Movie Reviews

We’re a hotheaded group of individuals. We crave a pull quote like anyone else, but it’s not about that. It’s only about you the reader. We love you. We want to take you home and cuddle with you. The following reviews are the opinions of the editors of CHUD.com and are by most accounts bang on.

REVIEW: BABEL

Babel is what Crash could have been if Paul Haggis were a better director. Alejandro González Iñárritu and longtime partner Guillermo Arriaga once again bring a fractured narrative to an otherwise straightforward story that contains supposedly deep commentary about the human condition. This is probably the last time they’ll be doing this, since Arriaga and … Continue reading

REVIEW: CHILDREN OF MEN

Children of Men is about a miracle. Children of Men is, itself, a miracle. It’s a movie that can single-handedly remove the scales of cynicism from your eyes, reminding you of what wonders cinema is capable. It’s a movie that rejects the two modern directions of the screen – a shrinking to TV size for … Continue reading

REVIEW: ROCKY BALBOA

Jesus Christ, Rocky Balboa WORKS. Not always, and certainly not consistently, but more often than not Rocky Balboa is a movie that grabs and exhilarates the audience – and that’s despite huge problems like a bizarre structure, rampantly flat acting and sloppy editing. This film just shouldn’t be this enjoyable, and that’s part of its … Continue reading

REVIEW: LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA

I walked out of Letters From Iwo Jima thinking that we could have saved a lot of American lives in the Pacific Theater of WWII if we had just let the Japanese alone for a bit to kill themselves. Clint Eastwood’s companion piece to the dud-ish Flags of Our Fathers is soaked in suicide, with … Continue reading

BOOK REVIEW: EVERY MAN A KING

BUY IT AT AMAZON: CLICK HERE!PUBLISHER: Da Capo PressMSRP: $15.95PAGES: 412 This reprinting of Huey P. Long’s 1933 autobiography comes well-timed into the modern political forum. Long was a political of unusual celebrity for his time, and his understanding of democracy as a theory was tentative at best, downright naïve at worst. His tendency to … Continue reading

REVIEW: WE ARE MARSHALL

We Are Marshall is the most insidious kind of bad movie – the very well made kind. It’s an easy, often beautiful, movie to watch, and if you’re not inoculated against the most base brand of movie cheese, it’s an easy movie to weep over. But it’s still bad, bad at it’s very core, because … Continue reading

REVIEW: GOOD SHEPHERD, THE

They don’t make movies like The Good Shepherd anymore. It feels like it slipped into theaters through a crack in reality, escaping from a parallel world that never experienced the one-two punch of Jaws and Star Wars and rather based its major blockbuster formula on the Godfather movies. But is there another alternate universe that’s … Continue reading

REVIEW: GOOD GERMAN, THE

The Good German is an easy movie to admire. Soderbergh is attempting to capture the look and the feel of film from the 40s, and he does it. The Good German doesn’t just imitate these movies, it is one of them; Soderbergh isn’t just aping the camera moves and lighting, he understands it completely and … Continue reading

REVIEW: PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS, THE

Here’s a testament to Will Smith’s inherent charisma: I would have despised The Pursuit of Happyness if it wasn’t for him. The film is the story of a man who is essentially dumb, and it has a right wing anti-homeless vibe running throughout it. And that’s not even addressing the movie’s inherently sappy and manipulative … Continue reading

REVIEW: HOME OF THE BRAVE

Forty-five minutes into Home of the Brave the movie made its way onto my Worst of the Year list. It could have been placed there within the first fifteen minutes, but I was feeling charitable and decided to give the film a chance to redeem itself. My patience was rewarded with a motion picture that … Continue reading