Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (review)
This is simply a great flick: powerfully emotional, profoundly resonant, scary and funny and intense and wholly enrapturing.
drama
Trust (review)
For a goodly while, it does feel, depressingly, as if Trust is going to morph into one of those luridly melodramatic made-for-Lifetime flicks gone theatrical feature thanks to the presence of a stellar cast…
The Tree of Life (review)
Tree of life? Tree of sanctimonious mopey male egotism disguised as a search for meaning, more like. Or a search for God. Or for nostalgia. Or for innocence. Or for Mom. Or for something.
The Conspirator (review)
Admirable. Too, too admirable…
X-Men: First Class (review)
“Best. Comic Book Movie. Evah!” So my inner fangirl is screaming at the moment as she does a little happy Snoopy dance.
Water for Elephants (review)
As cornball goes, there’s nothing cornier than running away to join the circus. And that’s why Water for Elephants works so beautifully: It doesn’t pretend to be anything other than an old-fashioned melodrama yarn-spun for as much emotion and tragedy and romance as possible.
William & Kate (review)
If you’re gonna do a WB-esque royal-wedding cash-in movie, you have to give it a fair shot. Where is the dream sequence? I fully expected to see Kate go all Buffy on some shuffling hoards of zombie paparazzi. But it’s nowhere to be found in William & Kate. How mysterious.
Miral (review)
What could possibly be offensive about artist-filmmaker Julian Schnabel taking on an underdog tale and imbuing it with his usual warm, empathetic, humanist touch? Ah, here is Schnabel’s mistake: his story is about a Palestinian girl, and he fails to give equal time to the Israeli side of the story, an unforgivable transgression in the eyes of many. That said…
Oranges and Sunshine (review)
Hilarious true story. You’ll love this. In the 20th century, up until as late as 1970, thousands and thousands and thousands of British children were forcibly deported to Australia, where they were herded into group homes or other institutions, treated like slave labor, and subject to regular physical and sexual abuse on top of the emotional abuse of being ripped from their families, their homes, their country.
Blooded (review)
First-time feature filmmakers director Edward Boase and screenwriter James Walker want you know right off the bat that Blooded is not a “mockumentary.” But it is a fictional story told in an expansive documentary format — complete with “reenactments” of “real” events — that lends a powerful urgency and immediacy and relevance to an invented story in a way that a more narrative structure would have missed.
