11/8/08:  "It's funny to think back to my childhood, when one could go an entire year without a new animated movie being released, and the ones that did trickle out were generally flops.  Now, the Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks revolution has firmly entrenched the animated comedy as one of our most dominant movie genres.  A big part of that formula is the use of popular comedians doing the voices, and we're always assured that lots of improvising went on while recording the dialog.  But because an animated movie is essentially one long special effects sequence, it's rare to see one that truly has a sense of spontaneity to it.  Madagascar:  Escape 2 Africa is such a movie, a big-budget modern day Hope/Crosby Road movie that puts a cast full of clinically insane talking animals through a bunch of loosely connected sketches that add up to a fast-paced, fun-filled story.  It's not without bumps in the road, and in one particular case falls victim to the sequel curse of giving far, far too much screentime to a throwaway gag from the original that now just won't go away.  But directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath have pulled off a pretty tough job:  turning a smart, funny movie in a smart, funny franchise." MORE

5/8/08:  "Of all the movie genres, there's none that takes more cinematic alchemy to pull off than the Romantic Comedy.  Let's be honest, you can likely count all the romcoms you've seen with real, quality, unique three act stories without needing your toes.  When they work, it's because of things that are hard to quantify:  star power, chemistry, writing that's light on its' feet even if not structurally sound.  But when they go wrong, it's pretty easy to quantify.  I could go on all day about the flaws of Made of Honor, a labored, charmless love story for which I'd had high hopes.  It's a movie only for completists of its' appealing stars and screenwriters looking to study what they should never do.

Tom (Patrick Dempsey) lives a charmed life as the inventor of that paper cup sleeve you use to hold coffee (fun fact:  a Jim Chelossi, who I'd probably like better than Tom, did that in real life).  Getting three cents for every one that's used, he spends his time hanging out with platonic best friend Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), playing sports with his buddies and having casual sex with assorted bimbos.  Wait, did I say “casual”?  It's anything but, as the apparently OCD-stricken Tom has a lengthy list of Official Rules designed to keep his relationships from ever becoming legitimate, and he quotes them relentlessly to anyone who'll listen " MORE

5/27/08:  "There are some movies which, no matter how enjoyable they may or may not be to watch, clearly exist primarily for the people who made them.  Married Life, Ira Sachs film version of John Bingham's 1949 book Five Roundabouts to Heaven strikes me as such a movie:  with its' lovingly recreated 1950's setting and top-shelf cast smoothly and coolly wrapping their mouths around the kind of dialog that's meant to be enjoyed like fine wine, it's the kind of film the people who make movies would inevitably rather be making than the kind people actually pay to see.  Because of that great cast, and that great dialog, it's never anything less than interesting.  But at the end of the day, Sachs' thoughtful meditation on... something... is less than the sum of its' lovingly assembled parts.

Our narrator is Richard Langley (Pierce Brosnan), long-time friend of humdrum businessman Harry Allen (Chris Cooper) and his loving wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson).  Harry asks Richard to dinner to meet Kay (Rachel McAdams), a lovely young widow who's become his improbable mistress.  He explains to Richard that he's now in love, in a way he's not with Pat, and plans to leave his wife for Kay.  Except... she could surely never endure the heartbreak of a divorce, and Harry has a better idea." MORE

11/11/07:  "Everybody yearns, on some level, to connect with other people.  At least, “connect” is the word we use as adults; when we're kids, we say “fit in”.  Because while as adults we might respect and even treasure our differences, the worst possible thing for a child is to be different from those around them.  But when it's clear that those connections, that all-important “fit” isn't going to happen, we're likely to recede into the fantasy that we never wanted it to start with.  Martian Child (it's been a long time since a title so desperately pleaded for an introductory “The”), Menno Meyjes' new film version of an autobiographical book by former Star Trek writer David Gerrold, is a gentle, tentative story that takes this universal bit of human psychology to the extreme.  It's perhaps a bit too literal, its' metaphor too superficial to spend so much time exploring, but the movie is constantly engaging thanks to great performances by a first-rate cast.

David (John Cusack) is a science fiction writer riding high on the success of a bestseller he's struggling to sequel.  Always a social misfit, he's hard-pressed to restart his life after the death of his wife, and finds himself revisiting their plans to adopt a child." MORE

10/19/08:  "Truth be told, the vast majority of movies are mediocre, but there are different kinds of mediocrity.  There's the movie that's content to simply chug along at a mildly entertaining pace and keep us diverted until its' running time is up.  There's the movie that wants to be great, and sometimes is, but just can't consistently fire on more than a few cylinders.  The movie that's mostly bad, but contains a few scenes or performances that are really special.  And then there's Blockbuster Mediocrity:  that special product of trying to make the most possible viewers happy that pretty much guarantees that very few people will truly love the finished product.  Max Payne is such a movie, a 90 minute bundle of plot threads (a few of which seem to exist only to generate footage for the trailer) providing a reason for Mark Wahlberg to kill a whole lotta people, all of whom may or may not be bad.  As such, the movie's a mess.  But if you liked that trailer, you'll probably like the movie enough to get by.  It's the kind of Killing Machine Hero on a Mission movie I generally enjoy, complete with a pretty potent vein of (probably) unintentional campiness.  It's a pretty cynical way to mildly entertain an audience, but, you know, whatever works...

Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg) used to have a happy life with his loving wife Michelle (Marianthi Evans) and their child." MORE

7/30/08:  "I've always thought (only half-jokingly) that the solution to our problems in a lot of foreign lands involves carpet-bombing those countries with DVDs.  Call it decadent or materialistic all you want, but our pop culture embraces individuality and happiness in a world where too many people are afforded neither by the accident of where they were born.  A very interesting story on that subject is half-obscured behind summer movie machinery in Brian Robbins' new Eddie Murphy vehicle Meet Dave.  While containing more than its' share of childishly course humor and indifferent performances (though not from Murphy, who's very good), it also packs some big laughs and fleeting but real flashes of what could have been one hell of a sci-fi comedy.

Near the Statue of Liberty, a fireball blasts through the atmosphere and crash-lands face-first.  It then stands, dusts itself off, and walks away.  What appears to be a person (Eddie Murphy) is in fact a spaceship, sent from the planet Nil with a tiny crew inside to locate a device previously sent to the planet to scout for water.  Once acquired, that golf ball-sized object need only be dropped into the harbor and it will suck all the salt from Earth's oceans, solving Nil's energy crisis." MORE

4/1/07:  "We've all got our lists:  things that geek us up or just generally improve our enjoyment of any film in which they appear.  Mine's a little long, but here are a few things that are on it: 

-Time travel, particularly when time streams are altered so we get to see more than one future depending upon what changes are made in the past.
-Wacky inventions.
-Evil machines.
-Dinosaurs
-Mad scientists.
-Oh, and my sense of humor is kinda loopy.

Since all these things (including the loopy humor) appear in Disney's new animated film Meet the Robinsons, odds were that I was gonna have a good time.  " MORE

10/14/07:  "The ads make it look like a cross between Erin Brockovich and Disclosure:  a fast-paced red meat legal thriller about an ethically challenged lawyer at war with both his own conscience and the dirty deeds of the farm-poisoning conglomerate he's defending.  Well, some of that stuff is kicking around inside Tony Gilroy's directorial debut, but the last thing you'd call Michael Clayton is fast-paced.  A triumph of mood and character, it's something of a stretch to call the artfully dispiriting film a “thriller” at all.  Instead, it puts its' hero (a sensationally beaten-down George Clooney) through the paces of one, but each step simply re-enforces the cold facts of his existence.  Yes, there are evil corporations in Michael Clayton killing innocent people with their defective products, but the movie's real horror is its' contention that no matter how “successful” you become, the American Dream is a joyless lie.

Yes, Michael Clayton (Clooney) has a business card that'll tell you he's a lawyer, but he's actually a “fixer”, the guy who swoops down when rich people screw up and makes their problems go away.  This skill makes him very valuable to those at his firm, led by friend Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack), but has left him without a title, a partnership, or much in the way of assets." MORE

3/16/08:  "It's my self-appointed job here at The Palace to break the movies I see down:  to tell you why they work (or don't), and to explain what about them might appeal to (or repulse) you.  But there are some movies that just ping me like a tuning fork.  I can tell you about the virtues of their acting and filmmaking, but the greatest thing they have going for them is that they just gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling.  Like this one.  Between the Great Depression and the coddling and appeasement of Nazis and Fascists that laid the groundwork for WWII, the 1930's wasn't exactly our finest decade.  But it was the heyday of Showbiz glamor and saw the birth of screwball comedy.  The new comedy Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day somehow takes all four things and mixes them together into a lovely little comedy of manners and dreams.  Top-shelf performances keep the laughs coming while also delivering on the story's darker undercurrents, making this adaptation of Winifred Watson's novel as moving as it is silly.

Guenevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) is at the end of her rope.  Already considered a “Governess of Last Resort” by her employment agency, she is dismissed yet again by an angry employer and finds no new job offers forthcoming.  Broke and homeless, she grabs a lifeline off an agent's desk:  the address of an actress seeking a social secretary." MORE

11/30/07:  "Confession time:  as The Mist's end credits ominously crawled up the screen to the continuing ambient sounds of its' shocking ending, I found myself experiencing an unfamiliar sensation.  I was shaking.  For the first time since I emerged from Se7en a dozen years ago, a thriller had so engaged, terrified and ultimately exhilarated me as to produce an actual physical reaction.  Frank Darabont, known for his work on the squishier end of the Stephen King spectrum (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) and his underrated piece of Capra-Corn The Majestic, has done a full 180, turning King's 1980 tale of apocalyptic isolation into a relentlessly thrilling, utterly pitiless horror machine that makes huge, hard points about our tendency to self-destruct in the fact of fear.

Artist David Drayton (Thomas Jane) lives in a small lakeside community in Maine with his wife Stephanie (Kelly Collins Lintz) and son Billy (Nathan Gamble).  When a storm damages their house, David, Billy and hostile neighbor Brent Norton (Andre Braugher) head into town to buy supplies at the local supermarket.  David and Stephanie had already noticed an odd, thick white mist rolling in over the lake, and once it reaches town, a panic sweeps through the streets." MORE

6/5/07:  "You know it'll bust your diet to have that second donut, but it would taste so good...  that you can't afford to lose money betting on that game, but you can feel in your gut that it's a sure thing...  that alcohol is destroying your life, but you need just one drink to get through the night...  that killing is wrong, but there's something about that couple you see in the street that just calls out to you to put bullets in both their heads...

Did I lose you with the last part of that progression?  Hopefully so; the fewer budding psychopaths visiting my site, the better.  But it also means you probably haven't seen Mr. Brooks, the sensational new thriller that manages the trick of making a serial killer played by All-American Kevin Costner a sympathetic metaphor for the addictions large and small that tease and torment us.  Working its' magic on all sorts of different levels both thoughtful and escapist, Mr. Brooks is a crackerjack thriller with a pair of amazing performances.  And it's the best movie I've seen so far this year." MORE

12/13/07:  "Those who go back to the beginning of this site (mostly friends and family, to be sure) may remember that I picked Stranger Than Fiction, the feature screenwriting debut of Zach Helm, as 1996's Best Movie.  It was literate, thoughtful and wildly humanist, qualities shared by Helm's second big-screen writing job, and first as director.  But while Stranger Than Fiction is very much a movie for adults, particularly those adults who write, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium is aimed squarely at kids.  So while I can't say I was captivated throughout, the movie does pack a strong emotional punch, and I can imagine it affecting 10 year-olds just as profoundly as the Best Movie of 2006  resonated with me.

Eric Applebaum (Zach Mills) is a kid with no friends.  Well, he's got one:  Molly Mahoney (Natalie Portman), the 23-year old failed piano prodigy who manages Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, a magical toy shop filled with stuffed animals that move under their own power, doors that lead to different rooms depending upon where a certain dial is set, and a giant book that makes any item listed in its' pages materialize out of thin air.  They sell books, too, all written on demand by a guy in the basement." MORE

8/2/08:  "So, how long do you want your favorite franchise to continue?  Past the departure of the filmmakers?  The stars?  The supporting cast?  Anyone even remotely involved with the original?  Do you want to meet adult children of the heroes who hadn't even been born in the original?  Some would rather never see ANY sequels, while others would go to see anything that slaps a number (or, the current fashion, a subtitle) behind the title of the movie they once loved.  Somewhere between those two extremes lies the fan base that will embrace The Mummy:  Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.  Gone are many of the characters (Imhotep, Ardeth Bay, Anck Su Namun)  from Stephen Sommers' two Mummy films, the original actors who played Evie (Rachel Weisz) and Alex O'Connell (Freddie Boath), Sommers himself (although the credits list him as a Producer) and the Egyptian setting.  In their place, we get an interesting infusion of Chinese mythology, a few cool new characters, one great piece of recasting and one awful one, and a less effective outing behind the camera by Rob Cohen.  Tomb is a fun summer movie, but it's a shadow of the series high point, 2001's The Mummy Returns."  MORE

2/20/07:  "I want to like romantic comedies.  I really do.  But they don't make it easy for me, and I think it has something to do with The Formula.  You know, the exact plot structure all romcoms (as they call them in the business) are required to follow as surely as if they had a gun pointed at their adorable little heads.  Two people with nothing in common meet, fall in love, have a huge, hurtful meltdown and then get back together.  It doesn't sound so hard, except that while most (though certainly not all) movies can lick the meeting and the falling in love, the meltdown and the getting back together are mighty obstacles indeed.  While real-life couples fight all the time, screenwriters can rarely come up with a reason to have people split up that doesn't involve the revelation of monsterous, hugely unfunny lies that reveal the characters to be so unlikeable that I no longer care about their fates (are you listening, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days???).  And don't get me started about how often the getting back together part seems so completely unmotivated it's as though the directors started screaming in people's ears that the end titles are gonna roll in 5...4...3...

But enough about my issues, because they don't really apply here except to say that I'm always happy to come upon a movie that manages to navigate this romantic minefield and come out unscathed on the other side."  MORE