The Tourist (review)
Who knew the Hollywood Foreign Press Association had such a sense of humor? A nomination for Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy, for The Tourist? Unless… No… They can’t mean “Inadvertent Comedy,” can they?
romance
Monsters movie review
“Sunny with a chance of creatures” could well be the weather report from this world, one not too far removed from our own, in one of the most startling movies of our new DIY filmmaking culture.
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.
Burlesque (review)
Oh, cheese, glorious cheese! Christina Aguilera gets off a bus from Iowa in Los Angeles with nothing but a coupla bucks in her pocket and aspirations of stardom. As a dancer. Or maybe a singer. But something flashy, anyway: it’s L.A., after all!
Tangled (review)
Between the title change and writing in a male character who appeared to be taking over the film, Disney didn’t seem at that interested in making a Rapunzel film that was actually about Rapunzel. But I should have trusted. Because if there’s one thing Disney has in spades — besides pink princesses — it is a capability to transform simple cartoons into cinematic magic.
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (review)
There’s a sneaky cheekiness to You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger that is inherent in the slyness of the title, which wraps up in one neat little package ideas about romantic fate, our yearning for something better than the pretty good thing we might already have, and an up-to-the-minute restlessness about our lives that hounds even the most comfortable of us.
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.
Catfish (review)
The ambitions that Mark Zuckerberg had for Facebook — at least what we see of them in The Social Network — seem so small and sad and deeply ungrand next to the reality of how life on Facebook plays out a mere few years later in the profoundly poignant Catfish.
Never Let Me Go movie review: ordinary people
I’ve come to realize recently that there’s something more chilling, more eerie than a fictional dystopian world: a fictional dystopian world in which no one understands they’re living in a dystopia.
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.
