Everybody’s Fine (review)

Writer-director Kirk Jones has pulled off a little miracle with this lovely, lovely movie: He’s telling us a story both universal enough in its reach to speak to anyone who’s ever been part of a family, and specific enough in its particulars to keep it grounded in the fantasy of fiction.

The Road (review)

This is a really great film — truly great in the classical sense of the world, as grand as our most terrible fears and as wild as our most outlandish hopes and as intimate as being alive can be.

Ninja Assassin (review)

‘Ninja assassin.’ It’s like ‘monster trucks’ and ‘automatic weapons’ and ‘zombie Nazis’: you take two great things that are awesome separately, and then you put ’em together and it becomes like totally mindblowing, dude. Oh not.

Planet 51 (review)

Much of what might have made it appealing to true devotees of science fiction and cinema, like how it’s a pastiche of 1950s B-movies, is lost when its parodying of the paranoia and xenophobia of those films is so relentlessly trite and obvious…

Fantastic Mr. Fox movie review: trip the dark fantastic

Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach looked at a sweet-and-sour children’s story through a peculiarly skewed eye and said, This can be so much more. And they turned it into something touching and funny, and magically absurd and at the same time pointedly real. They turned it into something genius.

Women in Trouble (review)

Apparently, in Gutierrez’s mind, expanding the range of humanity available to women on film means they can be porn stars or prostitutes, they can be neurotic and indecisive, they’re all almost certainly suvivors of physical and emotional abuse, and they can be catastrophically dumb…

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?