Category: Reviews – Blog Only

A petulant assertion of its creator’s messianic greatness, M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water may not be quite as awful as 2004’s The Village, but this mind-bogglingly convoluted batch of children’s fable gobbledygook certainly qualifies as stunning narcissistic self-exposure from a filmmaker blind to his own escalating failings as a storyteller. In place of…

So long as his films were reasonably sharp, Woody Allen’s clockwork efficiency in churning out a movie a year represented an admirable (and largely bygone) dedication to workmanship and the value of inventive minds remaining constantly inventive. As the director’s output has grown progressively lousier, however, such a tight schedule has seemed like a creative…

Philip K. Dick’s 1977 cautionary tale of deleterious drugs and insidious government/corporate power gets a rotoscoping makeover in Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, which employs the filmmaker’s Waking Life visual schema – in which live-action actors and sets are covered by hallucinatory computer-drawn animation – as a means of amplifying its portrait of fluctuating, unstable…

As a bloody nightmare populated only by women and set in a deep, dark, narrow passageway-lined cave, The Descent certainly doesn’t lack for allegorical interpretations. Unfortunately, Neil Marshall’s tale of underground adventuring-gone-awry isn’t sturdy enough to support even superficial readings as a gory tract about feminism, lesbianism, or post-traumatic catharsis, with any analytic promise weakened…

The stop-motion animation of the Quay Brothers – twins Stephen and Timothy, who were born in Pennsylvania but have long resided in London – operates on a nearly subconscious level, their abstract, surrealist imagery hopelessly confounding literal interpretations. Their uniquely fanciful shorts certainly live up to the glowing adjective used in the title of Kino’s…

Essentially a camp-tastic footnote to the late-‘70s, early-’80s slasher flick craze, Happy Birthday to Me at least distinguishes itself from the pack by refusing to conclude with its first climactic twist, instead choosing to pile on a second, even more batshit-insane ending in an apparent effort to make sure viewers finish the film with incredulous…

The affected clipped cadences of Mamet-ese reverberate throughout Edmond, Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of the playwright’s 1982 one-act play about a discontented shlub (William H. Macy’s Edmond) who embarks on a violent nocturnal odyssey through an unidentified urban hellhole. Abandoning the wife (Rebecca Pidgeon) he can no longer stand, Edmond shuffles along from bars to diners…

Mytho-poeticism is the chord most frequently struck by Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, a spiritual successor to Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie (right down to its use of John Williams’ theme) filled with so many grandly iconic images that it’s rather easy to dismiss the film’s not-inconsiderable shortcomings. From its recurring, yet rarely excessive, Christ symbolism…

Less mean-spirited but just as racist and unfunny as Napoleon Dynamite, Jared Hess’ Nacho Libre proves to be a modest step up from the director’s prior cult hit thanks to Jack Black, whose quirky, compassionate humanism gives this culturally insensitive, farcically flat film its empathetic heart. Working from a screenplay co-written with wife Jerusha and…

You’d think the creepy masks worn by Shawn and Marlon Wayans – which look like Michael Myers with blond hair – would be the worst element of White Chicks. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong, since this undercover brothers comedy complements the awfulness of its protagonists’ Caucasian camouflage with putrid bathroom humor, pitiable romance and brainless racial/social…