Law Abiding Citizen (review)
It had me at *kaboom,* this thorny moral conundrum of a film, and then it lost me when it threw out all the tricksy pointedness in favor of thoughtless, counterproductive badassery.
reviews
An Education movie review: A-plus
Someone once said that perfect movies are boring and only flawed movies intriguing, and then along comes a movie like An Education, about which the number of things that are absolutely perfect is impossible to measure… and it’s thrilling and captivating anyway.
Couples Retreat (review)
Maybe it’s pointless to complain about the shocking lack of elegance to an instantly forgettable bit of multiplex fluff like *Couples Retreat.* It’s like complaining about the food at Applebee’s…
The Invention of Lying (review)
It’s rare that a film — especially a studio film — does this: goes so far in a direction you weren’t even expecting it would go in at all that the shock of it is doubled.
Zombieland movie review: dead funny
Kinda sorta Shaun of the Dead done up American style, so instead of cricket bats as weapons and jokes about tea, it’s shotguns as anti-zombie devices and a quest to find the last Twinkie.
Whip It (review)
I always knew Drew Barrymore could be this cool: her directorial debut is a simultaneously sweet and kickass story about one girl’s finding her bliss, a movie that works within Hollywood conventions of storytelling to handily demonstrate that just because a tale is familiar doesn’t mean it can’t be fresh and funny and edgy, too.
The Boys Are Back (review)
It’s hard to believe we haven’t seen Clive Owen in a movie like this one before.
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (review)
Here’s the thing about Tucker Max: He’s a child. A toddler. A three-year-old screaming, ‘Poopie, poopie, POOPIE!” at the top of his lungs in the middle of the supermarket in the hopes of getting a reaction out of his embarrassed mother.
Bright Star movie review: cinematic poetry
John Keats is the intruder in Fanny Brawne’s story, and you might be forgiven for assuming that she’s the one who became legendary, for how the film defies convention by lavishing its focus on her.
The Baader Meinhof Complex (review)
Oh, what a riveting mess!
