Category: Reviews – Blog Only

Belgian filmmaker Fabrice Du Welz proves he’s both a devoted student of the horror genre and uninterested in bringing anything new to it with Calvaire (“The Ordeal”), the latest torture-obsessed film to thrust a middle-class innocent into a backwoods heart-of-darkness. As with Alejandro Aja’s High Tension, Welz’s directorial debut is an aesthetically polished but soulless…

Dismissed and forgotten almost immediately upon its theatrical release, Eaten Alive predictably suffered from being Tobe Hooper’s follow-up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Thirty years later, however, that fate seems the product not just of unfair expectations but also of an audience unwillingness to accept its aggressively abstract argument in favor of nihilism. “My name…

Fernando Eimbcke’s Duck Season is one of the year’s great surprises – a nuanced, authentic portrait of adolescent ennui and maturation that treats pre-teen emotions with a Jim Jarmusch-ian brand of detached sympathy and bemusement. Set entirely on a Sunday and largely inside a high-rise Mexico tenement apartment, Eimbcke’s directorial debut concerns fourteen-year-old best friends…

Oh, how deliciously campy Notes on a Scandal might have been had director Richard Eyre taken a more deliriously hysterical approach to his material. Instead, alas, his film (based on Zoe Heller’s novel) tackles its tale of women-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown with only one eye toward frenzied feverishness, burrowing inside the crazed psyche of a schoolteacher named Barbara…

Venus won’t elicit many swoons, but if Roger Michell’s film never quite musters the energy to be more than a placid hybrid of Nobody’s Fool and Lolita, it nonetheless provides a satisfactory showcase for Peter O’Toole. In the familiar role of a once-famous actor prone to drink, the aged O’Toole proves he still knows how…

Light silliness comfortably coexists with neorealist socio-economic critiques in Mafioso, a largely unseen (at least stateside) 1962 comic gem from Alberto Lattuada, a filmmaker whose international reputation has largely been predicated on his having co-directed Fellini’s Variety Lights. With this story of Northern Italian auto factory foreman Antonio Badalamenti’s (Alberto Sordi) vacation to his Southern…

With Flushed Away, the understated drollness that defines Aardman Studios’ finest efforts (Chicken Run, Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit) takes a back seat to the scatological hyperactivity that typifies the work of co-producer DreamWorks Animation. That the two outfits are strange bedfellows has been apparent since the outset of their union,…

Bill Condon may be a more capable filmmaker than Rob Marshall, but his Dreamgirls lacks the one quality that Marshall’s sub-par Best Picture winner Chicago had going for it – an invigorating, irresistible, knockout score. It’s a shortcoming attributable to the 1981 Broadway source material, and one glaringly amplified by the fact that Condon’s adaptation…

If Casino Royale is a “reinvention” of the long-decaying 007 franchise, it’s not simply because it jettisons the high-tech gadgets, tongue-in-cheek puns, and cartoonish villains that have long defined the series, but rather because it’s the first Bond film to actually prize three-dimensional characters and moral dilemmas over action-film flash. Of course, there’s plenty of…

Mel Gibson trades The Passion of the Christ’s hooked noses for noses decorated by hooks (and a character named “Curl Nose”) with Apocalypto, though don’t let that fool you into thinking that the controversial director has given up on religious mythmaking. An epic about the fall of the Mayan empire populated predominately by unprofessional actors…