One comes away from HOLMES AND WATSON bemused. The stunning lack of entertainment value in a film starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly is almost a body blow, such is its unremitting ineptitude. Using as its premise the same spoofery done much better by the Wayans Brothers in their series of SCARY MOVIE riffs,… Read More »
THE LITTLE HOURS
Jeff Baena has taken as his inspiration Bocaccio’s Decameron for his sly gem of a film about female frustration and empowerment, THE LITTLE HOURS. That 14th-century book is full of bawdy tales of people from all stratas of society behaving badly, and so they do in this film set very specifically in 1347. Like the… Read More »
PROMOTION, THE
THE PROMOTION bills itself as a comedy, and elements of it do fall into that category, but at its core, this is an incisive and often merciless deconstruction of the American Dream. What writer/director Steve Conrad is getting at here, amid the absurdity rife in the general human condition, is the dark side of that… Read More »
STEP BROTHERS
Will Ferrell makes two kinds of silly comedies. There are the silly ones that are very funny, BLADES OF GLORY comes to mind, and then there are the silly ones that are wretched. KICKING AND SCREAMING comes to mind. STEP BROTHERS falls, alas, into the latter category. It is a one-joke film dreamed up by… Read More »
9
There will not be a more audacious, more theologically complex film this or any other year than 9. Melding spirituality with science, this animated post-apocalyptic fantasy suffuses the two seemingly opposite disciplines into a rich synthesis that favors the asking of a question over whether or not there is an answer that the asker is… Read More »
CEDAR RAPIDS
CEDAR RAPIDS is a sweet tale with of innocence lost and happiness found. In the grand tradition of MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON and MR DEEDS GOES TO TOWN, Mr Lippe (Ed Helms) goes to the titular city for an insurance convention and discovers the real world in the big city, and the further, more… Read More »
CHICAGO
Just when you thought we’d lost the knack for producing a live-action musical film here in the States, along comes CHICAGO. Set in 1920s in that toddling town, this hard-as-nails tale of sex, politics, fame, and most of all jazz, is a big, splashy, brassy confection wrapped up in a bow with enough bugle beads… Read More »
THE HOURS
THE HOURS begins with a suicide, a famous one at that. Virginia Woolf with a fierce deliberateness puts a heavy stone in her pocket and walks into a river. We see her head duck silently into the water and then her body floating delicately away, pulled by the current with a gentle urgency. By the… Read More »
CRIMINAL
Greed makes the world go around, at least it does in the seedy world of CRIMINAL. This re-make of the Argentinian film, NINE QUEENS, has been re-imagined by writer/director Gregory Jacobs as a quirky daylight noir with a plot that spins on a dime as its twists and turns on its way to proving that it’s… Read More »
DARK WATER
Anyone who has had to deal with the terrors of a leaky roof or faulty plumbing will find much to raise goosebumps, to cause the averting of the eyes, and, perhaps, to inspire one or two flashbacks to those unfortunate interludes while viewing DARK WATER. And if this were the intent of the makers of… Read More »