drama

Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (review)

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All over the country, little girls with equine fixations will be blinking their dreamy pony-filled eyes at their daddies and pleading please please please prettyplease can we see the horse movie? And oddly enough, *Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story* is the cinematic equivalent of the deployment of such adorable nascent feminine wiles: Please don’t shoot the horse with the broken leg, Daddy, Dakota Fanning with her enormous eyes brimming with tears and her quivering lip doesn’t exactly say, but she might as well have. Please nurse the horse back to health at tremendous personal expense and sacrifice so you can later give it to me as a prezzie and I can train her and we can enter the massively prestigious Breeder’s Cup race with her! Pul-eeeeeeze!

Good Night, and Good Luck. (review)

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Are you now, or have you ever been, a journalist? That’s what *Good Night, and Good Luck.* feels like, a smooth, sardonic smack in the face of today’s so-called newspeople, the cinematic equivalent of a withering glare and a disdainful roll of the eyes. Oh, this is an angry movie, calm and collected on the surface and seethed with reeled-in rage underneath. Yeah, it’s about Edward R. Murrow and how he took on McCarthy’s insanity, but what it’s really about is how we need a Murrow now and is there no one, not one supposed journalist, with the balls to take up Murrow’s mantle of integrity and honesty and fearlessness?

Serenity (review)

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Damn you, Joss Whedon, you *hwoon dahn*! Damn you and your honesty and integrity and unwillingness to succumb to Hollywood bullshit and–

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (review)

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Well, hooray for a movie about girls doing their own thing. Too bad it’s more like a training-bra of a flick designed to indoctrinate tweens with the estrogen-drenched sappiness of “women’s pop culture” — you know, like Oprah magazine and Lifetime Original movies and Celine Dion ballads — than a story that deals with the … more…

Unleashed and Crash (review)

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With its clear and obvious choices — think Eddie Izzard’s ‘cake? or death?’ bit — *Unleashed* really is a fairy tale next to *Crash,* where half the time when you think you’ve got a grasp on what’s the ‘right’ thing to do and the ‘right’ way to live, you turn out to be wrong, even if the other guy is wrong, too.

Diary of a Mad Black Woman (review)

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It’s kindness, at first, that leads you to suspect that someone is pulling our collective leg with *Diary of a Mad Black Woman,* because surely anything this jaw-droppingly awful must be a joke. Surely this is not being proffered with any genuine intention of it being seen as, well, an actual *movie,* with a plot and characters and scenes that connect in some reasonably logical sense. This *must* be a *MAD TV* sketch that went horribly wrong and escaped into the wild where it turned feral. Right?

Downfall (Der Untergang) movie review

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Berlin has been reduced to rubble, the Russians are overrunning the city, 10-year-old kids are fighting alongside soldiers in the streets, and a once-proud citizenry has been completely demoralized. The reaction from the nation’s leadership: “The German people chose their fate,” Joseph Goebbels says with a shrug — after all, they elected the man who … more…

Million Dollar Baby (review)

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Oh, but this is a sucker punch of a movie, harsh and sere and so thoroughly unsentimental that it seems to have active contempt for lesser movies that pander to the audience’s desire to walk out of the theater feeling good and happy and that all is right in the world. This is like winning the lottery and getting hit by a train on your way to cash in your ticket. This is not for anyone who feels the need to escape real life at the multiplex. This *is* real life, as real as film gets. You are warned.