Category: Reviews – Blog Only

Blood Diamond director Ed Zwick may as well have titled his newest action-adventure The Constant Gardener II: Diamonds Are Forever, as it peddles the same distasteful, condescending attitudes toward Africa as did Fernando Meirelles’ 2005 fiasco. Another tale of Africa’s systematic exploitation by whites and eventual liberation from such tyranny thanks to a morally ambiguous…

Possessing neither Hero’s political charge nor House of Flying Daggers’ swoon-worthy romantic roundelays, Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower feels a tad slight, its stab at Shakespearean court intrigue and tragedy primarily kept buoyant by hyper-ostentatious visual pageantry and the delicious hysteria of Gong Li. In a fictional kingdom in 10th-century China during the…

Naomi Watts doesn’t invoke Greta Garbo in director John Curran’s The Painted Veil, an adaptation of the 1925 W. Somerset Maugham novel that previously made it to the screen in 1934 as a glamorous Garbo vehicle (and again in 1957 under the title The Seventh Sin). That’s probably a good thing. Curran’s version remains relatively…

Karen Moncrieff’s The Dead Girl offers up a series of stories about strangers whose lives are touched by the death of a young blonde named Krista (Brittany Murphy), from the reclusive mama’s-girl (Toni Collette) who finds the corpse out in the desert, to the twentysomething (Rose Byrne) who desperately longs for closure regarding her missing…

RFK is envisioned as a rock-star Jesus sent from on-high to save America from its social and Vietnam hell in Bobby, a multi-character period piece set in the Ambassador Hotel the night of His assassination that mainly reveals writer/director Emilio Estevez’s fondness for PT Anderson and Martin Scorsese’s oeuvres. Overstuffed with tracking shots unimaginatively modeled…

“Death to organization” cries Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in The Science of Sleep, and while it would be going too far to say that Michel Gondry’s whimsical film wholeheartedly echoes its character’s celebration of creative chaos, it definitely makes few concessions to logic and tidiness. Boasting a collage aesthetic whereby dream sequences, stop-motion animation, paper-maché constructions,…

Thanks to its metaphysical, life-as-art narrative conceit, Marc Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction has been dubbed, in some disparaging circles, Charlie Kaufman Lite. One might add that it’s also Drama Lite, Comedy Lite, and Will Ferrell Lite, the entire production such a featherweight nothing that it engenders only indifference. In screenwriter Zach Helm’s oh-so-cute tale, IRS…

Familiarity often breeds not only contempt but also boredom. That’s certainly the case with regards to the work of Christopher Guest, who continues to mine the multi-character mockumentary for ever-diminishing returns. True, the director’s latest, For Your Consideration – which takes aim at the movie biz and the infotainment culture that surrounds it – doesn’t…

Now out on DVD, it’s easy to see why Takashi Miike’s Masters of Horror episode Imprint was never aired – it’s about as brutally graphic as anything I’ve ever seen produced for television. The story of a forlorn American (creepy Bill Drago) who, in searching for the beloved prostitute he dreams of spiriting away to…

Riveting even when it borders on the hagiographic, Jeff Feuerzig’s The Devil and Daniel Johnston details the troubled life of the titular singer-songwriter, a West Virginia native born into a devout Christian family whose idiosyncratic and profuse artistic gifts (which also included drawing, painting and amateur moviemaking) were inextricably colored by mental illness. Feuerzig’s documentary…