Log In Register

Film Review

Missed Connections

by Laura Leon December 27, 2012

Like millions of fans of the suspense author Lee Child, I was shocked when I heard that Tom Cruise had been tapped to play his main character, Jack Reacher. Reacher’s a loner and former military ...

Oh boy oh boy, you can tell right from the opening credits that it’s a Quentin Tarantino joint. The classic 1950s-era Columbia Pictures logo! The bright red credits that look like they were lifted from ...

Back There Again

by Ann Morrow December 20, 2012

There is a marvelous passage, early in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, where Bilbo Baggins, reluctant host to a company of dwarves who are talking and singing of their lost riches, is suddenly seized with a jealous ...

The Trouble With Alfred

by Laura Leon December 13, 2012

Having just released North by Northwest to enormous acclaim, filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock is asked if now, at the age of 60, it’s time for him to retire. Clearly miffed, he sets out instead to find ...

Snow Job

by Ann Morrow December 6, 2012

Toward the end of his life, Leo Tolstoy turned away from artifice, including the fiction of his own novels. It stands to reason, then, that he would find the latest adaptation of Anna Kareninaespecially disappointing. ...

Dancing As Fast As They Can

by Shawn Stone November 29, 2012

This riotously entertaining comedy finds its tears and laughter in the budding romance of a recently discharged mental patient (and violent felon) with a grieving widow who has been working out her sorrow by fucking ...

Fantastic Journey

by Ann Morrow November 29, 2012

Life of Pi launches with a terrifically exciting shipwreck that includes zoo animals, some of them large and carnivorous, with the human passengers desperately trying to survive the sinking of their ship in the middle ...

Ho Ho Ho

by Laura Leon November 29, 2012

I’ll admit, finding out that there was no Santa devastated me. I mean, coming across those bags of toys that could only be for me confirmed that I had been a very, very bad child. ...

Sexual Healing

by John Rodat November 20, 2012

The subject matter of The Sessions, the tale of a disabled man’s quest for physical intimacy, seems to promise melodrama. Paralysis may not constitute a genre, per se, but it is a powerful metaphor and ...

Toothless

by Ann Morrow November 20, 2012

The Cullens are not “real” vampires and neither are the members of the clans they enlist for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 2. If you’ve seen any of the preceding films, you already know this, ...

The Presence of Greatness

by Laura Leon November 20, 2012

How to make a movie about Abraham Lincoln? What portion of a life, a presidency, an immense political footprint, would you focus on? These had to be questions director Steven Spielberg thought long and hard ...

Licensed To Thrill

by Ann Morrow November 15, 2012

Grim. Sensationally grim. In Skyfall, part three of the Daniel Craig-James Bond reboot, 007 is hit by friendly fire and given up for dead. In the opening sequence. And that’s not even the heavy part. ...

Sins of the Script

by Laura Leon November 15, 2012

An uneasy cross between After Hours and Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Details charts the moral ambiguity of its protagonist, Dr. Jeff Lang (Tobey Maguire), as he confronts a seemingly endless pile of inconveniences and moral ...

Going Down, Hard

by Laura Leon November 8, 2012

Any movie that begins with a visual panorama of flashing lighting, pouring rain and a rundown trailer park, set to the aural backdrop of a snarling junkyard dog and the expletive punctuated door pounding of ...

Zero To Hero

by Laura Leon November 8, 2012

I never liked video games or fell for the dubious allure of darkened arcades with their grubby joysticks and incessant backdrop of gaming techno-noise. Later, Pac-Man represented a welcome respite at restaurants from having to ...

Do It Again (and Again)

by Shawn Stone November 1, 2012

This cinematic lollapalooza from Run Lola Run’s Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis of Matrix fame is ambitious beyond any film in recent memory. Sprawling over three hours, Cloud Atlas tells six stories, spanning hundreds of ...

Real Kids

by Laura Leon November 1, 2012

A throwback to a more innocent time when films like Ordinary People, ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, Valley Girl and Sixteen Candles gave surprisingly realistic depictions of how kids lived in a pre-Internet-and-cell-phone America, Fun Sizeis a ...

Tragic Kingdom

by Shawn Stone October 25, 2012

God only knows what documentary Lauren Greenfield thought she would be making when she and her associates embedded themselves in the lives of billionaire time-share king David Siegel, his third wife Jacqueline Siegel and their ...

Escape Artistry

by Ann Morrow October 17, 2012

It’s a story that even Hollywood couldn’t have dreamed up. And yet the Hollywood dream machine was a major player in this daring rescue mission that occurred during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. Argo, named ...

Splatter Effect

by Laura Leon October 17, 2012

I’ll be up front: In Bruges, written and directed by the Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, is, to my way of thinking, perfect. I’ve watched it umpteen times. My kids quote from it (admittedly awkward when ...

A Boy and His Dead Dog

by Laura Leon October 10, 2012

The dark at the top of the attic stairs. The deceptively quiet emptiness of a school hallway at night. A cemetery during a midnight storm. Such are just a few of the horror-movie conceits filmmaker ...

Get Me Out of Here

by Ann Morrow October 10, 2012

Like the vigilante he played in Taken, Liam Neeson has “a very particular set of skills.” One of them is imbuing formulaic characters with an intimidating authority beyond what the script calls for. Taken was ...

Needs More Churning

by Laura Leon October 10, 2012

A movie about the fiercely competitive world of butter sculpture might seem odd, but then again, we’ve had similar stories about dog shows and children’s beauty pageants. Butter, directed by Jim Field Smith, sets out ...

Gleefully Nerdy

by Shawn Stone October 4, 2012

Who knew there was such a big audience for a movie about collegiate a capella singing groups? The Glee concert movie tanked, didn’t it? Pitch Perfect opened on only a couple of hundred screens last weekend, ...

1 comment

Monster’s Ball

by Laura Leon October 4, 2012

When I saw the name Genndy Tartakovsky listed in the credits for the new animated picture Hotel Transylvania, I did a momentary “aha!” remembering that he had been involved with some of my favorite (and ...

← Previous Posts

Next Posts →