For a film focused on teenage angst and invaders from other planets, I AM NUMBER FOUR shows a curious tameness. Based on the book by Pittacus Lore, directed by D.J Caruso, who made EAGLE EYE and DISTURBIA so much fun, co-scripted by Marti Noxon of Buffy fame, co-produced by Michael Bey of blowing things up… Read More »
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN is a diverting entertainment, well-plotted with a story that is just convoluted enough to keep the action barreling along with a nice selection of twists, some of which have a tantalizing foreshadowing that adds texture without spilling too many beans. Taking its cue from the best sort of Hitchcockian premise, the innocent man plunked… Read More »
RED RIDING HOOD
RED RIDING HOOD begins well in its misguided attempts to plumb the rich territory of what lies beneath the surface of the most persistent of fairy tales, wallowing in the subtext that goes directly to the subconscious, but disguised in a form easily assimilated the most delicate of sensibilities. That remains true here, the unreality… Read More »
THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU
The particular brand of unhinged paranoia of which Phillip K. Dick was a master, and then some, gets a respectful treatment in THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU, based on one of Dick’s short stories. It takes the warm and fuzzy notion that someone or something is keeping the universe creaking along according to a plan, as opposed… Read More »
OF GODS AND MEN (DES DIEUX ET DES HOMMES)
OF GODS AND MEN, based on a real incident, is an engrossing consideration of the struggle for religion to exist in the modern world untainted by politics. Set in a rural Cistercian monastery with a long history in the Muslim country it serves, the film proceeds at a deliberate pace that serves to enhance the growing… Read More »
HALL PASS
There is in the epilogue of HALL PASS a reminder of how gloriously demented a Farrelly Brothers movie used to be. Stephen Merchants hopelessly repressed character is offered the eponymous break from married life and imagines a series of interludes that grow more ridiculous and more dire with a geometric progression that ends in a… Read More »
RANGO
RANGO triumphantly trades on the peculiar appeal of the well-executed excursion into the grotesque. Channeling spaghetti westerns, Cervantes, Castaneda, and a dash of CHINATOWN as refracted through the visual sensibilities of Dali, it is a fiendishly clever concretion of high- and low-brow in a story that is both vision quest and farce. The eponymous and… Read More »
BATTLE LOS ANGELES
BATTLE LOS ANGELES is a rousing and rip-roaring action flick expertly crafted by people who know what they are doing. And by that, is meant that rather than actively fighting the clichés inherent in this genre, they have consciously, even joyously, embraced them. By doing so, they revisit why the clichés have persisted, and by… Read More »
THE LINCOLN LAWYER
THE LINCOLN LAWYER is a smart, taut, and well-told neo-noir. The setting is Los Angeles, among the low-lifes and the well-to-do, where they meet and the consequences thereof. It follows the formula for such genre flicks, but has an impudent originality in the telling. The titular lawyer, Michael Haller (Matthew McConaughey) is a savvy practitioner… Read More »
LORD OF THE DANCE 3D
It was not the most intuitive hit of a road show, traditional Irish folk dancing, both classical and tweaked into modernity, married to the slightest wisp of an overbaked melodrama based in Irish folk culture. Yet in the hands and flying feet of Michael Flatley, LORD OF THE DANCE sold out performance after performance in… Read More »
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