What WHIP IT nails as well as anything ever committed to film is that heady, giddy moment in a girl’s life when she is sure that she has all the answers and that her parents are idiots. In other words, it’s that moment when the prospect of absolute freedom, unencumbered by responsibility, first makes its… Read More »
AMELIA
Of late, Hilary Swank gives only two kinds of performances, award-winning, and duds. AMELIA, a prestige effort from Mira Nair, alas, delivers the latter. To be fair, she and everyone else concerned are not working from a script, but rather from a scenario thrown together with broad strokes and characters conceived as cardboard cut-outs of… Read More »
GI JOE
Breaking up is hard to do, and sometimes the fate of the whole world hangs in the balance of how it plays out. Thats the theme driving G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA, an action film that is not quite as plastic as its namesake and certainly has higher production values. Its cheerfully cheesy with… Read More »
THE PROPOSAL
What almost saves THE PROPOSAL from itself is a pair of performances by Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds that have a bold and bracing bite of snarkiness to them. Alas, the formulaic nature of the script requires that they both warm up to each other and in the process, while their characters find true love,… Read More »
JENNIFER’S BODY
Though rife with occult phenomenon, JENNIFERS BODY is more in the tradition of HEATHERS than BUFFY. This sophomore effort by Diablo Cody explores the intense, baffling, and all-consuming relationships that bind and repel adolescent females to and from one another. Framing it in the context of a horror film overflowing with blood, erotica, humor, and… Read More »
MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS, THE
Two men, each determined to cross the border from Kuwait into Iraq for reasons they find compelling to themselves, wait with some impatience to get going. One is a man whose consciousness has been expanded beyond the quotidienne, and the other, a man whose consciousness has been contracted to the confines of his own psyche… Read More »
CHRISTMAS CAROL, A
A great deal of money has been expended in order to bring the Robert Zemeckis 3D animated version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL to the screen. And yet, for all the showy set pieces that have Scrooge (Jim Carrey) hurtling through the stratosphere at breakneck speeds creating dizzying tableaux of impressively changing perspectives, every woman in… Read More »
CORALINE
CORALINE dazzles on many scores, not the least of which is that it unstintingly respects the intelligence of its audience, adult and child. Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman, its been adapted for the screen as 3-D stop-motion animation and directed by Henry Selick, who also directed THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. In this modern… Read More »
ICE AGE 3: DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS
After an uncertain sophomore effort, the ICE AGE franchise has bounced back, more or less, with its third installment. The message is the same, family arrives in the least expected of forms, and though one may love the other members of ones herd, one doesnt necessarily like them all of the time. The humor is… Read More »
FOURTH KIND, THE
THE FOURTH KIND proves that a horror film doesn’t need splashy digital effects or pyrotechnics to be effective. On the contrary, to work, a film needs to establish a discombobulating sense of unease, the which happens here with a smartly low-key mood. Director and co-writer Olatunde Osunsame couples that with some very smart filmmaking techniques… Read More »
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