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.

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.

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.

The Nutcracker in 3D (review)

You already know the score — duh da-duh-da-duh! duh da-duh-da-duh! — but in case you’ve forgotten, The Nutcracker in 3D will attempt to mainline it into your brain, fuel-injecting sugar-plum fairy juice into your festivus lobe at the drop of, um, a sugar plum. If you think that’s a horrendously mixed metaphor, it’s got nothing on this polar-express train wreck…

Wild Target (review)

If you didn’t get enough of Rupert Grint and Bill Nighy in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or just need a dose of goofy British-flavored comedy — offhand, self-deprecating, and coming in equal doses of light and black — don’t miss this.

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.

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.