10/29/07:  "Some movies are great from top to bottom.  Some have so much greatness in them that certain mediocre elements are completely overshadowed.  And some movies contain a single element that is so great you don't really give two hoots about its' many problems and weaknesses.  Such is true of Steve Carrell's lead performance in Dan in Real Life, a sweetly well-intentioned romantic comedy that contains a laundry list of hypothetically grating elements.  Some I noticed but happily allowed to sail by while others only occur to me in retrospect.  But all of them are dwarfed by the former Produce Pete's sensationally accessibly performance as a middle-aged widower whose chance at happiness seems hopelessly blocked by his obligations to his large, loving, loud family.  I'd have loved watching Carrell give this performance in front of a green screen, and as a result, for him alone, Dan in Real Life is a great movie.

Dan Burns (Carrell) failed as a novelist, and now writes an advice column for a local newspaper that might be picked up for national syndication.  But he devotes most of his energy to his three daughters, budding driver Jane (Alison Pill), dating-too-soon Cara (Brittany Robertson), and cutsy little Lilly (Marlene Lawston)."  MORE

11/4/07:  "Wes Anderson is one of those filmmakers whose work you can enjoy while at the same time understanding perfectly why some people hate it to pieces.  He fills his stories with aggressive comic artifice and has his performers act in a slow, deadpan manner that seems to hint at either some greater wisdom or mental retardation.  I'd seen two of his movies previously, liking The Royal Tennenbaums and loving The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, so I had high hopes for his new film, The Darjeeling Limited.  Alas, it lives down to the worse attributes of his work:  quirky for quirky's sake, slower than a naked marathon in Antarctica and seemingly designed for decoding over dozens of viewings.  While it sports likable performances in two of its' three lead roles, the third is filled by an utterly, humorlessly blank Jason Schwartzman.  Since he also co-wrote the script and stars in the lethally off-putting short that precedes the film, I find myself aiming a disproportionate amount of my scorn in his direction.

Since it starts with the short, so will I.  It's called Hotel Chevalier and features the morose Jack (Schwartzman) in his morose hotel room.  He receives a call from his Ex (Natalie Portman) who shows up for a cryptic postmortem on their relationship and some sex.  Their conversation is the kind of thing that needs to be played just right to pull off."  MORE

7/20/08:  "What a truly amazing movie this is, simply taken on its' own terms.  But add to that the pressure of being the 6th Batman movie, the highly anticipated sequel to one of the most influential Hollywood hits of the last 10 years, and most of all, my pre-season pick for the #1 summer movie of 2008, and it's hard to believe a film this assured, this structurally and thematically sound, could emerge.    I really feel like Hollywood's turning a corner.  Gone are the days of dressing up beloved properties in disgraceful “crowd-pleasing” parade floats like Batman & Robin.  Increasingly, the studios are becoming savvy to what we as fans knew all along:  give the people what they WANT, what they dreamed of when they saw the original, read the comic book or played with the toys, and they'll return the favor.  Like Iron Man before it, The Dark Knight isn't just “some Batman movie,” it's a great movie, period, a moody, thoughtful and ultimately uplifting story about one of the central political issues of our time:  can we battle evil without becoming evil?  That Batman, The Joker, and Two-Face are the ones telling us that story is only icing on the cake.

Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) continues his crusade against crime in Gotham City as the costumed vigilante Batman.  Some of the results (like a bunch of fanboys in their own Batman costumes “fighting crime” themselves) are not what he had hoped for."  MORE

1/10/10:  "I can just imagine brothers Michael and Peter Spierig sitting someone down to explain their concern about the planet's dwindling natural resources to someone who doesn't agree with them.  “Look,” they might say, “imagine that the human race was all vampires, and that oil was blood.”  At that moment, perhaps, they'd have looked to each other, forgotten about their clueless friend and raced off to their laptops.  Their new movie Daybreakers riffs on that idea, a world of vampires crumbling as the human blood they need to survive slowly runs out, with great detail and precision for a hair over 90 minutes.  It's an interesting, thoughtful bloodbath that never quite catches fire because its cool, distant characters are a tad, er, bloodless.  But when it's done, you'll know you've been told a tale, and it's quite rare to see a horror movie this smart.

In the year 2019, a virus that began sweeping the Earth ten years earlier has turned essentially the entire planet into vampires.  Human civilization has continued under their rule with just a few adjustments:  no one goes out during the day (although cars with blacked-out windows and external cameras for navigation are available if you need to get somewhere) and it's the military's primary mission to hunt down the remaining humans so they can be farmed for the blood everyone needs to survive."  MORE

12/13/08:  "Remakes are an inherently dicey proposition:  the very reason people's interest is piqued by a familiar title and story is because they tend to hold the original to be above reproach and believe anything less than Gus Van Santing it shot by shot (which, come to think of it, nobody much cared for either) is sacrilege.  But remaking famous films (especially the good ones) can also be a fascinating exercise in marking the generational changes in both our society and our cinema.  If there were a Mt. Rushmore for 50's sci-fi, Robert Wise's 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still would be on it, and Scott Derrickson's perfectly cast update does the most important thing a remake can:  hold Wise's film up as a mirror to the world that has revisited it.  With more sound, more fury, and a whole new set of reasons to believe man is about to snuff out his own existence, this new Day proves to be an entertaining, thoughtful blockbuster... even if nobody ever does get around to saying “Klattu Barada Nikto”.

Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly), a widow raising her stepson Jacob (Jaden Smith), is rousted out of her house one evening by a military escort."  MORE

8/24/08:  "About a year and a half ago, I stood more or less alone in my fanatical love of The Condemned, a slam-bang B movie that cast wrestler Steve Austin as a wrongfully imprisoned soldier trapped on an island as a contestant on a reality TV show where he and his fellow prisoners were forced to fight to the death.  It never looked better to me than it does now that I've seen Death Race, which plays like a Master's Thesis on how to screw the same story up.  Action star Jason Statham plays a wrongfully imprisoned ex-con trapped in an island prison as a contestant on a reality TV show where he and his fellow prisoners are forced to race to the death in souped-up killing machine cars.  It's got a far more accomplished cast and production values that put the direct-to-video-looking Condemned to shame, but it's wrongheaded at almost every turn and suffers from one of the most fundamentally dumb screenplays I've seen filmed in quite some time.  Action hack Paul W.S. Anderson (Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, Alien vs. Predator) has made many more competently entertaining flicks than his status as online whipping boy would suggest, but Death Race is one of those movies that keeps you asking “what were they thinking?” until you realize they weren't."  MORE

9/6/07:  "It happens all the time in movies:  the hero lusts for revenge on the bad guy, bringing down all his plans and henchmen to finally stand gun-to-head with the fiend and be struck by an epiphany: “Don't do it!  It'll make you just like him!”  Honestly, while I get the sentiment, I've always found this to be a cheap and unearned device:  it's an awful lot of split-second soul searching for a guy who's just moved Heaven and Earth to get to this point without giving that a moment's thought.  But I'd buy it a lot more from now on if their inner Dalai Lama would just cry out “Don't do it!  You don't wanna end up like Kevin Bacon in Death Sentence!”  Making this point as well as humanly possible, the first non-horror outing from Saw director James Wan is a relentlessly gripping thriller that depicts a positively Shakespearian tragedy of murder, revenge, and the special madness that lies in the words “If I stop now, it'll all have been for nothing”.

Risk analyst Nick Hume (Kevin Bacon) has a perfect life with his wife Helen (Kelly Preston) and sons Brendan (Stuart Lafferty) and Lucas (Jordan Garrett).  Brendan is the favorite, and Nick's only too happy to drive him to The Big City for a special hockey game."  MORE

4/26/08:  "There are two kinds of people in the world.  The ones who sit back and wait for happiness and success to come to them and those who barrel forward determined to grab those things by sheer force of will.  Those of us in the former group have the certain fascination with the later:  doesn't everybody wish they were that guy who takes what he wants and seems immune to doubt and regret?  The new Hugh Jackman/Ewan McGregor vehicle Deception is ostensibly one of those tricky thrillers where nothing is as it seems, but at its' heart, it's a sensational character study about two different worldviews.

Jonathan McQuarry (Ewan McGregor) is an accountant who specializes in audits.  Spending all his time in offices where he's The Enemy, he makes no friends at work and is too shy to meet anyone in the outside world.  One day, while he's auditing a law firm into the late hours, in walks attorney Wyatt Bose (Hugh Jackman).  Wyatt is everything Jonathan wishes he was:  handsome, funny, and charismatic as hell.  The lawyer offers the accountant a joint and they spend the rest of the night and the next few days bonding.  Then, Wyatt is called away on business and they “accidentally” swap cell phones.  Jonathan finds Wyatt's phone ringing nightly, with women on the other end asking “Are you free tonight?” and giving him a hotel and room number."  MORE

1/20/09:  "I was tickled once by a Stephen King comment about people watching The Passion of the Christ like it was the Zapruder Film, but it is easy to get caught up in the notion that when you watch a historical film, you are watching history.  I try to always do at least some historical research after seeing a film to make sure I can sort Hollywood invention from reality.  Even so, I have to say I felt a little bad about just how bored I was by Edward Zwick's Defiance, an inert, bone-dry filming of an amazing true story. 

1941:  Germans seize Belarus (it was actually called Poland at the time, thanks Wikipedia!) and begin rounding up or outright killing Jewish citizens.  Upon finding their parents killed at the family farm, the Bielski brothers, smugglers by trade, do what they always do when the police threaten:  they retreat into the woods nearby.  The brothers, oldest to youngest, are Tuvia (Daniel Craig), Zus (Liev Schreiber), Asael (Jamie Bell) and young Aron (George McKay) (in reality, Asael was older than Zus, thanks Wikipedia!).  While the Bielskis are far better equipped to survive than their neighbors, they are not the only Jews to seek refuge in the woods, and they just keep happening upon people asking for help."  MORE

5/13/07:  "While I don't think of myself that way, Jeff Foxworthy has informed me on more than one occasion that I might possibly be a redneck.  I was born and raised in small-town central Pennsylvania, the land of back (and sometimes front) yards filled with junk cars up on blocks and folks dreaming of living the good life on a disability settlement.  I don't like NASCAR, don't listen to country music, and the blue book value of my car does not rise and fall depending upon how much gas is in it, but I do know the world of Blue Collar Comedy Tour veterans Larry the Cable Guy and Bill Engvall pretty well.  Maybe that's why I got such a kick out of their new lowbrow comedy adventure Delta Farce, which attempts to drop the worst Army Reservists ever into the Iraq War and only misses by a few thousand miles.

Sincere Larry (Larry the Cable Guy), sneaky Bill (Bill Engvall) and crazy Everett (DJ Qualls, courageously playing someone with a different first name) somehow managed to “miss” their Reserve Unit's deployment to Iraq.  One weekend a month, they still head out to the base to drive trucks, shoot guns and watch TV.  But with manpower stretched to its' limit, the Army sends the brutal Sgt. Kilgore (Keith David) to bring them in."  MORE

1/4/07:  "A great concept and an amazing all-star cast service the unfortunately muddled screenplay that is The Departed.  Martin Scorsese will redoubtably make another run at his long-denied Best Director Oscar, but this is far from his best work.

Gangster Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) rules his Boston neighborhood.  He punishes his enemies, rewards his friends, and is always on the lookout for new recruits.  That includes kids like Colin Sullivan, who grows up (as Matt Damon) to join the police academy and wind up on the fast track, all the while feeding Costello the information he needs to stay one step ahead of the cops.  Meanwhile, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) can't shake his family's criminal background, even when he becomes a cop.  An elite undercover unit led by Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) recruits him for a job no sane man would seem to want:  get thrown off the force and join Costello's organization, all the while feeding information back to the Police.  As the police get closer and closer to an arrest, they assign Sullivan to find the mole within their ranks, and Costello demands that Costigan find the one within his own organization.  As the double-crosses and bodies pile up, Costigan finds that the only person he can trust is a psychiatrist (Vera Farmiga), who just happens to be Sullivan's fiance."  MORE

8/14/09:  "The pilot episode of TV's The X-Files began with a disclaimer:  “The following story is inspired by actual documented accounts”.  Creator Chris Carter would later acknowledge that no such accounts had existed, but that the text was forced upon him by FOX executives riding high on the success of shows like COPS and America's Most Wanted who couldn't imagine why anyone would want to watch anything that wasn't “true”.  Of course, the salad days of COPS seem pretty tame compared to the Reality TV/YouTube rabbit hole down which much of our society has fallen, and more and more movies in the years since The Blair Witch Project have felt the need to add a layer of “reality” to their narratives through the use of fake real footage.  District 9, the much-ballyhooed directorial debut of South African Neil Blomkamp, tells an allegorical tale of his country repeating the sins of apartheid when a race of aliens arrives in a derelict starship over Johannesburg.  All the pieces of a great sci-fi flick are here, and the second half of the movie builds up an impressive head of steam.  But Blomkamp had previously made a mockumentary short on the same subject, and errs in revisiting the format at feature length.  As a fake documentary, District 9 is underdeveloped, maddeningly inconsistent and unmemorable.  The good stuff (including a sensational debut performance by Sharlto Copley) is very good indeed, and I liked the movie on balance."  MORE

4/16/07:  "Most Hollywood movies take whatever interesting, possibly even unique, story hook they've got and execute it as dictated by one of a dozen or so familiar genre formulas movie fans could recite by heart.  Not, as Jerry Seinfeld once said, that there's anything wrong with that.  Formulas, for the most part, exist because they work.  They're satisfying and fun and most movies that defy them ultimately do so to their detriment (a good writer can play by the rules, while it takes a great one to break them successfully).  But one interesting way to make a familiar story new is to take two totally different formulas and run them on parallel tracks during the same movie.  That's exactly what happens in Disturbia, which is both the umpteenth unofficial remake of Hitchcock's classic Rear Window and a John Hughes-style romantic comedy.

Traumatized by the death of his father (Matt Craven) in an auto accident while he was behind the wheel, high school student Kale (Shia LaBeouf) goes into a downward spiral that ends with him assaulting one of his teachers.  Sentenced to three months of house arrest over summer vacation, Kale has no company but his mom Julie (Carrie-Anne Moss), goofball friend Ronnie (Aaron Yoo)... and the people he can see out his window."  MORE

6/22/07:  "It's fitting that only a single letter separates the words “CAMP” and “CRAP”:  attempting to delight an audience with intentional cheesiness is one of the hardest things in movies.  Out on this kind of ledge, film criticism is almost besides the point:  only you know what quickens your pulse and tickles your funny bone.  After a long, long time on the shelf, the Weinstein Company has slipped the video game adaptation DOA:  Dead or Alive, a kind of Enter the Dragon filled with bikini-clad babes, into a handful of theaters in what's probably some sort of tax scheme.  Luckily, one of them was in my neck of the woods, because this silly, cheeky film delighted me to no end.

All over the world, elite (or at least really peculiar) fighters receive invitations to a secluded island to participate in a famed annual tournament called DOA (why this is the case, I have no idea, since each fighter only needs to knock their opponents unconscious to win).  The event's original promoter has died, leaving his daughter Helena (Sarah Carter) to prepare for her first try as a contestant, while his ex-partner Donovan (Eric Roberts) runs the event.  The other fighters are a mixed lot."  MORE

3/23/08:  "Since the clamps were let off of movie content at the end of the censorship era in the late 60's, we've always had violent, gory horror and action movies.  But during times of particular national distress (Vietnam/Watergate, the Reagan-era climax of the cold war, and, uh, now) certain sub-genres have consistently risen from their graves.  Flesh-eating zombies, world-destroying plagues, and the post-apocalyptic future popularized by the Mad Max series have all taken on lives of their own.  But by offering us a world-destroying plague that gives rise to a flesh-eating Mad Max society, writer/director Neil Marshall (in his first outing since being declared a horror genius for his work on The Descent) struggles to make anything about his aptly titled new film Doomsday pop.  We have literally seen it all before, and if you're pulling this much of your movie out of the recycle bin, the execution had better be top-notch.  Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions, Doomsday is as creaky as it is familiar.

Sometime around the present, Scotland is ravaged by the Reaper Virus, which turns people into puffy-faced makeup effects before killing them and spreads like the common cold.  Mortified, England chooses containment over finding a cure and walls off the entire country, also surrounding it with mines and a no-fly zone, then happily forgets about their dying neighbors to the North." MORE

12/31/08:  "Upon divesting its' development slate of projects like Ali, About Schmidt and The Shipping News in the late 90's, Sony chairman John Calley uttered these immortal words:  “We're not going to make movies for audiences that need to be dynamited out of their homes.”  He was only saying aloud what most of the industry was thinking, as the era when Saving Private Ryan and Armageddon could co-exist as 1998's two 200 million dollar grossers gave way to the one in which no non-franchise drama grossed 100 million this year.  What happened? Sure, there was a whole lot of self-fulfilling babble about home theaters and DVDs, but the truth of the matter is that drama as a genre got labeled with a scarlet B for an entire generation of moviegoers.  And, yes, just as a good many action movies and comedies are soul-numbingly stupid, a good many dramas are a tad, er, deliberate.  But I have come here to tell you that it need not always be so.  In the right hands, a filmed stage play about a couple of nuns wondering if their Priest has “acted inappropriately” toward a Catholic school student can emerge as the year's most gripping thriller.  That play is Doubt, brilliantly adapted and directed by Pulitzer-winner John Patrick Shanley.  In addition to his, the hands are those of actors Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Viola Davis, who make every one of his ever-so-carefully chosen words cause to perch on the edge of our seat." MORE

6/7/09:  "My day job is in the financial sector, and I can tell you without a doubt that the road to Hell is paved with middle management.  Following meaningless rules no matter who they hurt, nickel and diming customers in the name of profit margins, and generally looking at the world through the prism of tomorrow's stock price and “getting ahead” are steadily rotting our collective morality and devastating our economy with no end in sight.  We've all got our reasons:  everybody's doing it, honesty's for suckers, I've got bills to pay, blah blah blah.  Perhaps what our corporate mentality needs is a little Old Testament shakeup, and Sam Raimi's ready to deliver it with the ruthlessly moralistic thriller Drag Me to Hell.  For his first non-Spider-Man outing in nine years, the Evil Dead director reconnects with his grindhouse roots to tell the tale of a loan manager for whom a tiny little sin comes with a really big price.  Light on its' feet, and positively giddy with the filmmaker's skill at delivering scares, Drag Me to Hell will make you think twice the next time you're tempted to stamp “DENIED” on an application you could approve if you wanted to.

Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) has a good life, with a solid job as a bank's loan manager that could lead to a promotion and a great boyfriend in college professor Clay Dalton (Justin Long)."  MORE

4/14/09:  "It's amazing how much time, effort, money and passion can go into a film that still comes out looking like an afterthought.  20th Century Fox poured tens of millions of dollars into their film adaptation of the much-loved (but unread by me) anime Dragonball and populated the cast with an impressive group of familiar actors at least one of whom (James Marsters) reportedly conspired with the makeup artist to change the look of his character to be more comic-appropriate because “Better to get fired than to get Piccolo wrong”.  But while its' spirits are consistently high, James Wong's Dragonball:  Evolution is an 84-minute jaunt through fantasy boilerplate than rarely explains itself or develops any dramatic momentum. Dragonball doesn't hurt (at least not if you don't care about the property, I understand fans' reactions have been less forgiving than mine), but it's not particularly engaging either.

In some vaguely futuristic city, Goku (Justin Chatwin) has been raised by his kindly Grandpa Gohan (Randall Duk Kim) who's taught him mystical martial arts and given him the gift of a Dragonball, one of seven forged millennia ago to drive off aliens who attacked the Earth.  On his 18th birthday, he happens to get invited to a party thrown by the Girl of His Dreams, Chi Chi (Jamie Chung), meaning he's not home when Lord Piccolo (James Marsters) attacks, leaving Gohan for dead."  MORE

9/15/07:  "When I first saw the trailer for Dragon Wars (or D-War as it was known in its' home country of South Korea), I'd had such high hopes.  Here, in the middle of September, was a Fairy Tale Monsters Attack LA spectacle filled with top-shelf visual effects.  As a fan of the Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie school of monster mash, how could I not expect greatness?  Alas, as a movie, Dragon Wars is a great trailer.  20-odd minutes of remarkably imaginative CGI effects come wrapped in a silly, amateurish package in which a cast of familiar faces muddle through an incomprehensible plot while speaking Online Translator English and waiting to run from something cool.

Ethan (Jason Behr) is a reporter for CGNN (you may roll your eyes now) who sees authorities unearthing a giant scale that reminds him of a strange incident from his childhood. At an antique shop, he met Jack (Robert Forster) who told him (in flashbacks-within-flashbacks) a story about how every 500 years giant serpents called Imoogies and Burakis fight over the Yuh Yi Joo, some kind of spiritual thingie that's inside a woman born with a dragon birthmark on her shoulder."  MORE

3/30/09:  "Few women have ever had the pure starpower of Julia Roberts.  When combined with a worthy role (star turns in Pretty Woman, Sleeping with the Enemy and Erin Brockovich, supporting roles in Flatliners, Charlie Wilson's War and the otherwise hopeless Hook), nobody's better.  But whether you want to blame her own taste in projects, the scarcity of good roles for women or the fact that in recent years her attention has been more on family than career, we haven't seen the full measure of her talent as often as you'd think.  So even when the vehicle's questionable (My Best Friend's Wedding, The Mexican), I'm always happy to see her turn the burners on, and she does just that in Duplicity, a too-cool-for-school caper flick from Michael Clayton writer-director Tony Gilroy.  As in Clayton, he's primarily interested in the soullessness of the modern business world.  But unlike that heavy drama, Duplicity is supposed to be fun and as such finds itself in desperate need of someone to root for.  It's fun to watch Roberts and co-star Clive Owen strike sparks and the plot is undeniably clever, but the movie often drags and I ultimately felt no emotional investment in the outcome.  The stars (and supporting player Paul Giamatti) are in fine form, and as such Duplicity is for buffs only, which I just happen to be."  MORE