After seeing HIGH TENSION, I can only think that the French have not had the exposure to Hollywood slasher films that we here in the United States have enjoyed. Why else would writers Gregory Levasseur and Alexandre Aja, who also directed, subject their audience to every one of the genres clichés from PSYCHO to Freddie?… 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 »
RED EYE
Most horror films are dedicated to the proposition that females are prey and little else.
THE CAVE
There are so many ways for a film to join the ranks of bad cinema. THE CAVE is daring in doing so in that it isn’t just tedious, it isn’t just silly, no, it goes the distance until it actually becomes a personal affront to the sensibilities of everyone concerned. The first misstep was in… 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 »
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 »
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 »
DERAILED
Clive Owen is an actor of enormous charisma, a tough vulnerability, and a not inconsiderable amount of animal magnetism, none of which are on display in DERAILED, a ridiculously overplotted and underthought exercise in muddled filmmaking. Blame director Mikael Hafstrom for quashing Owen’s appeal along with everything else that threatens to light up his film.… Read More »
MUNICH
In MUNICH, Steven Spielberg has created an intensely profound, if somewhat flawed, work. Moral debates about right and wrong abound with as many variations as there are characters to expound them, and there are many of both. The message, though, is unequivocal. Killing is an awful business that kills more than the victim, it also… Read More »
THE CONSTANT GARDENER
The difference in outlooks between Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) and his late wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), can be summed up in a conversation they have while driving on the squalid streets of Kenya’s capital where Justin, a British diplomat, is stationed. Tessa wants him to stop and give a lift back to her village to… Read More »
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