For a film that is based on a super hero’s ability to make anything he thinks of materialize in green glowing splendor, THE GREEN LANTERN is a film that is unusually flat in execution and uninspired in conception. It’s also painfully disjointed, as though there were a much longer, even more disappointing flick from which… Read More »
SAFE HOUSE
SAFE HOUSE is a curiously subdued film relying more on the charisma of its leading men, Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds, and on psychology rather than bombast for its suspense. The result is a film that occasionally becomes too languid for its own good, but is generally entertaining enough with an earnest style of gravitas… Read More »
THE CROODS
On one level, THE CROODS is a funny, heartwarming, and imaginative look at life in the original dark ages, those of prehistoric humankind crouching in their caves surviving, barely, in a state of perpetual fear of the dark. And it would be perfectly fine to enjoy this animated film from Dreamworks in just that way.… Read More »
R.I.P.D
Its not enough that R.I.P.D. is bad, its also derivatively bad while also being mind-numbingly boring. Whatever wit or smarts or silliness the Dark Horse graphic novel of the same name by Peter Lenkov possesses, it is not found in this screen adaptation that is neither fun nor funny. In a messy pastiche of GHOSTBUSTERS,… Read More »
BLADE TRINITY
There is so very much that is so very irksome about BLADE TRINITY, the third installment in the Blade series and the one with the least reason to exist, that one scarcely knows where to begin. One is tempted to sum it all up with a short sentence warning potential audiences to stay away, but… Read More »
THE AMITYVILLE HORROR
You’d think that in 86 minutes of screen time that the makers of THE AMITYVILLE HORROR’s 2005 incarnation could come up with at least one genuinely scary moment. Even if it’s just by accident aided and abetted by the law of averages. Alas, this dreary Z-grade schlock-fest is capable of producing only titters and yawns… Read More »
SMOKIN’ ACES
Somewhere in Joe Carnahan’s SMOKIN’ ACES there is a really good film trying desperately to get out. Several actually. And therein lays the problem. Dashing blithely as he does through several different genres Carnahan shows moxie and a genuine flair for each one: black comedy, gut-wrenching drama, farcical silliness, and a deeply affecting morality tale. It’s… Read More »
CHAOS THEORY
CHAOS THEORY is a torpid piece of filmmaking that is at once a fluffy drama and a dreary comedy. Like its hero, Frank (Ryan Reynolds), it’s decided never to make a definite decision and the shambles that results is as predictable as the story of which it is part. The story is told in flashback,… Read More »
BURIED
It would be easy, and a huge mistake, to dismiss BURIED as a stunt film. Sure, Ryan Reynolds spends the entire 94 minutes of the running time buried underground in a box, but such is the imaginative take on the subject by screenwriter Chris Sparling and director Roderigo Cortes, that the struggle of one confined… Read More »
BURIED
It would be easy, and a huge mistake, to dismiss BURIED as a stunt film. Sure, Ryan Reynolds spends the entire 94 minutes of the running time buried underground in a box, but such is the imaginative take on the subject by screenwriter Chris Sparling and director Roderigo Cortes, that the struggle of one confined… Read More »