The best thing that can be said about DEJA VU is that it pumped some much needed revenue into New Orleans and its environs. The second best thing that can be said about this otherwise benighted exercise is that by filming a few scenes in the ravaged Ninth Ward of that city, the devastation that… Read More »
CHILDREN OF MEN
In a here-and-now where the primacy of children is given ample lip service by proponents of any and all social issues, it is refreshing, and not a little thought-provoking, to see in Alfonso Cuaron’s CHILDREN OF MEN, based on the P.D. James novel of the same name, a world in which this is actually the case.… Read More »
BREACH
In a moment of supreme and unintentional irony, Robert Hanssen, the quarry in BREACH, tells his assistant, Eric O’Neill, who doesn’t know yet what his real assignment concerning Hanssen is, that he was never interested in making headlines, only history. Of course, they will shortly be making both, but neither of them is aware of that yet.… Read More »
THE NUMBER 23
It’s one thing when a film is bad from the very start. There is an honesty about it, a candor that is, in its own small way, praiseworthy. The same cannot be said about THE NUMBER 23. Instead of breaking one’s heart merely by being bad, it commits the far more heinous offense of offering… Read More »
PREMONITION
Blithely unfettered by internal logic, exhibiting the pacing of a banana slug, and boasting a heroine who makes Betty Crocker seem like a radical feminist, PREMONITION is exactly the reason that the Razzie Awards exist. Dishonoring the premise of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five”, it stars Sandra Bullock as Linda, a woman who comes unstuck in time.… Read More »
FIRST SNOW
The theme of a man trying to outrun his fate is an old one. Laius tried getting around the prediction about being done in by his son, Oedipus, with less than stellar results. More recently, Puritans in colonial America worried themselves silly over predestination at the hands of an angry deity, while hedging their bets… 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 »
PERFECT STRANGER
There was a reason that we were all warned as kids to be wary of strangers and PERFECT STRANGER reinforces that. Lifeless, plodding, pat, and predictable when it’s not being preposterous, this dreck is an assault on the audience’s intelligence. It doesn’t so much unfold as run out of steam, not that it had much… Read More »
DISTURBIA
Any doubt about Shia LeBeouf being able to carry a film on his slim shoulders is put to rest almost immediately after DISTURBIA begins. It’s right after the traffic accident in which his character, Kale, is injured and his father killed. After Kale drags himself from the wreckage, he looks back into what’s left of… Read More »
FRACTURE
Hubris, as the ancient Greeks were oft wont to mull in their plays and myths, is a fatal flaw. It’s the one that the gods of those self same ancient Greeks couldn’t abide and hence, the one that got them interested in smiting the one showing it. FRACTURE is a film that would warm the… Read More »