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.

The Next Three Days (review)

How do you manage child care while doing all the footwork required to plan your wife’s prison break? It sounds ridiculous, and it should be ridiculous up on the screen. But Russell Crowe makes it work in ways that far exceed any expectations we should honestly have for such a preposterous potboiler of a concept.

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.

For Colored Girls (review)

Indie filmmaker Tyler Perry has spun an unlikely career out of catering to underserved black audiences by giving them excruciatingly unwatchable minstrel-show movies. Now, finally, Perry has made a film that doesn’t pander, that has something meaningful to say — something actually worth hearing…

Paranormal Activity 2 (review)

I suppose there’s a sort of cleverness in the direction Paranormal Activity 2 decided to take. Sequels are typically about one-upping their progenitor films by being bigger, faster, louder, more-er of everything. But the filmmakers went in the other direction: They aped the look and feel of Paranormal Activity but made everything else smaller and lesser. It’s a bold choice, if an odd one. And almost entirely predictably, it utterly fails to pay off.

Hereafter (review)

I sincerely cannot help but worry, with no snarkiness intended whatsoever, whether Clint Eastwood has gone senile. He is 80, after all. I hope this not the case, of course, and I certainly don’t wish it on the guy, but I can’t imagine what else explains this utterly baffling film.