Five Minutes of Heaven (review)
After a disastrous foray into Hollywood, German director Oliver Hirschbiegel returns to the realms of uneasy morality he explored in his portrait of Bunker Hitler in *Downfall*…
reviews
2012 (review)
It’s kind of awesome, the film’s self-involvement. This isn’t really a movie: it’s more director/FX-mad wannabe supervillain Roland Emmerich calling out every other disaster film that has ever come before… including his own. Aliens blowing up the Empire State Builder? What piker came up with that?
The Box (review)
It’s a box. A cardboard box. Frank Langella brings it to your door, and inside is the Pop-o-matic of Death, and you either push the big red button under the plastic dome, in which case someone you don’t know dies and you get a cool million in a briefcase, or you don’t, in which you don’t get a movie made about you. Resisting the Moral Dilemma? No movie for you!
Pirate Radio (aka The Boat That Rocked) (review)
Richard Curtis appears to have nothing at all to say *about anything at all* in this mess of a misbegotten would-be comedy.
The Men Who Stare at Goats (review)
I’m not sure if I’ve seen a more sublimely funny moment on screen this year than the one in which George Clooney, in all deep serious earnestness, tries to convince Ewan McGregor that he — McGregor, that is — is a Jedi warrior.
A Christmas Carol (review)
Robert Zemeckis appears to have given up making fantasies for grownups in favor of making theme-park attractions designed to do nothing more than shut the kiddies up for 90 minutes, if they can sit still for that long for the dazzling…
The Fourth Kind (review)
There is no ‘archival footage’ of these sessions upon which *The Fourth Kind* was based. None of the ‘archival footage’ we see here, as terrifyingly plausible as it is, is real. Seriously. I promise you.
Coco Before Chanel (review)
Audrey Tautou looks *amazing,* surrounded by women who flounce around like fluffy Edwardian fruit cups. But moments like that — in which you really feel the impact of Chanel’s legacy — are, *tant pis,* all too rare…
Motherhood (review)
It’s too bad that writer-director Katherine Dieckmann couldn’t imbue her portrait of the titular state with as much easy, authentic panache as she does her setting.
The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day (review)
Riotously awful and simultaneously vile, this orgy of sexualize violence with no point except to give itself something to jerk off to…
