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Review: Immortals (2011)
Scream to us, o nudes, an evocation of old Harryhausen and ignite a flame under that testosterone cauldron inside all of us, the same one that encourages you to fistbump your wife after the closeup of...
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Review: Mirror Mirror (2012)
Tarsem was unlucky enough to land in the middle of a bizarre Snow White resurgence, and it didn't help that Mirror Mirror's three screenwriters couldn't pound out a single good joke. None of these...
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Review: Self/less (2015)
Is it that the business, by nature, wears people down and turns them into inert husks of the warriors they used to be? Does part of that nature include an element that does everything it can to...
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Review: Shattered Glass (2003)
Billy Ray's first directorial effort is lacking anything you could rightly call a gimmick. It is a straightforward, honest portrayal of a real life liar, one that relies exclusively on its cast to do...
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Review: Breach (2007)
Seeing Breach requires total shunning of its advertising material, all of which will lie to you and say this is not a character study and much closer to placing a rabbit trap over Satan's head. The...
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Review: Secret in Their Eyes (2015)
Billy Ray's second framework of bureaucratic impotence is built upon the tried-and-true bedrock of a teenage girl's murder (additionally, under a façade of the height of the War on Terror), so you'd...
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Review: Metropolitan (1990)
The bones of Pride and Prejudice find a new body in New York, 1990, where yet again, two acquaintances fall in love with each other, at different times. Stillman chucks us into the middle of group of...
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Review: Barcelona (1994)
Leaving our out-of-touch group of UHB socialites, Stillman's focus shifts inches to out-of-touch American citizens living in Spain. Communication breakdowns are expanded to include political and...
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Review: The Last Days of Disco (1998)
It's bad enough trying to get a book published under your name while living in an apartment with people you dislike, but you also gotta worry about cocaine addiction, tax indictment, and violent punk...
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Review: Damsels in Distress (2011)
Christians in college, this time. Kay. Greta Gerwig and her team of blank-faced sprites attempt to improve the morale at their college by implementing a strict regimen of tap-dancing, donuts, and...
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Review: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (2005)
Shane Black has proved, over the course of a few decades, that once a formula works, it can be used repeatedly and that people don't care much as long as you're only ripping yourself off. Turns out...
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Review: Knight of Cups (2015)
Christian Bale, indistinguishable from Ben Affleck and Sean Penn, wanders around the decadent wasteland of the Los Angeles overworld, hopping from girlfriend to topless girlfriend, mumbling something...
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Review: Iron Man 3 (2013)
To succumb to my own bit of mythologizing, Marvel had to realize, along with at least half of their audience, just what a safe, by-the-numbers, boring-ass sequel that Iron Man 2 was, and that Favreau's...
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Review: The Nice Guys (2016)
Hope you like Christmas. Shane Black keeps his streak alive of recalling his usual trademarks (even a direct one from Last Action Hero) and gives us the gift of watching two lovable characters fumbling...
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Review: Love & Friendship (2016)
Dreams do come true, about 25 years later. I'm not too familiar with Jane Austen -- I only know what the movie adaptations have taught me, that among other things they are Hoiti^Toiti and they require...
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Review: The Way of the Gun (2000)
Christopher McQuarrie didn't cut the cord entirely to Bryan Singer (good thing -- how else can you meet Tom Cruise?), only enough to unlearn some fairly awful filmmaking habits. Public Access, a film...
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Review: Jack Reacher (2012)
Yay, he's back!New York Times Bestseller trash turns to gold under the right helmsman, and we live in an age where that is becoming increasingly common as long as your name isn't Ron Howard or Edward...
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Review: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)
Ah, the resilience of a franchise. Some can survive anything: from the poor decision-making skills of a shitty 20th Century Fox Executive to a drift in Tokyo to a series of seemingly endless JJ Abrams...
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Review: Mr. Jealousy (1997)
Baumbach's Post-College Years. There are two concepts at work in this film. One is Every Beta-Male's Biggest Fears Realized, and the other is Man Goes to Therapy as His Friend. The former is certainly...
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Review: De Palma (2015)
Baumbach's... um... wait, you're telling me Brian De Palma didn't take one drink throughout this whole thing? Dammit. Seems as if we're suddenly in an age of bridge-burning, earth-scorching...
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Review: Dunkirk (2017)
Dunkirk is a war film of an unusual sort, one that frustrates as it entertains, though not in equal measure. Nolan's usual trademarks (quick pacing, gimmicky time manipulation, non-sensationalist...
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Review: The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017)
Baumbach's Embarassing Dad Years.Consequences of an incestuous family come home to roost in Shadow Earth's The Royal Tenenbaums 2, where all of the kids have grown up and have kept themselves busy by...
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Review: Song to Song (2017)
When cooking a steak, be sure to awkwardly stare at it until it heats itself. Malick's ongoing scriptless Shoot the Rodeo projects continue their study of the Human Osprey, squandering the goodwill of...
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Review: Reservoir Dogs (1992)
listen, listen: let me tell you a little somethin' about the early nineties, all right? it was a magical time full of possibility and wonder, okay? all of the sixties kids had grown up and were selling...
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Review: Pulp Fiction (1994)
okay so okay, you ever hear the old expression "a good decoy can lead the enemy away from the king, a master decoy can do it again"? how do you prove you weren't some flash-in-the-pan ripoff artist who...
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