I don’t know that NORTH COUNTRY can even be said to have its heart in the right place. I’m not even sure that it has a heart. In recounting the events leading up to a sexual harassment class-action suit brought by a suitably plucky female miner in Minnesota, it cheapens the story “inspired” by actual… Read More »
THE WAR WITHIN
THE WAR WITHIN charts a different sort of territory in its examination of the psychology of suicide bombers. Its protagonist, Hassan(co-writer Ayad Akhtar), isn’t a refugee, isn’t psychotic, isn’t an extremist of any kind, and far from living a hopeless existence with no future and a murky past, he’s cosmopolitan, well-educated, and more western than… Read More »
STAY
The failing of most very bad movies is that there was very little in the way of thinking that went into them. That is not the case with STAY. This overbearingly pretentious piffle has been overthought so much in its attempt to be clever and deep that rather than being engaging or mysterious or even… Read More »
SHOPGIRL
In the voice-over narration Steve Martin reads at the beginning of SHOPGIRL, based on his novella and for which he provided the screenplay, he informs the audience that the eponymous wage-earner of the piece, Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes), is special, if only people would realize it. He also informs us that she came to Los… Read More »
SAW II
SAW II suffers the fate of many sequels, it mimics the original without quite catching what made that original worth seeing. In SAW I, it was the impish perversity filmmakers Leigh Whannell and James Wan celebrated while plumbing the psychology of victims who have fallen prey to a serial killer with a singular style. Dubbed… Read More »
PRIME
It is a testament to Meryl Streep’s stellar acting skills that she had kept her role in PRIME from devolving into a shrill caricature of a Jewish mother. And this is especially important given that hers is the only fully realized character to be found in this otherwise dreary excuse for a romantic comedy. The… Read More »
KISS KISS BANG BANG
Films detailing the dark side of Hollywood have been around for a long time and for a long time they’ve suffered from the excesses of hack films that approach the subject with a taste for the lurid and the seamy. Shane Black’s KISS KISS BANG BANG certainly doesn’t skimp on the lurid stuff nor on that… Read More »
CHICKEN LITTLE
CHICKEN LITTLE begins with a narrator struggling to come up with a way to get things started. This, we are told, is not your usual sort of animated kid’s film, and so none of the usual openings, say leafing through a storybook, will do. And the wonderful part of that is that it doesn’t begin… Read More »
JARHEAD
The history of the military film has had several notable eras, from the melancholy of THE BIG PARADE (featuring the divine John Gilbert in arguably his best role) from the post WWI, silent era, to the jingoistic excesses during and just after WWII with such offerings as an iconic John Wayne THE FLYING LEATHERNECKS, followed… Read More »
GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN’
I can see why this seemed like such a good idea. Jim Sheridan, a director who has made brilliant films about the strife and violence in Northern Ireland and has done so without becoming maudlin, put at the helm of a film that deals with the gangsta culture of violence in contemporary New York. The… Read More »
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