This review was originally published March 21, 2008.

Since the success of 2002’s The Ring, Hollywood has been unstoppable in its determination to remake every Asian horror film of the last ten years or so. From a business standpoint, I suppose this makes sense—Asia’s been extremely prolific in churning out decent thrillers as of late, and remaking them is sure a lot easier than coming up with your own ideas (something Hollywood’s been notoriously bad at from the very start—that Maltese Falcon movie starring Humphrey Bogart? it was the second remake of the original, which was, of course, based on the book by Dashiell Hammett to begin with). But there’s something disturbingly xenophobic about most of the resulting films. On the one hand, they give Americans yet another excuse to pretend that Hollywood cinema is the only cinema that matters; on the other, they usually end up transporting the heroes to Asia, anyway—making the heroes Americans and the ghouls Asians (and also making the remake seem even more unnecessary). I’m not sure what to read into this—economic anxiety, maybe? (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, ask anyone from Detroit.)
Continue Reading »

This review was originally published March 8th, 2008.

A heist film starring Jason Statham with the words ‘The’ and ‘Job’ in the title? The British actor certainly has a type, and while this film shares a lot of superficial similarities with 2003’s The Italian Job, it differs in nearly every other respect. Where Italian was a remake and a light popcorn diversion (essentially serving as a $60 million Mini Cooper commercial), Bank is based on a true story and has a surprisingly dark undercurrent to it.
Continue Reading »

This review was originally published April 8th, 2008.

If the cynics in Hollywood can market Shutter using its executive producers (“From the executive producers of The Ring and The Grudge!” as the poster so eagerly tells us), then it only seems fair that I should be allowed to tell you that The Ruins was executive produced by Ben Stiller. Yes, that Ben Stiller. I’m kind of spoiling the ending here, since you don’t find this out until the final credits roll, but don’t worry—this isn’t quite the funniest part of the film. Thanks to pedestrian script writing, inept directing and some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen, it’s actually quite a challenge to pick the funniest part of The Ruins. But I should at least try.
Continue Reading »

This review was originally posted April 26th, 2008.

Chop Shop is such a beautiful, understated film that it almost feels like I’m insulting it by even attempting to review it. The film is more than capable of standing on its own—it says exactly what needs to be said, and nothing more. To add anything to it would destroy its delicate beauty—and far too often, this is exactly what film reviews do. To attempt “judge” a film—especially one as self-interpreting as this one—is a presumptuous task indeed.
Continue Reading »

Jeff Nichols’ gritty revenge story Shotgun Stories had its debut at The Berlin Film Festival — a prestigious honor for a film shot with almost no budget in the director’s hometown. But there’s a reason why it has captured the minds of critics and audiences worldwide. It’s a film about envy, greed, brotherhood, and sin, but it’s also an elevated piece of gritty Southern poetry tackling themes as old as the Bible and ones that run just as deep in the roots of the human condition.
Continue Reading »

This review was originally published May 30th, 2008.

My Blueberry Nights approaches the viewer like an awkward lover, desperate to please but unsure of what to do. At times it is sensual and alluring, a delicious cinematic confection for the senses, but suddenly it becomes clumsy and inexperienced, placing its hands in all the wrong places and whispering words that induce giggling rather than titillation. You will either be enraptured with it in spite of its faults or you will be turned off completely by its graceless advances. I could only entertain the films fleeting charms for so long, however, before becoming irrevocably irritated with it.
Continue Reading »

This review was originally published February 22, 2008.

The suspension of disbelief in Vantage Point may be difficult to maintain at times, but it nonetheless provides decent action thrills guaranteed to satisfy your adrenaline, if not your grey matter. As guilty pleasures go, this is one of the better ones.
Continue Reading »

This review was originally posted March 1st, 2008.

Martin McDonagh’s previous film, Six Shooter, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short in 2007, was shown to me by a friend without any caveats attached, and McDonagh is a director that requires…no, necessitates caveats. His blend of black humor, violence, and human despair was not only off-putting, it was borderline offensive. Caught unawares, I was mortified.

I was more prepared for In Bruges (pronounced ‘broozsh’ – you know you’ve picked a bad title for your film when the critic has to tell people how to pronounce it).
Continue Reading »

It seems every time you turn around, another graphic novel has been made into a movie. Which is great, because I love graphic novels, and I love movies, and I love the thought of bringing them together like some beautiful cosmic sandwich. It hasn’t been all peanut butter and jelly, though - too often, these attempts are marred with inconsistent vision, shallow storytelling, and the sheer inability to capture the tone and experience of the source material.
Continue Reading »

This review was originally posted February 22nd, 2008.

High school comedies usually fall into one of two categories. Either they take themselves seriously and attempt to really capture the feel of high school (like Mean Girls, or—Oscar plug!—Juno); or they throw realism completely to the wind and simply appeal to the base fantasies of teenagers (American Pie, or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Charlie Bartlett is the rare film that manages to run the gamut between these two—and it succeeds with flying colors. It’s borrowed a fair amount of its material from earlier teen pictures, but watching it really is an experience unto itself.
Continue Reading »

This review was originally posted February 16th, 2008.

Nickelodeon Movies, since its inception, has pulled off a handful of fairly decent literary adaptations. Harriet the Spy managed to be watchable despite the presence of Rosie O’Donnell; A Series of Unfortunate Events rode to success on brilliant visual direction and excellent usage of Jim Carrey’s underrated acting chops; Charlotte’s Web was reportedly pretty good as well. Unfortunately, they were due for a miss. The Spiderwick Chronicles is not only a bore to sit through, it’s also, I’m sorry to say, probably not the sort of thing you want to take your kids to see (or at least your youngest ones).
Continue Reading »

In 1969, Mike McGrady of Newsday magazine was frustrated with the state of American fiction. He was convinced that anything could become a bestseller, regardless of how awful it was, if it had enough explicit sex. In order to prove his point, he assembled a crew of twenty-four Newsday writers, and instructed them to write the worst book imaginable, but fill it with lots of pornographic descriptions. They tackled this job by each writing a single chapter—sometimes rewriting their chapters several times, to ensure that they were all wholly awful and mismatched—and then publishing their book, Naked Came the Stranger, under the pseudonym Penelope Ashe. Of course it became a bestseller.

Once the hoax was revealed, the book was appreciated for its novelty value as much as its numerous detailed orgies, and it remains on library shelves to this day. The question remains, though: Can a single story with multiple authors get by on its own merits, regardless of its novelty?
Continue Reading »

This review was originally published February 8th, 2008.

Okay, let’s get this out of the way. Is Fool’s Gold essentially a rip-off of Romancing the Stone? Yeah, more or less. Does it have vaguely racist and homophobic undertones? You bet. Is it still an irresistible guilty pleasure? Yeah.
Continue Reading »

This review was originally published March 3rd, 2008.

Michel Gondry’s been alternating back and forth for a while now between heady arthouse fare and more commercial projects. He initially broke into the mainstream with the well-respected thinker Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; then he turned around a directed a lightweight documentary entitled Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (which was about exactly what you’re probably thinking it was about). He followed this one with the independent French-produced film The Science of Sleep, which made the usual film festival rounds before getting picked up for a limited release by Warner Independent Pictures. For his next project, he’s chosen to direct a screwball comedy starring two musicians-turned-actors. I guess you can’t accuse him of being afraid to try new things.
Continue Reading »

Mad Money plays out like a litany of missed opportunities, particularly financial ones (ironically enough, considering its title). First there’s the premise: as a heist film concerning three women, it could have functioned as a hybrid caper/chick flick, making it a film that women could drag their husbands/boyfriends/whatevers to, without too much whining from either party. Second, there’s the cast, which—almost any way you look at it—has three potentially fantastic leads. Sadly, it’s dull as a heist picture and undeveloped as a drama. That leaves comedy, which is surprisingly absent, for a film that has a lot of potential to be funny. The result is a dull march from the obvious beginning to the predictable end.
Continue Reading »

61 year old Sylvester Stallone brushes the dust off of his bandoleer and joins the ranks of borderline geriatric action heroes of yesteryear (Bruce Willis at 52, Ahnold at 55, and Harrison Ford at 65) determined to prove that yes, they still have what it takes. And, unsurprisingly, he does. Whether the equally geriatric franchise that (along with Rocky) gave him his start deserves to be resuscitated is another matter.
Continue Reading »

This review was originally published April 3rd, 2008.

It is literally impossible to overestimate the influence George A. Romero has had on modern cinema. His directorial debut, Night of the Living Dead, not only single-handedly created both the exploitation film and the zombie film; it also single-handedly redefined the word “zombie.” You can look this up: “zombie” used to specifically refer to a corpse reanimated by a voodoo priest. Then Night of the Living Dead came along, and so many imitators sprang up that a genre was born, which, apparently for lack of a better term, was dubbed the “zombie movie.” (Feel free to use this bit of trivia next time your horror-fanboy friend complains that 28 Days Later isn’t a “real zombie movie.” To find a “real zombie movie,” you might have to go all the way back to RKO’s 1943 masterpiece I Walked with a Zombie—but, of course, I digress.)
Continue Reading »

This review was originally published February 19th, 2008.

Remember National Treasure? Yeah, me neither.
Continue Reading »

J.J. Abrams is a producer who’s made a career out of convincing American audiences that his productions are a whole lot deeper philosophically than they actually are. From the reheated spy drama of Alias, to the pretentious mess of audience misdirection known as Lost, to (now) his first major motion picture (as producer) Cloverfield, Abrams has no shortage of ideas that would have been cutting-edge about ten years ago. Don’t get me wrong—it’s not that Cloverfield is a bad film; it’s just that, for all the pomp surrounding it, it’s shockingly vanilla—not to mention hard to watch and even harder to care about.
Continue Reading »

The Orphanage (known as El Orfanato in its country of origin, Spain) is as unoriginal a horror film as one is likely to find. We’ve seen it all before, dozens of times: the family that moves into a creepy gothic mansion, the child who sees dead people, the woman who has to solve the mystery of some horrid past crime. Horror movies typically trade in clichés like clowns trade in terrifying small children, and you could justifiably re-title this one The Sixth Ring of the Amityville Others, but The Orphanage does something with the tropes of the genre that most other horror flicks could only dream of doing: it does them all really, really, really well. And when I say ‘really,’ I mean “scared the living bejeezus out of me” really. The Orphanage, in spite of its derivative trappings, is one of the best horror films of the past two decades.
Continue Reading »