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.

Love and Other Drugs (review)

Maybe the romantic comedy about a couple of sociopaths is where the Hollywood expression of the genre has been heading all along, since such films of recent vintage have been populated by unpleasant people doing unpleasant things in the hopes that we will be somehow charmed by them. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before pathological charm was deployed.

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.

Nowhere Boy (review)

Oh, we already know how it ends! John Lennon starts a band and ends up bigger than God. Before that, though… whew. There’s a whole lotta psychosexual stuff packed into Nowhere Boy, the tale of Lennon’s adolescence in Liverpool, which may or may not be true, but it sure makes for a smashing film.

It’s Kind of a Funny Story (review)

‘I wanna kill myself,’ Craig tells the triage nurse. ‘Fill this out,’ she tells him boredly, handing him some paperwork. Yet the film steadfastly refuses to go anywhere near cultural criticism of how we now turn ordinary frustrations and disappointments into medical diagnoses…

Howl (review)

James Franco’s elucidation of Allen Ginsberg is soaring in its warmth and sincerity. The words are (mostly) the writer’s, but the vitality and the passion are all Franco’s: he makes the poet breathe for us today in a way that feels entirely modern and relevant.

Let Me In (review)

It is a strange and curious thing that director Matt Reeves chose to follow up his uniquely distinctive Cloverfield with a film that is, if not precisely a shot for shot remake of the Swedish-language Let the Right One In, then at least a tonal copy.

The Social Network movie review: unfriend

The Social Network isn’t overly concerned with the obvious irony: ha ha, an antisocial nerd invented the most popular social-networking Web site on the planet. As Fincher frames it, Zuckerberg’s loneliness is hardly ironic. It is, in fact, inherent in the mindset that got him to where he is…

Freakonomics (review)

There’s an appealing sort of crazy, on the surface, to Freakonomics — the theory, the book, and now the documentary. But it seems for all the world as if Freakonomics the movie is mocking Freakonomics the theory. Did they mean to do that?