White House Down review: I’d rather be in Philadelphia
It lifts an embarrassing number of beats from Die Hard… but Channing Tatum is no Bruce Willis.
crime
Bounty Killer review
The genre equivalent of soft-core porn: it doesn’t care how strained and derivative it is as long as it is delivering flying bullets, fast cars, and closeups on women’s sashaying asses.
2 Guns review: buddy cops, slight of hand
Oddly took some advice not intended for movies: “Be specific but not memorable. Be funny but don’t make ’em laugh.”
Passion review
Trashy remake of the brilliant French black comedy strips out the satire and slathers what’s left in ridiculous lesbian-erotic-thriller sauce.
Upstream Color review: higher dimensions of storytelling
A confounding intellectual mystery, an enigmatic philosophical science fantasy that’s like a cinematic Moebius strip.
Pain and Gain review: American nightmare
A bleak, bitter, wicked pleasure that holds up the underpinnings of modern America — self-help, Jesus, and violence — for ridicule.
Rebellion (L’ordre et la morale) review
Sporadically exciting French action drama about a 1988 hostage crisis drags more often than it should.
A Hijacking (Kapringen) mini review
Harrowing drama of modern-day piracy as a sort of illicit corporate takeover; riveting and exhausting.
Olympus Has Fallen mini review
A vile propagandistic action flick that shamelessly indulges fears of terrorism while also failing on a basic narrative level.
Elysium review: third world rock from the sun
Neill Blomkamp cements his science-fiction credentials as a filmmaker with a genre vision the likes of which we haven’t seen since the socially conscious SF of the 1970s.
