‘Doctor Who’ blogging: “A Christmas Carol”
Doctor Who has been doing amazing things with TV since 2005, but this may be the best example yet of how gonzo and how simultaneously emotionally satisfying TV can be these days.
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True Grit (review)
There’s a sense of something great just beyond the grasp of the Coen Brothers, something that they may not even be aware of, hanging over this elegant yet somehow vaguely unfinished film.
The Tourist (review)
Who knew the Hollywood Foreign Press Association had such a sense of humor? A nomination for Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy, for The Tourist? Unless… No… They can’t mean “Inadvertent Comedy,” can they?
Tron: Legacy (review)
This totally superfluous and eminently forgettable sequel to the groundbreaking 1982 flick Tron will make a bloody fortune, not because it embodies any qualities deserving of such, but out of compelling nostalgia and, well, not much else.
Monsters movie review
“Sunny with a chance of creatures” could well be the weather report from this world, one not too far removed from our own, in one of the most startling movies of our new DIY filmmaking culture.
The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Luftslottet som sprängdes) (review)
Tough, smart, and competent, yet also wounded and searching: that Lisbeth Salander remains the riveting centerpiece of the two films that follow on from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but, alas, her continuing story has been winnowed down in a way that makes it — and her — feel smaller than before.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (review)
More like Voyage of the Yawn Treader, actually. Little kids will surely find this collection of fantastical geegaws enthralling — look, a talking mouse! hey, a minotaur! — but as a grownup fan of the magical and the mysterious, I was almost totally bored by this third, and perhaps most tryingly pious, installment in C.S. Lewis’s fanciful spin on Christian mythology.
The Nutcracker in 3D (review)
You already know the score — duh da-duh-da-duh! duh da-duh-da-duh! — but in case you’ve forgotten, The Nutcracker in 3D will attempt to mainline it into your brain, fuel-injecting sugar-plum fairy juice into your festivus lobe at the drop of, um, a sugar plum. If you think that’s a horrendously mixed metaphor, it’s got nothing on this polar-express train wreck…
Wild Target (review)
If you didn’t get enough of Rupert Grint and Bill Nighy in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or just need a dose of goofy British-flavored comedy — offhand, self-deprecating, and coming in equal doses of light and black — don’t miss this.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (review)
I’m almost entirely sure that no one who has not read The Deathly Hallows will be able to grasp what’s going on. The film is damn nigh impenetrable without the background of the novel, and all the previous novels in the series. It was almost impenetrable to me, who has read all the books, at least on an emotional level.
