A Woman Like That (review)

Forget movies about art as you’ve seen them before. Award-winning documentary filmmaker Ellen Weissbrod takes a compellingly intimate tack in her look at the convention-busting 17th-century artist Artemisia Gentileschi, creating an extraordinary synthesis that is part art appreciation, part personal diary…

I Am Number Four (review)

High school is hard. High school is even harder when you’re a secret alien from another planet in hiding from big scary guys with enormous feet and weird tattoos on their bald heads who are after you for reasons no one really understands. Except maybe that you’re the last of your kind. Well, apart from your alien-warrior protector, who isn’t specially numbered like you are.

Sanctum 3D (review)

Sanctum is extreme people in extreme danger in an extreme place. In 3D! The good kind of 3D. And both Ioan Gruffudd and Richard Roxburgh take their shirts off. What, you need Shakespeare, too, on top of all that?

John Carpenter’s The Ward (review)

Crazy hot girl is hot, I guess. Is there something perceived to be sexy about mental illness? Cuz there would appear to be no purpose here unless it’s intended to get lonely horny guys off on the idea of the tediously banal Amber Heard locked in a depressing mental institution and subject to electroshock therapy rocking her bod.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (review)

More like Voyage of the Yawn Treader, actually. Little kids will surely find this collection of fantastical geegaws enthralling — look, a talking mouse! hey, a minotaur! — but as a grownup fan of the magical and the mysterious, I was almost totally bored by this third, and perhaps most tryingly pious, installment in C.S. Lewis’s fanciful spin on Christian mythology.

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.

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.

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…