MADAGASCAR 2 ESCAPE TO AFRICA begins with a backstory, the better to set up the forestory of this animated piece. Alex (Ben Stiller), the dancing king of New York, was not always an inhabitant of the Central Park Zoo. Nor was always an inhabitant of the New World, for that matter. No, when he was… Read More »
THE CHANGELING
THE CHANGELING, directed and produced by Clint Eastwood, is based on a true story so Kafka-esque that it staggers the imagination. In March of 1928, Christine Collins came home from work to discover her nine-year-old son, Walter, was missing. Her call to the Los Angeles police for help was rebuffed because the boy hadn’t been… Read More »
QUANTUM OF SOLACE
QUANTUM OF SOLACE does a tidy job of building on its predecessor, CASINO ROYALE, while introducing a sinister cabal that fills the void left by the collapse of the Cold War. Yet, there is still room in this brave new Bond world for wacko villains who so entertainingly populate the Bond universe, and who are… Read More »
TRANSSIBEREAN
TRANSSIBEREAN hearkens back to those glorious tales of intrigue and adventure that populated film screen in the 30s and 40s. In those days, it was trains that whisked people over vast distances and the close quarters with strangers of all sorts forced together in them was a situation rife with possibilities. Throw in a foreign… Read More »
TWILIGHT
TWILIGHT, the film version of Stephenie Meyer’s young adult novel, operates on two levels of fantasy, one traditional that speaks to many of the roiling and contradictory impulses that lurk in the collective subconscious of us all: to dominate, to fit in, to cheat death. It also speaks to the other irresistible impulses, roiling and… Read More »
AUSTRALIA
Baz Luhrmann has a great deal to say about his native Australia, and he has very ambitiously attempted to say it all in one film. It’s a bold choice more admirable in the intention than in the execution. He has essentially grafted two separate films together, one an over-the-top homage to adventure films from the… Read More »
CADILLAC RECRDS
Writer/director Darnell Martin has an obvious passion for the blues and for the men and women who sang them. It comes across in every frame of CADILLAC RECORDS, based on the true story of Chess Records, whose founder, Leonard Chess, had a penchant for handing out Cadillacs to his recording artists. Executive producer and pop… Read More »
NOBEL SON
As with his last film, BOTTLE SHOCK, Randall Miller returns to the themes of father-son relationships in NOBEL SON. While the former was a sun-drenched idyll in the wine country of Napa Valley, arch but ultimately warm and fuzzy, the latter starts in the darker environs of human behavior and then gets seriously nasty and… Read More »
PUNISHER — WAR ZONE
THE PUNISHER is many things, but a good movie is not one of them. It is an extended trip to an abattoir. It is a script that makes no sense whatsoever. It is an unsightly mélange of genres trapped in a steel-cage death match. But worst of all, it’s a wasted opportunity. In Ray Stevenson,… Read More »
THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX
THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX is as bold, as brave, and as charming as its eponymous mouse hero. Adapted from the book of the same name by Kate DiCamillo, this is an animated film for both kids and adults that is vibrant, complex, and fearless in its depiction of the good, the bad, and the careless… Read More »
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