THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM isn’t so much a thriller as a race, a breakneck one, with no quarter given for anyone wanting to catch his or her breath, much less anyone keeping track of the internal logic at work here. Secret meetings in Turin, heartfelt confessions in Paris, sudden changes of allegiance in Madrid, and a… Read More »
THE NANNY DIARIES
THE NANNY DIARIES rises above its whiffenpoof premise of a middle-class anthropologist charting the strange and treacherous milieu of an unfamiliar culture and comes up with something that is almost but not quite substantial. The anthropologist in question is the eponymous nanny, and the culture is the Upper East Side New York society in which… Read More »
THE LAST LEGION
THE LAST LEGION tries to ride the coat tails of the Arthurian romances with a new take on who Arthur was, where his sword Excalibur came from, and how the Roman empire involved itself in mixing it all up into a proto-Camelot. And it does all of this without cracking an R rating. That, in… Read More »
THE KINGDOM
THE KINGDOM wants to be SYRIANA by way of BLACK HAWK DOWN, but by earnestly following those templates, it renders itself an unsatisfying pastiche that has neither conviction nor surprise, much less the pervasive sense of uncertainty for which it so desperately strives. Instead, it comes across as schmaltzy, predictable, and insidiously imperialistic. It’s the… Read More »
THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. — THE COMPLETE SERIES
With the success of the Bond films, it was just a matter of time before television tried to cash in on the spy craze, and as we learn in one of the many featurettes that distinguishes the DVD release of the THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., THE COMPLETE SERIES, Ian Fleming was involved in both. It… Read More »
RENDITION
RENDITION takes a subject worth a stark examination and turns it into a long, rambling, and unexpectedly dull tale unredeemed by its good intentions, its twist at the end or Meryl Streep as the prissy and persnickety CIA rendition-meister. It takes a great deal of effort to make that combination fail and this earnest effort… Read More »
HITMAN
Sometimes all it takes is one great image. From there the fertile imaginings of a visionary filmmaker can build a story that is a compelling, even wondrous, cinematic experience. Alas, that is not the case with HITMAN. The image is of a striking bald guy (Timothy Olyphant) in a well-tailored black suit striding about with… Read More »
REVOLVER
Caution! Guy Ritchie has entered his Bergman phase. Ingmar Bergman. Having stylishly plumbed the depths of the action genre with his dazzling visual style and staccato pacing as crisp as the wrong end of a machine gun, he has decided to attempt something more. And for this he should be lauded. Alas, with REVOLVER he… Read More »
ATONEMENT
ATONEMENT is as close to perfection as mere mortals can aspire to. This translation to the screen of the Booker Prize-winning novel by Ian McEwan flawlessly captures the complex and powerful play of emotions that propel the story while annotating it with a visual component that amplifies rather than distracts. The plot hinges on what… Read More »
NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS
NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS is a cutesy and inane follow-up to the only slightly less cutesy and inane NATIONAL TREASURE. The plot feels like it was cobbled together from the sort of random ideas tossed out during the wee hours of the morning during an all-night brainstorming session, ideas that seem like genius when… Read More »