February 2012
3 posts
13 tags
Film Review: Wanderlust
Dir. David Wain Score: 6.5 It’s notable that whenever Hollywood churns out a comedy about a couple who move away from everything they know in order to better get in touch with themselves, the initial baseline from which they leave is inevitably New York City — perhaps the single most unique urban experience in the country (or at least a close second to New Orleans). Nevertheless,...
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Film Review: The Innkeepers
Dir. Ti West Score: 6.3 Most horror films have to spend so much time setting up their clumsy atmosphere of dread they can’t take the risk of injecting humor in the offering, less they spoil the mood of blood-soaked fear. Ti West’s haunted inn fright show, by contrast, spends the vast majority of its screen time making light of the apparatus of scary films before courageously charging...
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Film Review: The Woman in Black
Dir. James Watkins Score: 5.3 The essential irony of ghost stories — at least as they relate to films — is they’re usually much better off without the ghosts. You want all the spooky adornments: the blown out candles and creeping shadows along the walls, you just don’t want to actually have to visit the ghostly apparition itself, because as soon as you do, the fear begins...
January 2012
7 posts
15 tags
Film Review: A Separation
Dir. Asghar Farhadi Score: 8.3 The sound of the heavy glass door closing shut in the main characters’ Tehran apartment is final and thunderous, like an echoing clap of permanence every time someone leaves. Ironic, then, that no matter how many times characters leave the apartment, angry, insulted, or thrown out with conviction, they don’t stay gone long. The film begins with a POV...
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Film Review: The Grey
Dir. Joe Carnahan Score: 5.4 Clearly, the short stories of Jack London still retain a powerful hold on the collective male consciousness in Hollywood. Something about the primal inhumanity of London’s best known works, which generally involve a lone man against the elements under harsh conditions, affixes to the adolescent brain, man v. nature reduced to a simplified core of savage logic....
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Film Review: Albert Nobbs
Dir. Rodrigo Garcia Score: 4.0 A well-regarded actor, known for working both in film and theater, once remarked about the difference between the two mediums by dismissing acting for the silver screen as being done entirely through your eyes. If so, Glenn Close’s sunken marble orbs, set against a plain of pale forehead, are some of the more expressive in the business, and in playing a woman...
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Film Review: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Dir. Stephen Daldry Score: 6.5 Symbols can take any form, but the bigger they are, the more irrepressible they become: You want to represent an alcoholic’s descent? Try an ice cube; you want to tackle mortality? Look for an ice berg to hit the Titanic. In this way the horror of 9/11 is almost too easy to emulate. You had two of the largest, most signature buildings in the world reduced to...
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Film Review: Haywire
Dir. Steven Soderbergh Score: 5.6 Steven Soderbergh, who seems to threaten retirement after every new film he makes, must be getting bored. Tired of shooting glossy, A-list capers like the Ocean’s series, and weary of making big-deal ensemble dramas like Contagion, Soderbergh gets a rush from trying odd combinations of things just to see what might happen. Like a small boy bored of his...
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Film Review: Pariah
Dir. Dee Rees Score: 7.3 After a night at a sweaty club, a young Brooklyn woman changes her clothes on the bus before having to face her mother at home. But rather than changing out of something skimpy and too-revealing, she instead changes from city-tough lesbian to high school casual. This isn’t the only common trope Dee Rees plays off of in her fearless feature debut, in fact, the film...
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Film Review: The Iron Lady
Dir. Phyllida Lloyd Score: 6.5 The lioness in winter. The story of Maggie Thatcher’s rise from shy grocer’s daughter to leader of the Tories and first female Prime Minister of Britain throughout the ’80s would be compelling enough in of itself for a biopic treatment, but Phyllida Lloyd’s film goes much further than that. In its depiction of a half-mad and hallucinating...
December 2011
12 posts
7 tags
The Best (and Worst) Films of 2011 →
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Film Review: The Artist
Dir. Michel Hazanavicius Score: 7.6 In a nearly flawless example of artistic synchronicity, director Michel Hazanavicius’s audacious film asks its audience to engage with a ’20s style silent drama about a movie star of the silent era facing the impending career doom of the rise of the talkies. But that’s not even all Hazanavicius adds to the film’s degree of difficulty....
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Film Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Dir. Tomas Andersen Score: 7.4 If you want to catch the real difference between this epic British adaptation of John LeCarré’s gripping international espionage drama, and what schlock typically passes for ‘spy thriller’ in this country look no further than the toast. Twice within the first fifteen minutes of Tomas Andersen’s well-appointed cat-and-mouse game, characters...
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Film Review: War Horse
Dir. Steven Spielberg Score: 4.3 Is it any wonder that Spielberg’s best film, Jaws, is the film he was so traumatized to make he absolutely refused to attend the 25th anniversary in Martha’s Vineyard back in 2000? He was a young, callow director then, making his first major feature on a remote location, with a bunch of cranky actors and a giant, mechanical shark that refused to work...
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Radio Times: 'The Adventures of Tintin' →
Here’s the mp3 from my conversation about Tintin with host Marty Moss-Coane on NPR’s “Radio Times.”
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Film Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo...
Dir. David Fincher Score: 6.1 We already know David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac) can direct, but in adapting Stieg Larsson’s bewilderingly popular novel, he’s been given one of his greatest challenges: Turning Larsson’s clunky and overwrought book into something resembling a fluid and arresting narrative. The Swedish adaptation, directed gracelessly by Niels Arden Oplev already made...
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Film Review: The Adventures of Tintin
Dir. Steven Spielberg Score: 5.7 For manic Tintinologists, the apprehension towards this big-budget, motion-animation blockbuster from heavyweights Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson (Spielberg directed; both of them produced, with Jackson taking the reins for the sequel) came down to a series of seemingly minor but tellingly important details: Will Snowy, the brave fox terrier never far from...
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Trepidations of a Devoted Tintin Fan, Part 2
As a follow-up to Friday’s post about my misgivings heading into a screening of the new, Steven Spielberg-helmed Tintin movie, I wanted to include a reaction post to having seen the film and sitting with it for a day.
After Sunday, December 18, 2011. 7:17 a.m. Most of my worst fears were alleviated, that much I can say. With some exceptions, the film stayed fairly close to the proximity...
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Trepidations of a Devoted Tintin Fan
As I prepare for tomorrow’s screening of the Steven Spielberg-helmed Tintin film set to open wide a week later, I wanted to jot some thoughts down as to exactly why I’m so nervous about it. Later next week I will be doing a spot on the film and the character as a whole for “Radio Times” on Philly’s NPR station, so I will preparing for it by re-reading the books...
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Film Review: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Dir. Brad Bird Score: 6.7 In director Brad Bird’s version of the IMF — the ultra-secret, covert division of the government that run a non-ending series of near-unimaginable capers — things go horribly wrong time and again. And it’s not just the human element: unplanned for acts of nature intervene at inopportune moments, meticulously planned operations get gummed up by...
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Film Review: Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows
Dir. Guy Richie Score: 4.5 The first Guy Richie-helmed Sherlock Holmes was almost shockingly entertaining. With a crafty, engaging script by Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg, outstanding performances from leads Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, and Mark Strong, and the twisted atmospherics of Richie’s vision of 19th century London, the film was both rollicking and...
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Film Review: Shame
Dir. Steve McQueen Score: 5.4 Brandon Sullivan suffers the kind of life you might only find in cologne ads and Bret Easton Ellis novels: Rich, cultivated and handsome, he lives in the obligatorily immaculate Chelsea high-rise, wears the finest tailored shirts and has indiscriminate sex with beautiful strangers and the occasional high-society call girl every chance he gets. Are you ready for the...
November 2011
10 posts
13 tags
Film Review: My Week With Marilyn
Dir. Simon Curtis Score: 6.2 True movie stars, it is said, have a charisma so palpable there is an attendant glow emanating from them (hence, I suppose, the allusion to heavenly bodies in the term). Imagine being a callow lad of 23 and hornswagling your way on the set of a film only to end up face-to-face with the single biggest movie star in the world. Then imagine the two of you fall in love,...
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Film Review: Hugo
Dir. Martin Scorsese Score: 5.5 Would it surprise you to hear that the director of a visually ravishing new 3D film for children was none other than Martin Scorsese, whose previous cinematic highlights involve the mob, a raging pugilist, and a Mohawk-sporting vigilante? Would it surprise you any less if you found out the topic of the film in question involved a brilliant former filmmaker whose...
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Film Review: Into the Abyss
Dir. Werner Herzog Score: 6.8 We first see Michael Perry through the reinforced glass of a max security prison communication booth. With his bad saucer haircut and uneven buckteeth spread in a listless smile, you might mark him as a particularly guileless 15-year-old, the type of kid you’d see happily pumping your gas or assembling your burrito box at Taco Bell. Instead, he’s on...
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Watch My Movie: Simon Curtis for 'My Week With... →
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Film Review: Melancholia
Dir. Lars Von Trier Score: 7.2 Weddings are often used by filmmakers as a way to convey a great deal of information about a group of characters all at once (consider the bravura opening of The Godfather or The Deerhunter as the model). Besides gathering everyone together in a confined space, you also have the ramped-up emotional psyche fulcrum tantalizingly close to the surface. It’s so...
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Film Review: J. Edgar
Dir. Clint Eastwood Score: 6.5 If the ultimate purpose of the bio-pic is to shed some illuminating light on a shadowy public figure, what in the hell do you with a man so wrapped up in his own image and legend that he dedicated most of his career to obfuscating the truth, while keeping tabs on anyone that might say otherwise? Clint Eastwood’s interesting solution is to let J. Edgar Hoover...
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Speakeasy: Sean Durkin & Elizabeth Olsen →
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Film Review: Like Crazy
Dir. Drake Doremus Score: 6.1 First love, as has been noted by several writers and artists over the past few thousand years of human existence, is both thrilling and absolutely terrifying in its complete takeover of your previous existence: The steadfast rules of your life get upended and blown apart in a way that is nothing less than intoxicating. Unfortunately, it is exactly that element of...
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Watch My Movie: Elizabeth Olsen for 'Martha Marcy... →
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Watch My Movie: Amber Heard for 'The Rum Diary' →
October 2011
7 posts
14 tags
Film Review: Martha Marcy May Marlene
Dir. Sean Durkin Score: 7.5 Consider the word ‘cult’ for a moment, then replace it with something softer, like ‘community,’ ‘idyll’ or ‘farm house.’ You might be able to conjure up images of trees, wooden barns, young people all living and working together in harmony, each with their own way of fitting into the group. What’s the harm in any...
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Film Review: The Rum Diary
Dir. Bruce Robinson Score: 4.8 Johnny Depp might be one of our greatest living American actors, but there’s a dirty little secret about the guy that’s absolutely impossible to ignore: He’s an utterly forgettable straight man. Give him a crazy countenance, a penchant for wild drug debasement (and/or a dreadlocked beard and heavy eye mascara) and he’s riveting; give him any...
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2011 Philly Film Fest Highlights →
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Film Review: Margin Call
Dir. J.C. Chandor Score: 6.4 Kevin Spacey fits neatly into Wall Street movies much the way De Niro does in mob pictures. There’s something about his forcefully clipped delivery and smug superiority, that lends itself perfectly to the life of a fast-talking financial bigwig. Which is why it’s so striking that here in writer/director J.C. Chandor’s drama — which concerns a...
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Film Review: The Ides of March
Dir. George Clooney Score: 6.5 For those fervent, politically minded fans who think George Clooney’s liberal politics, sober intelligence and inhuman charisma would make him an ideal candidate to run for office, George has a message for you, written in bold, with a pen dipped in poison ink: No one is as good a human being as you want them to be, least of all your favored candidates. His...
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WHYY’s “Radio Times” did a show...
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Radio Times: Movie Theater Audiences →
September 2011
9 posts
gambinogirls asked: DO you write all of these reviews?
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Film Review: Moneyball
Dir. Bennett Miller Score: 6.4 If there’s anything more conceivably wonky than watching an awkward braniac from Harvard extolling the virtues of social networking, it would be watching an awkward braniac from Yale going on about the most valuable metrics and statistical analysis of baseball. Yet, just as he made last year’s surprisingly riveting The Social Network into a treatise...
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Watch My Movie: Jonah Hill →
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Nicolas Winding Refn Pitches 'Drive,' Intensely →
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Evan Glodell Digs Flamethrowers →
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Film Review: Drive
Dir. Nicolas Winding Refn Score: 6.8 There’s a moment midway through the last act of director Nicolas Winding Refn’s brutal noir-thriller that more or less typifies the director’s approach to his material. The nameless driver (Ryan Gosling) is in an elevator with the newly found love of his life, Irene (Carey Mulligan), a young mother whose husband has inadvertently put the...
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Film Review: Bellflower
Dir. Evan Glodell Score: 6.4 You know what would be awesome? Working out the pain and suffering of a bad relationship in a film where you get to soak everything in blood and fire. In writer/director/star Evan Glodell’s pre-apocalyptic relationship meltdown, everything is set in the present day, somewhere in L.A. The characters are all grounded in a sort of reality, only, through exhaustive...
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Film Review: Contagion
Dir. Steven Soderbergh Score: 5.9 There are a lot of big name stars in Steven Soderbergh’s international epidemic procedural, which is necessary, in part, because so many of them die within minutes of their first appearance on screen. As the comedian Louis CK attests in one of his seminal bits, everyone we know will eventually die, a concept we as human beings do our best to tamp down, but...
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Film Review: The Debt
Dir. John Madden Score: 6.3 Spy movies tend to run either gritty and substantial, or overblown and idiotic, here we have a bit of both. John Madden’s espionage thriller features a beautiful, highly trained secret ops agent from Mossad, prepared for nearly any contingency, but rather than the kind of bubblegum cartoon assassin so favored by Angelina Jolie, the sort who can wipe out a...
August 2011
12 posts
18 tags
DVD Review: The Killing - Criterion Blu-ray...
Dir. Stanley Kubrick Score: 6.4
Watching early Kubrick is a bit like sampling from a slightly too-young wine: Some of the notes are there, but the complexity has yet to fully mature. This film-noir from 1956, co-penned by Kubrick and pulp master Jim Thompson, certainly isn’t at the level the great auteur would come to find just one year later with Paths of Glory, not to mention his later...
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Film Review: Our Idiot Brother
Dir. Jesse Peretz Score: 6.0 Over the years, Paul Rudd has offered up several comic incarnations: He’s played the downtrodden everyman (I Love You Man), the narcissistic careerist (Dinner for Schmucks), the loyal friend (Anchorman) and, of course, the sweet cutie-pie love interest (Clueless), but the commonality of all of them is his good nature. He might not have the people skills of Tom...