Category: Reviews – Blog Only

A groovy, socially conscious triumph, the Oscar-winning Happy Feet stands at the very top of the 2006 animated kid’s film class. It’s no surprise to discover that George Miller – the man behind Babe and its stellar sequel – is capable of crafting children’s entertainment that’s at once playful, intelligent and modestly profound, but his…

Paul Verhoeven tries to go respectable with the WWII drama Black Book, and the question that persists is: Who wants a respectable Paul Verhoeven? Naysayers be damned, the Dutch firebrand’s finest work remains his disreputable American films – Robocop, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, and the undervalued (and, by some revisionists, now slightly overvalued) Showgirls –…

Shocker may not be scary, but it is educational. For instance, did you know that fathers and sons regularly share an impenetrable psychic bond that manifests itself in dreams? And believe it or not, when spirits possess the bodies of living others, the deceased’s original physical disabilities (like a limp) carry over to their new…

Racist, xenophobic, homophobic and sexist – Crank has some intolerance for everyone. Hurtling forward like a nihilistic PCP addict on a bender, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s action film about a hitman poisoned with a drug that’ll cause him to die if his heart rate drops too low – in other words, it’s Cardiac Speed…

For all its sublime charms, Babe’s most endearing attribute may be its universality, which extends from its episodic tale’s lessons about tolerance to its Hoggett farm setting, a storybook locale that feels at once Midwestern American, rural English, and sleepy countryside Australian. Based on Dick King-Smith’s children’s book “The Sheep-Dog,” Chris Noonan’s film (co-written with…

No wonder screenwriter Shane Black’s career took a nosedive shortly after The Last Boy Scout – there was nowhere left to go but down after creating the apotheosis of the modern interracial-buddy action film genre he helped popularize with 1987’s Lethal Weapon. Jammed full of so many ludicrously cartoonish set pieces and hip one-liners that…

Neither the train wreck Twentieth-Century Fox believed it to be when the studio unceremoniously dumped it onto DVD after a miniscule theatrical release, nor the disrespected and misunderstood masterpiece many had hoped, Mike Judge’s Idiocracy instead turns out to be simply an intermittently amusing – and sometimes lazy – satire that plays like a so-so…

Set in seedy, pre-Disneyfication early-‘80s Manhattan, Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case is the kind of film a young Martin Scorsese or Abel Ferrara might have made had they been interested in tales about murderous one-foot-tall monsters with a thing for hookers’ panties. Fresh-faced Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck) moves from upstate New York to a squalid…

Broderick Crawford nabbed an Oscar for his portrayal of Huey Long-ish politico Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, and while his full-bodied performance still holds up nearly six decades later, the rest of Robert Rossen’s Best Picture winner (based on Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel) has lost a good deal of its fierce…

The Devil Wears Prada may name-check trendy Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo, but its tale of publishing industry bitchery and one naif’s dawning realization that personal integrity is more important than professional success is fashioned on countless, better corporate ladder-related women’s pictures. Tailored to appeal to those who enjoy gawking at designer clothes and accessories…