There are two stories duking in out in TAKERS. One is a glitzy caper flick with a clever leader of a group of glamorous thieves with hearts of gold (mostly). The other is a gritty L.A. cop drama with a dedicated detective, the kind beset with the usual assortment of personal problems, trying the crack… Read More »
HEREAFTER
Though the main characters of Clint Eastwoods HEREAFTER have all been profoundly affected by their brushes with the afterlife, the film is about anything but death. Rather, it is how each of them copes here after the experiences that have altered their lives irrevocably. Screenwriter Peter Morgan skillfully weaves together three stories that move inevitably… Read More »
THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU
The particular brand of unhinged paranoia of which Phillip K. Dick was a master, and then some, gets a respectful treatment in THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU, based on one of Dick’s short stories. It takes the warm and fuzzy notion that someone or something is keeping the universe creaking along according to a plan, as opposed… Read More »
CONTAGION
Steven Soderbergh begins CONTAGION with a black screen, the sound of a cough, and, when the picture comes up on screen, the caption Day 2 in appropriately lurid red letters. The cough belongs to Gwyneth Paltrow, one of the legion of stars that shuffle through this sprawling tale of social devolution, and in a nicely… Read More »
ELYSIUM
Neill Blomkamp, he of DISTRICT 9 fame, should not be expected to make a straight-up thriller without also making it a damning critique of societys ills. Nor would we want him to. His is an eye that can pick out the details that illuminate the whole without going all dialectic on us. Instead, he uses… Read More »
THE MONUMENTS MEN
Its easy to be seduced by THE MONUMENT MENs swagger. Directed and co-written by co-star George Clooney, it is as much a tribute to the golden age of Hollywood filmmaking as it is to the brave men who thought that art and culture was worth defending with their lives. It is manipulative, it is at… Read More »
BROTHERS GRIMM, THE
The original stories of THE BROTHERS GRIMM were the folk tales that the fraternal pair, linguists by trade (Grimm’s Law of Phonetic Transformation has always made me weak in the knees), collected from the peasants in the countryside of the German-speaking world. They were dark, they were dangerous, and they were unforgettable. Full of archetypes… Read More »
SYRIANA
At two different points during SYRIANA, two different men in traditional Arab robes sits on a floor surrounded by two different sets of rapt listeners sitting in a circle. Each explains with perfect conviction how to make the world a better place. One is an eloquent imam in a poverty-stricken madrassa, advocating a return to… Read More »
THE DEPARTED
With THE DEPARTED, Martin Scorsese has taken a good film, the Hong Kong minor classic INFERNAL AFFAIRS, and remade it into a movie that is as bloated as it is bland. Gone is the dramatic tension of a slick action flick, gone is the suspenseful psychological subtext that pondered the nature of identity, subsumed into… Read More »
THE GOOD SHEPHERD – DVD
Doing the wrong things for the right, even honorable, reasons is the heart of the conflict in THE GOOD SHEPHERD, director Rober De Niro’s history of the CIA as told through the story of one of its founders. The tale is fictional, but the events, from the fall of the Third Reich to the Kennedy-era… Read More »