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Ninja Assassin (review)

15 comments

‘Ninja assassin.’ It’s like ‘monster trucks’ and ‘automatic weapons’ and ‘zombie Nazis’: you take two great things that are awesome separately, and then you put ’em together and it becomes like totally mindblowing, dude. Oh not.

Planet 51 (review)

21 comments

Much of what might have made it appealing to true devotees of science fiction and cinema, like how it’s a pastiche of 1950s B-movies, is lost when its parodying of the paranoia and xenophobia of those films is so relentlessly trite and obvious…

Fantastic Mr. Fox movie review: trip the dark fantastic

9 comments

Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach looked at a sweet-and-sour children’s story through a peculiarly skewed eye and said, This can be so much more. And they turned it into something touching and funny, and magically absurd and at the same time pointedly real. They turned it into something genius.

2012 (review)

45 comments

It’s kind of awesome, the film’s self-involvement. This isn’t really a movie: it’s more director/FX-mad wannabe supervillain Roland Emmerich calling out every other disaster film that has ever come before… including his own. Aliens blowing up the Empire State Builder? What piker came up with that?

The Men Who Stare at Goats (review)

11 comments

I’m not sure if I’ve seen a more sublimely funny moment on screen this year than the one in which George Clooney, in all deep serious earnestness, tries to convince Ewan McGregor that he — McGregor, that is — is a Jedi warrior.

Ong Bak 2: The Beginning (review)

1 comment

Rewinding to 15th century Thailand, this is the downright Dickensian tale of a royal boy kidnapped by slavers and raised by thieves who grows into a man who vows revenge on everyone who’s wronged him.