2/11/07:  "I've seen movies juxtapose the events of World War II with sci-fi, fantasy or horror in the past, usually because of our endless desire to see Nazis get theirs, and if they do it at the hands of fantastic creatures, all the better.  But I've never seen it done so skillfully as in Guillermo del Torro's Pan's Labyrinth, which merges a story of the last days of the Spanish Civil War with a fairy tale story about a little girl trying to escape to her fated place in a magical kingdom.  Both stories are really about the same, old-fashioned lesson:  the importance of doing the right thing, no matter how hard it is.

Young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) seeks solace in books filled with fairy tales.  Spain is in turmoil, and her mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) has married the cruel Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez).  Carmen is pregnant with the Captain's child, and he has the women brought on a perilous trip to his headquarters so his son can be born in his presence, indifferent to the damage the journey has done to the mother.  One night, Ofelia is lead by an insect that becomes a fairy into an ancient labyrinth.  There she meets Pan (Doug Jones), a faun who tells her that she is the reincarnation of a fairy-tale princess who can reclaim her place at her father's side in a land far, far away.  All she needs to do is complete three increasingly arduous tasks."  MORE

4/16/07:  "Is it just me, or have posters, banners and stand-ups for this movie been in theaters since the Reagan administration?  Pathfinder (as it's called on-screen; Fox's subtitle-happy marketing department has dubbed it Pathfinder:  Legend of the Ghost Warrior in ads) has been appearing and disappearing from the release schedule for at least a couple years now, but the runaway success of 300 has apparently persuaded the studio to finally let it out of its' cage.  But it's not the Spartan blockbuster that springs to mind now that I've seen it:  substitute Vikings for Mayans and Pathfinder is like a short, artless Sci-Fi Channel remake of Apocalypto.

About a thousand years ago, Native Americans discover a crashed Viking ship with a single survivor:  a sword-wielding child (Burkely Duffield).  The tribe adopts him and he grows up to be sword-wielding adult Ghost (Karl Urban).  One day, a new ship full of sadistic Norse Warriors arrives and slaughters the village.  Ghost is injured in the attack and taken in by yet another tribe, led by the Pathfinder (Russell Means).  He recovers and warns them to run for it while he stays and makes a stand.  And that he does, with the help of the peculiar Blackwing (Jay Tavare) and Pathfinder's daughter Starfire (Moon Bloodgold)."  MORE

3/5/08:  "It takes many elements to make a great movie, but just about all of them can be classified under one of three headings:  pure cinema (everything from the director's shot choices and the special effects to the work of the makeup artists and the foley editors), acting and plot.  How you'd rank them in order of importance says a lot about the kind of moviegoer you are.  I can really enjoy the crafts of actors and filmmakers of all kinds, but at the end of the day, it's difficult to be anything but unhappy with a movie with a BAD story.  Mediocre stories can be overcome, but if I'm sitting in my carefully selected seat in the middle of the back row of the front section of the theater asking myself who came up with this nonsense, no amount of effort from the rest of the cast and crew can make up for it.  Case in point:  you'd be hard-pressed to find a better acted comic fantasy than the new (relatively speaking:  it played at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival) Resse Witherspoon-produced fable Penelope, and the handsomely mounted production is certainly up to code.  But all that could only keep me occupied for so long while Leslie Caveny's screenplay chugs along on fumes for an hour or so and then goes into a suicidal nosedive no amount of post-production tinkering can salvage.  Penelope is a hopeless mess, but given how hard a really good cast tries to make it work, I felt at least as sorry for them as I did myself for having watched it."  MORE

5/27/07:  "It's a fact of modern box office life:  some sequels are so highly anticipated that there is no possibility that they will fail financially.  And thus, there is no possibility that the studio will not put a third movie into production.  Back in the late 80's, the always inventive (though not always in a good way) Robert Zemeckis recognized these facts and asked “why not just make the second and third movies at the same time?”  The resulting Back to the Future Parts 2 & 3 were at times brilliant (mostly in Part 2) and at times just vamping to fill out the running time (that would be Part 3) but either way, they set a precedent that haunts blockbuster fans to this day.  After the joyous explosion of swashbuckling quirkiness that was Pirates of the Caribbean:  The Curse of the Black Pearl, back-to-back sequels were commissioned, telling a sprawling two-part story of curses and betrayals that could easily have been fit into a single lean film.  Last summer, we watched the murky, downbeat Dead Man's Chest vamp to kill its' two and a half hour running time.  Now, at last, we get the goods.  Pirates of the Caribbean:  At World's End is also too long for its' own good, but the fat is pretty much exclusively in the first hour, and once it kicks into gear... WOW!

Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) is dead, killed by the Kraken at the end of the previous film."  MORE

10/5/07:  "Produced and co-written by the young Steven Spielberg, whose Amblin Entertainment sensibilities were seminal to my childhood movie experience, Poltergeist was marketed under the tagline “It Knows What Scares You”.  It certainly knew what scared me when I first saw it on HBO at the age of 10.  Closets, your toys sitting there staring at you in the dark, thunderstorms, and worst of all, old dead trees.  Oh, and it's got some ghosts too.  I hadn't seen the film from beginning to end in years, and it's interesting to watch it with parents Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams as my points of identification rather than their poor, put-upon kids.  But it holds up surprisingly well, with a loose, frisky spirit and patient faith in its' subject matter that you wouldn't see in a similar movie today.

Life is good for the Freeling family, Mom Diane (JoBeth Williams) dotes over 16-year old daughter Dana (Dominique Dunne), 8-year old son Robbie (Oliver Robins) and 5-year-old daughter Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke) while Dad Steve (Craig T. Nelson) is the top home salesman for the ever-expanding planned community in which they live."  MORE

3/17/07:  "*** SPOILER WARNING:  PREMONITION IS A MOVIE THAT'S PRETTY MUCH IMPOSSIBLE TO DISCUSS IN ANY MEANINGFUL WAY WITHOUT GETTING INTO HOW IT ENDS.  IF (AND IT WOULD BE A MISTAKE) YOU WISH TO SEE IT UNSPOILED, PROCEED NO FURTHER ***

There's a whole modern genre of thrillers that are the bastard children of Pulp Fiction and The Sixth Sense:  mix up the timeline, leave the audience guessing what the Hell's going on, and keep things moving at the slowest possible pace to maximize suspense.  The problem with most people who try to knock off the works of Tarantino and Shyamalan is that they get the style, but not the substance.  Perhaps the ultimate example of this is the awful new Sandra Bullock thriller Premonition, whose events can only be explained as the story of a woman trapped in God's really bad spec script.

Linda Hanson (Bullock) lives a vaguely sad, unfulfilling life with her husband Jim (Julian McMahon) and daughters Megan (Shyann McClure) and Bridgette (Courtney Taylor Burness)." MORE

10/26/08:  "Of all the little nooks and crannies of film criticism, the hardest thing to quantify is the simple fact that some things do and some things don't grab our interest.  I can point to a lot of things that go right with Pride & Glory, the new film from the director of my favorite movie of 2004, Miracle.  It's got excellent performances that do a really tremendous job summoning the realistic dynamic of a quietly dysfunctional family.  A a police thriller, it includes moments of effectively shocking violence.  But the one thing it couldn't do was engage my attention.  As its' mystery plot sprawled on and supporting characters filibustered through scenes that worked in and of themselves but did nothing to advance the plot, my mind wandered.  And I can't really recommend a movie I struggled to focus on, can I?

A spirited NYPD football game is broken up by shocking news:  a bust gone awry has led to the shooting deaths of 4 officers under the command of Francis Tierney Jr. (Noah Emmerich).  A task force is quickly assembled, and Francis Tierney Sr. (Jon Voigt) moves quickly to assure that his other son Ray (Edward Norton) is on it.  Ray's been hiding out in a desk job since an incident two years back that's clearly shattered his confidence and thrown his personal life into disarray."  MORE

1/16/07:  "I'm a sucker for creature features:  all the way back to the days when I used to plop my pre-teen butt down on the couch to watch Creature Double Feature on a now-defunct UHF station, I've always loved to watch giant creatures make life miserable for the poor humans who dared to get in their path.  Because this opinion seems to be in a distinct minority, my options to see this sort of thing in the theater aren't what they used to be.  But don't let Hollywood Pictures' deceptive ad campaign (serial killer, my ass!) fool you:  Primeval is a genuine, honest-to-God giant crocodile movie.  Saints be praised!

After making his cable news network bosses look bad by getting a big story wrong, news producer Tim Manfrey (Prison Break's Dominic Purcell) and his trusty camerman Steve (Orlando Jones) are sent to a civil war-ravaged African nation in search of the giant crocodile Gustav, who has just made news by killing a UN Anthropologist.  They're paired with an eclectic (albeit familiar) team:  Aviva Masters (Brooke Langton), a reporter who specializes in human interest animal stories, Great White Hunter Jacog Kreig (Jurgen Prochnow), Steve Irwin knock-off Matthew Collins (Gideon Emery), local kid JoJo (Gabriel Malema) and a couple of scary soldiers."  MORE

12/25/07:  "I am a firm believer that if it's well done, anyone can enjoy any kind of movie.  So, I've never been one to run from titles (OK, I ran from Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, but what man didn't???) just because they come bearing the mark of Chick Flick.  After all, Pretty Woman is one of my all-time favorite movies (did I just play the “Some of my favorite movies are Chick Flicks” card?).  But I think that where genre (and gender) tastes come into play is when the movie isn't well done.  Fans of this site know very well I can be a sucker for certain kinds of sci-fi and action junk even when it's not exactly up to code, but if women's shoes are going to play a major role in your plot, you'd better have the goods.  P.S. I Love You, Richard LaGravenese's second Hilary Swank vehicle this year (after the far superior Freedom Writers), both leans heavily on the shoes and is an utter mess.  As such, it was at times quite painful to watch.

Holly (Hilary Swank) and Gerry Kennedy (Gerard Butler) were very much in love and married for a decade before he died from a brain tumor, sending her into a downward spiral of shut-in despair and watching depressing movies from the 40's." MORE

1/4/07:  "Sure, he's handsome, funny and a fine actor, but I suspect the real reason Will Smith has quietly become Hollywood's biggest star is that he seems like a really nice guy. Exhibit A:  The Pursuit of Happyness, an already amazing real-life rags-to-riches story that draws almost unbearable suspense from the horror of reducing our pal the Fresh Prince to sleeping at homeless shelters while he doggedly pursues the American Dream.

It's 1981.  Chris Gardner (Smith) has poured all his savings into an advanced but expensive line of bone density scanners he tries (and mostly fails) to sell to hospitals.  His wife Linda (Thandie Newton) pulls two shifts at a lousy job trying to keep them and their young son Christopher (Will's real-life son Jaden Christopher Syre Smith) afloat.  Looking for a way out of economic quicksand, Chris has a chance meeting with a stock broker and his expensive car outside the offices of Dean Witter.  Despite an education that ends with high school and an unimpressive resume, he becomes determined to get his foot in the door of the better life a job there represents." MORE