This Christmas (review)
When a ‘heartwarming’ holiday movie is this hamfisted, the best response is to slap some pineapple slices on it, throw it in the oven, and serve it for Christmas dinner.
2007 theatrical releases
Enchanted movie review: toon in, toon out
The sweet silliness of the collective Disney animated fairy-tale landscape meets the rough reality of Noo Yawk. Why didn’t someone think of this sooner and pull it off as perfectly as Enchanted does?
August Rush (review)
Female film directors are such rare creatures in Hollywood, and so it’s always a delight to find a new one with such talent and such promise as Kristen Sheridan displays in her tender, enchanting ‘August Rush,’ an urban fable of family lost and gifts found… and refound.
The Mist movie review: we have met the monsters…
Frank Darabont’s adaptations of Stephen King’s writings are not just some of the best mountings of the writer’s work but some of the best films, period, of recent years. So I don’t think it’s too outrageous — or too surprising — to say that ‘The Mist’ is not only one of the best movies of 2007, it’s one of the best horror movies ever made. Period.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (review)
Oh, but these are awful people, honestly. They’re so deliciously amoral that it’s coolly insane fun to watch them implode, it’s true, but you’d have to run far and fast were you to find yourself actually encountering them lest their slimy stink rub off on you.
Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (review)
Its straightforward simplicity aims it squarely at the kiddies and the kiddies alone, but that’s okay — few films intended for children these days are this gentle, this plainly decent.
Love in the Time of Cholera (review)
With so many pieces of the puzzle seemingly so perfect, how could anything go wrong?
No Country for Old Men (review)
Here’s the thing about Joel and Ethan Coen: they can make anything, absolutely anything, intensely profound and deeply weird — and weirdly deep — and cruelly magnificent all at the same time.
Beowulf (review)
This example of the latest ‘advance’ in animation technology is sterile, synthetic, almost completely unengaging on a human level. It’s animated but inanimate.
Lars and the Real Girl (review)
*Ooo, ick* was my reaction when I first heard about *Lars and the Real Girl.* Because I had, unfortunately, heard about Real Dolls, the anatomically correct sex toys that are as lifelike as silicone can be. Which means they look like corpses. And the thought of a movie about a lonely guy who buys one of them and pretends it’s his girlfriend? No. No no no no.
