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?
suspense/thriller
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale movie review
You simply need to see this to believe that anyone would conceive of such an outlandishly demented Christmas fantasy. In playing with the creepy roots of the story of Santa, Rare Exports finds the grim awfulness in the supposedly pleasant fantasy…
The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Luftslottet som sprängdes) (review)
Tough, smart, and competent, yet also wounded and searching: that Lisbeth Salander remains the riveting centerpiece of the two films that follow on from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but, alas, her continuing story has been winnowed down in a way that makes it — and her — feel smaller than before.
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.
Unstoppable (review)
A runaway freight train loaded with dangerous chemicals is heading into a densely populated area! It’s a missile the size of the Chrysler Building! But wait! A reliable old-hand Hollywood star and a hungry new up-and-comer will save us all! Though there will be some explosions for your entertainment!
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.
classic ‘Doctor Who’ blogging: “Genesis of the Daleks”
It’s weird to look back at ‘Genesis of Daleks’ now and know that the first time I saw this — it would have been back in the early 1980s — I had no idea what the hell a Dalek was.
Red (review)
Of all the washed-up washed-out over-the-hill too-old-for-this-shit action-hero movies we’ve had thrown at us this year — The A-Team, The Losers, The Expendables — Red is by far the most amusing, the most clever, the most tongue-in-cheek, the most fun (and I say that as someone who mostly liked those other movies).
Stone (review)
No, wait: lemme guess what we’re meant to take from this turgid drama of small lives and smaller ambitions. ‘Some people do bad things and go to prison, and some people do bad things and live their lives out in the wide world as if they’re in prison anyway’? ‘Crazy, quietly desperate men are sad and sympathetic, and crazy, aggressively desperate women are slutty objects of derision’?
