident Evil: Extinction, the third installment in the based-on-a-videogame franchise, is also its Back to the Future III, a Western-tinged adventure whose innovations are so scant that the only things keeping the enterprise afloat are clumsy references to its predecessors. Milla Jovovich returns again, flipping and karate-kicking T-virus-infected dogs, which – like the introductory sight…

The Palm d’Or-winning toast of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is the latest Romanian import (after The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 12:08 East to Bucharest) to arrive stateside with an established critical-darling rep. And Cristian Mungiu’s film doesn’t disappoint, charting with blunt realism and intense humanism the…

As with last year’s Venus, Starting Out in the Evening stars a venerable actor in a May-December romance, though its concerns are less the nature of sexual hunger than the possibility of reinvention and the importance of seizing the moment. New York novelist Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella), his four novels long since out of print,…

Part heist-gone-awry crime pic, part family drama, Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead finds the 83-year-old director once again in fine form after 2005’s dreadful Find Me Guilty. Comfortably ensconced in its maker’s beloved New York milieu, the film charts the build-up to, and fallout from, the robbery of a Westchester mom-and-pop jewelry…

The latest piece of preening liberal-guilt cinema, Gavin Hood’s Rendition is laughably melodramatic and agonizingly inert, more interested in its pretzel-y narrative structure than issues of torture, justice and “extraordinary rendition,” the policy in which terror suspects are transferred and indefinitely imprisoned in foreign countries. On his way home from an unspecified business meeting in…