Category: Reviews – Blog Only

Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! regurgitates the hackneyed ‘50s romantic comedy formula in which a pretty, naive waif (Kate Bosworth’s country bumpkin Rosalee) meets and wins her dream guy (Josh Duhamel’s movie star Tad Hamilton), only to realize that her one true love has been right beside her all along (Topher Grace’s nerdy Piggly…

An atmosphere of desperate neediness permeates Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa, the story of a recently paroled criminal underling named George (Bob Hoskins) and the sleek, imposing black prostitute named Simone (Cathy Tyson) he’s ordered to chauffeur to and from high-class establishments. Jordan shoots nocturnal London in scraggly, hard-edged shadows, transforming the city into an empty,…

Infernal Affairs’ cinematic family tree isn’t hard to trace – start with American crime movies from the ‘40s to the ‘70s, then look to John Woo and the Hong Kong cop-yakuza flicks of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and finally to Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann, and the crime epics of the past decade –…

Everything and everyone has gone to seed in A Love Song for Bobby Long, Shainee Gabel’s drama about betrayal, redemption, and the ghosts that continue to haunt a trio of down-on-their-luck Southerners. After learning of her estranged mother’s death, Pursy Will (Scarlett Johansson) returns to Louisiana to take up residence in the house she’s inherited…

Clint Eastwood’s defining commentary on – and deconstruction of – the gunslinger persona that made him an icon, Unforgiven remains, a decade after it nabbed 1992’s Academy Award for Best Picture, the actor/director’s crowning Western achievement. The solemn tale of retired outlaw William Munny (Eastwood) and his final murderous act against a duo of cowboys…

Few films are as consistently pathetic as My Boss’s Daughter, an Ashton Kutcher-Tara Reid vehicle (that says it all, doesn’t it?) directed by David Zucker (Airplane!, The Naked Gun). Kutcher stars as Tom Stansfield, a goody-two-shoes roped into house-sitting for his boss (Terrance Stamp) by the domineering old man’s blandly sexy daughter (Reid). Insanity of…

(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn) With each successive film, director Wes Anderson pushes his idiosyncratic, painstakingly meticulous vision to the breaking point of preciousness, and Anderson’s latest gem, the imaginatively titled The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, comes closest to crossing that boundary between endearingly eccentric and suffocatingly studied. In a tour-de-force performance of…

A sentimental tale told unsentimentally, Clint Eastwood’s stunning Million Dollar Baby sounds like every second-rate boxing movie made during the ‘50s and ‘60s – a lower-class fighter with championship dreams is driven to greatness by a grizzled trainer with a heart of gold – but throws in the seemingly hokey twist that the pugilist is…

A twisted, frequently trying examination of sex, violence and the banal desolation of the expansive American West, Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms traverses ground already covered by his superior The Life of Jesus and Humanite. American photographer David (David Wissak) and his Russian, French-speaking girlfriend Katia (Katia Golubeva) take to the Joshua Tree National Park to…

The Life of Jesus, Bruno Dumont’s 1997 debut, paints a disturbingly bleak portrait of alienation through the story of Freddie (David Douche), an epileptic skinhead who spends his listless days driving his motorcycle around his rural town, dispassionately screwing his grocery store clerk girlfriend Marie (Marjorie Cottreel), and taking out his latent hostility toward life…