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 »
MR. BROOKS
According to some, we live in an age of moral relativism, and Mr. Brooks, a clever script with mediocre performances, explores that concept with nicely honed dash of irony. Our anti-hero, the eponymous Mr. Brooks, aka Earl, is affluent, pro-life, pro-family, and so devoted to his wife (Marg Helgenberger) and daughter (Danielle Panabaker) that the… Read More »
RENAISSANCE
RENAISSANCE is a film that can be appreciated, idolized even, for its stunning visual artistry, as well as admired for its unsentimental homage to the film noir genre it reproduces with such precision. Relying neither on the gimmick of having the motion-capture animation reduced to only black and white, this is not cinematic stunt rather… Read More »
DISTURBIA — DVD
Of the many things to admire about DISTURBIA, Shia LeBeouf not being the least among them, the way that the screenwriters (Christopher B. Landon and Carl Ellsworth) successfully re-imagined the Hitchcock classic, REAR WINDOW is pretty darned amazing. It’s the sunny suburbs rather than a noirsh big city. It’s a troubled kid instead of a… Read More »
EASTERN PROMISES
EASTERN PROMISES is a gloriously dark and compelling thriller that plays cat and mouse with its audience the way that the characters involved play cat and mouse with each other. The tension, though, in this well-plotted suspense yarn arises not so much from the evil that the villains purvey, it’s the way that the underworld… Read More »