4/23/07:  "It's April, so indulge me in a little baseball metaphor.  Like a team with a great starting rotation but no bullpen, Vacancy spends about 25 minutes carefully setting up two sympathetic characters and a creepy situation, cuts loose with a half hour of first-rate empty calorie adrenaline, and then... blows it.  I can imagine the movie sealing the deal while ending exactly the same way it does, but in a dozen little ways, it just fails to execute the fundamentals that make thrillers like this work.

Amy (Kate Beckinsale) and David Fox (Luke Wilson) are driving home from their final social engagement as a married couple:  they've agreed to tell no one they're getting a divorce until the papers are signed.  But David pulls off a crowded Interstate to take a “shortcut” and soon enough they're lost.  Then comes car trouble, and a friendly Mechanic (Ethan Embry) who helps them out.  About a mile further down the road, the car finally gives out, and the bickering couple is forced to walk back to the garage looking for help.  It's closed for the night, but the Motel next door has plenty of available rooms, as the creepy manager (Frank Whaley) informs them.  From almost the moment they take up residence in the filthy Honeymoon Suite, weird things start happening.  The phone rings, but there's no one on the other end.  Someone pounds on their door, then runs into the next room."  MORE

12/31/08:  "I've come to the conclusion that the only way to teach history in high schools is by showing the kids movies and then explaining which parts were changed for dramatic purposes.  A high school history textbook once paused for a paragraph to mention to me that some German dude put a briefcase with a bomb in it under Hitler's table and it blew up, but the Nazi Fuhrer emerged unscathed.  It's certainly the kind of fact that sticks with a person (who wouldn't have loved a crack at blowing Hitler up?), but it barely scratches the surface of the events that made Claus von Stauffenberg and his fellow July 20th Plot conspirators German heroes even though they failed.  That's where Bryan Singer's Valkyrie comes in:  methodically tracking the planning and execution of the Plot through Stauffenberg's involvement, it reveals a full-fledged coup that came ever so close to sparing the world the last nine months of the Nazis' mad rule.  Well acted from top to bottom, never less than interesting and quite moving at its' best, Valkyrie is required viewing for fans of historical thrillers, especially those who only know what they've read in textbooks and seen in the movies.

It's 1944 and Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) can no longer bear to serve the murderous Nazis."  MORE

2/23/08:  "Remember how exciting it was the first time you saw Pulp Fiction and marveled at the fact that the out-of-sequence presentation of its' three interlocking stories isn't just a gimmick, but in fact gives the story more impact than it would have had if all events had simply been told in chronological order?  A great moment and a classic movie, to be sure, but it didn't come without a price.  Tarantino's success has made it possible for less gifted filmmakers to play their own structural games, often with vastly inferior results.  Case in point:  Vantage Point, an entertaining political assassination thriller with the heart of an 80's action movie and the structure of Rashomon.  Those two great tastes don't taste great together, and while the multiple perspectives trick is OK, once the movie gets down to business for an action-packed finale, it's only too clear that a cast of characters more at home in Die Hard than Atonement could have used a lot more room to breathe.  Vantage Point is good, but if it had trusted itself to be what it so clearly is, it could have been great.

Five times, we witness the same period of roughly one hour in and around a Spanish anti-terrorism summit through the eyes of five different participants."  MORE

10/12/08:  "I've heard a fair amount of backlash against The Dark Knight saying that, while it stirs up a hornet's nest of hot button issues, it doesn't really “say” anything about the times in which we live.  Perhaps that's because what it does say is more about how iconic comic book characters would deal with those problems than how we as citizens of the real world have.  The fact is that action blockbusters very rarely have “something to say”.  They may add spice to their narratives by referencing the topical, but if a big-budget FX spectacular takes a stand on anything, you can expect that it's going to be “Pollution is bad”, “Corruption is wrong” or “Water is wet”.  So how strange was it in 2006 to see producers Joel Silver and The Wachowski Brothers (who also wrote the script) to embark on a big-budget action spectacular based on Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta, an anarchist tract they tweaked into a commentary on the politics of power and fear, post 9/11?  Although Hollywood had been mostly mum on the Bush Administration and the War on Terror, public opinion was steadily turning against both by this time, so that doesn't make V a particularly incendiary title.  What does is its' central contention:  that terrorism, the single dirtiest word in American life in the years following Al Qaeda's attacks on the US, is morally neutral."  MORE

5/23/08:  "As film buffs, we're encouraged to subscribe to a heavy duty Auteur theory that suggests every director is as much the author of his films as a novelist or a painter of their respective works.  But the truth is that more often than not, the director is more akin to the editor of a magazine, presiding over the work of dozens of other artists, always nudging his project in the right direction when it threatens to go off track.  Then there are times when you see a really unique movie, think “Hmmm... that was really unique”, and then see exactly the same uniqueness again from a different movie from the same director and say “Whoa!  Auteur alert!”  Such is the experience I had at The Visitor, the second feature written and directed by actor Tom McCarthy.  It's got a ton in common with his first, The Station Agent, from its' hyper-deliberate pace and minimal dialog to its' emphasis on the bonding of a socially awkward hero to unlikely friends and its' choice of an improbable leading man.  There's a lot more going on in The Visitor, but it achieves its' goals with the same tools:  put two people together in a room long enough and they're actually going to get to know each other.  And that changes everything.

Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is a tenured college professor and writer, but his life is almost completely devoid of joy."  MORE

2/11/07:  "There's an interesting shift happening at multiplexes all across the country:  subtitles are making a comeback.  Theaters that would never have imagined booking a movie you have to read are actually taking the leap and bringing the works of foreign filmmakers whose names you used to only know from the Oscars and by reading the columns of those Big City Critics to all new audiences.  It may not be an easy transition for everyone (a sign I recently saw in a theater lobby mentioning which of the movies they were showing are “SUBTITLED!!!” gave me visions of angry mobs emerging from Screen 13 furious at the outrage of characters who “don't speak no English!”), but it's stronger than ever this Oscar season.  So it was that I got my first look at “un film de ALMODOVAR”, the very descriptive possessory credit preferred by larger-than-live Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar. Volver is kinda slight and padded out with irrelevant subplots, but it's also fun and genuinely original.

Raimunda (Penelope Cruz), sister Sole (Lola Duenas) and daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) pay a troubling visit to her aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave) who's still self-sufficient despite being more or less totally senile."  MORE