After a yearlong delay, a replacement director, heavy reshoots, and multiple editors, The Wolfman is probably about as good as it could possibly be. It gets quite a bit right, adding up to a solid B-horror offering that delivers more than a few pleasures during its lean, 100-minute…
More vampires? Really? Is that what we need? You can’t swing a bat at the multiplex these days without hitting one, though it could be worse. We could be facing an onslaught of Matthew McConaughey romantic comedies (now that’s scary). The good news is that Daybreakers is a…
The Twilight Saga: New Moon hardly needs an introduction. As the second film in the massively popular vampmance series, courtesy of author Stephanie Meyer, New Moon earned high expectations thanks to one of the most extensive and hormone-centric marketing campaigns in recent memory. The first Twilight caught plenty…
When I was in third grade, I discovered my love for writing while penning an essay about Amelia Earhart. I vividly remember sitting at my kitchen table, reading about her adventures in an encyclopedia, and mythologizing both her existence as a 1930s aviatrix and her legendary disappearance. She…
Ricky Gervais has ample amount of personality and charm. He made the British version of The Office into the cult hit it has become, and he made last year’s Ghost Town at the very least enjoyable. A well-seasoned actor and writer, Gervais’ logical next step would be feature…
Steven Soderbergh made an interesting choice in telling the story of Mark Whitacre, the agri-food exec who turned informant and paid a price. Part fraud, part whistleblower, Whitacre is a heady topic for the screen — one that, in most hands, would have been dramatized for maximum fustian,…
All tearjerkers are not created equal. This is a point too rarely acknowledged. When it comes to pocket-sized tragedies, those tidy doses of Hollywood-friendly catharsis, it tends to be an open and shut case for most folks: either you’re in the mood for a good cry or that…
Scary notion: what if YouTube, with its streaming transmissions of home-movie inanity and fleeting flashes of sign o’ the times import, was our first and only source of pure, uncut, unfiltered reality? What if those little snippets of amateur verité — the camera confessions, the clowning around, the…
The work of Parisian auteur Claire Denis has been cause célébre for many film critics over the last two decades. Her adoring supporters do backflips with the arrival of each one of her films, while detractors bemoan her frequent tendency to favor oblique narratives and veiled expressions (read:…
Adaptation is the medium of our time. For better or worse, appropriation has devolved from oxymoronic theories of postmodernism into a more practical mode of replication. With films in mind, when, if ever, will this market driven habit of re-mining used material will run aground? The most confounding…
Bright Star, Jane Campion’s visually luscious period romance, tells the story of poet John Keats (impish British actor Ben Whishaw), and his immortalized love affair with one-time neighbor and muse, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). The film, which derives its title from a poem Keats dedicated to Brawne (“Bright…
The moment an actor signs on to impersonate a well-known figure in a film is the moment that actor gives up any chance of delivering a naturalistic performance. To impersonate someone famous requires too many affectations of voice and manner, overwhelming the everyman quality that neorealistic acting demands.…
Adored by geeks for his stylish violence, lauded by the arthouse for his immaculate camera, and beloved by many for his Vengeance Trilogy, South Korea’s resident idiosyncratic auteur, Park Chan-wook, hit a minor misstep in his career with the 2006 romantic comedy I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK.…
Orphan is a nasty, unpleasant movie, filled with predictable plot turns, one-dimensional characters, and some really lousy dialogue — but it’s also a lot of fun. Call it a guilty pleasure, but Orphan’s unyielding commitment to capturing demented family dynamics and repressed upper-middle-class angst makes it stand out…
Modest Sundance hit The Answer Man is one of those films that seems to erase itself from your memory days after seeing it. It’s a hokey romantic comedy, a passable, easy to stomach picture that brings up some mildly interesting ruminations on faith and spirituality, but fails to explore…
The moody and intense Public Enemies is a curious picture, and it’s going to be a great divider, creating two polarized camps of love and hate. It’s paradoxically wandering and aimless and at other times fully engaging. It’s one half of a great film that sometimes becomes — as…
German actress Nina Hoss has a central role in Christian Petzold’s second feature, Jerichow, one of the best films of 2009’s first half, and now she carries Max Färberböck’s WWII picture, A Woman in Berlin. In both films Hoss finds herself mired in dangerous power-struggles with men, spurred…
To those closely following current cinema trends, it’s relatively common knowledge that when a film is tagged with the word “indie,” this label refers to a specific sub-genre, as opposed to the traditional definition, inclusive of any “independent” film. A modern indie picture usually includes characters that find…
Despite a general indifference toward Tony Scott’s taut, but largely uninspired remake of the 1974 thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, this critic will be one of the first to stand up and defend the director, and to champion some of his most critically reviled offerings.…
Pixar welcomes us back into the realm of lighter fare with Up, the esteemed animation studio’s tenth film, and, at an agreeable 90 minutes, arguably their most refined and well-paced feature to date. Last time out, Pixar explored futuristic and dystopian landscapes with WALL•E, a cautionary tale about…