This review is late, but my deadline laxness has created the opportunity for me to admit to you that one of the quotes Fox Searchlight is using from me about this film – “Almost too intense” – is wrong. Reports have been coming in of people actually getting up and leaving the theater after the … Continue reading
It’s tempting to lightly praise Failure to Launch for at least attempting to be something more than a cookie cutter romantic comedy, but since the film stinks on almost every level, and contains only about three or four actual laughs over its seemingly quite lengthy running time, I won’t be praising it at all. Matthew … Continue reading
There’s a lot of hyperbole on the internet. God knows I’ve been responsible for my fair share over the years. Still, it’s hard to figure out where sheer hatred ends and hyperbole begins when it comes to The Shaggy Dog, a movie so soulless and shameless that it actually made me yearn for the Tim … Continue reading
Dave Chappelle’s Block Party is an ebullient, joyful, grooving, fun, funny, moving, ass-shaking, mood-elevating, pulse-quickening gem. It’s a movie that sends you dancing out of the theater, filled with glowing happiness and a peculiar optimism for the future of mankind. Dave Chappelle and Michel Gondry have come together to make a film that gets you … Continue reading
Calling 16 Blocks a bad film is selling it short. It’s often truly awful, a mess of confused geography (both real world and action), an improbably slothful pace, a lead actor showing about the same amount of effort I see in your average McDonalds lifer, and a subtext so grotesquely racist I couldn’t believe it. … Continue reading
I’m an unabashed fan of 19th century New York City, and part of what I love about that time period is the unabashed corruption of the “machine” system of politics used by people like the infamous Boss Tweed. The levels of fraud, intimidation and actual violence used to guarantee continued incumbency for preferred candidates makes … Continue reading
My experience with Running Scared went something like this: first came skepticism. The film opens with a heavily stylized six minute gun battle, and while I thought there were some cool shots and excellent kills, it seemed pretty standard. Next came disbelief. I couldn’t believe that the things I was seeing on screen were happening … Continue reading
Every now and again you see a movie whose problems can all be summed up in one moment. In the case of Winter Passing, the directing debut of playwright Adam Rapp, it’s a moment very early on when Zooey Deschanel’s character, Reese, takes her tiny kitten, who has been diagnosed with feline leukemia, to the … Continue reading
The Eternal Battle Between the Forces of Light and Dark. The Chosen One. The Coming End of the World. These are the basic tropes that populate about 99% of fantasy novels, and for some reason no one seems willing to move beyond them. So the problem becomes how do you make this stuff fresher, and … Continue reading
I made it pretty far into Eight Below without crying, but in the end it’s a losing battle. The theater was filled with the telltale sniffles of weeping moviegoers no more than halfway through this surprisingly wonderful story of survival, and while each tear was more than a little from each eye, Eight Below mostly … Continue reading