The Ice Harvest movie review
John Cusack as a neo-noir antihero? Hell yes: he’s been building to this his whole career. And now he’s done it, yanked the rug out from under us and left us to wonder just how far over he’s gone.
reviews
Walk the Line movie review: finding his voice
I left the screening room on Monday afternoon with Johnny Cash’s voice— no, with Joaquin Phoenix’s where’d-he-get-that-from baritone echoing in my head…
Thunderstruck (review)
You know how, in My Best Friend’s Wedding, the pals promised to marry each other if they were both still single at 30? Well, this is just like that, except it’s five heavy-metal fans who vowed, as teenagers, that if any of them died before he turned forty, the others would bury him next to … more…
Margaret Cho: Assassin (review)
I suppose there’s a time and a place for Margaret Cho. Unfortunately, that time and place is your dorm room during the brief moment of your first semester at college when jokes about Viagra and how the pope is like a drag queen are surprising and terms like “pussy cyclone” are shocking. I mean, look, … more…
El Crimen Perfecto (review)
What if they gave a black comedy and nobody laughed? See, it’s ironic, this “perfect crime” nonsense, cuz nothing goes right and the characters are all perfect losers whom, it is hoped, we will laugh at cuz they’re such dorks. There’s Rafael (Guillermo Toledo), see, a salesman at a Spanish department store. Except we don’t … more…
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (review)
This Radcliffe kid, you have to wonder: does he have any idea? Does he look around every day at work and say to himself, ‘Holy crap, there’s Maggie Smith. That’s Michael Gambon. And they’re calling me to the set with Alan Rickman!’ Or are they all just a few more annoying and clueless adults who make his teenage life a living hell?
Pride & Prejudice (review)
This is what, the 18,562,012th film version of Jane Austen? How many times can Lizzie Bennet and Mr. Darcy misunderstand each other and yearn and burn and fail to see past their own snobbery and stubbornness until they finally do? Oh my god, do we really need another *Pride & Prejudice*?
A History of Violence and Derailed (review)
I knew nothing about *A History of Violence* before I sat down to watch it, absolutely nothing except that it starred Viggo Mortensen, and that that was enough to make me want to see it. I had even managed to avoid hearing that this was a David Cronenberg film, knowledge that certainly would have colored my expectations about it, as would have the knowledge, which I did not have until just before the movie began, that this was based on a graphic novel.
Jarhead (review)
It’s from Sam Mendes, who gave us the somber Road to Perdition and the blackly funny American Beauty, so don’t expect “Flight of the Valkyries” and stuff blowing up real good… unless you expect the tropes of military movies to be deployed with knowing irony. Based on the book by U.S. Marine sniper Anthony Swofford … more…
Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (review)
Casualty-of-the-streets turned rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson makes his screen debut… playing a casualty-of-the-streets turned rapper. He’s got mojo enough to hold the screen, but he cannot overcome the tedious sense that we’ve seen this all before, nor can the film’s sober intentions overcome the feeble, lifeless script. All of which class the film as … more…
