You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (review)

There’s a sneaky cheekiness to You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger that is inherent in the slyness of the title, which wraps up in one neat little package ideas about romantic fate, our yearning for something better than the pretty good thing we might already have, and an up-to-the-minute restlessness about our lives that hounds even the most comfortable of us.

Red (review)

Of all the washed-up washed-out over-the-hill too-old-for-this-shit action-hero movies we’ve had thrown at us this year — The A-Team, The Losers, The ExpendablesRed is by far the most amusing, the most clever, the most tongue-in-cheek, the most fun (and I say that as someone who mostly liked those other movies).

Howl (review)

James Franco’s elucidation of Allen Ginsberg is soaring in its warmth and sincerity. The words are (mostly) the writer’s, but the vitality and the passion are all Franco’s: he makes the poet breathe for us today in a way that feels entirely modern and relevant.

Life as We Know It (review)

First of all, any movie that kills off the smashing Christina Hendricks in the opening 20 minutes deserves to be shot down on the basis of that alone. But that’s only the tiniest of the many cinematic crimes of Life as We Know It, which pretends to be something hip and fresh and is in fact relentlessly conventional, even retrograde.

Catfish (review)

The ambitions that Mark Zuckerberg had for Facebook — at least what we see of them in The Social Network — seem so small and sad and deeply ungrand next to the reality of how life on Facebook plays out a mere few years later in the profoundly poignant Catfish.

Stone (review)

No, wait: lemme guess what we’re meant to take from this turgid drama of small lives and smaller ambitions. ‘Some people do bad things and go to prison, and some people do bad things and live their lives out in the wide world as if they’re in prison anyway’? ‘Crazy, quietly desperate men are sad and sympathetic, and crazy, aggressively desperate women are slutty objects of derision’?

Buried movie review: boxed in

How did anyone dare to do this? How did anyone think they would get away with it? Most audacious of all, perhaps: Did anyone have any notion that such a recklessly bold premise for a film would possibly succeed this well?

Hatchet II (review)

Looks like you may have missed your chance to see Hatchet II on a big screen, because the film has been pulled from theaters. Not that it matters, really, because this is such a spurious waste of time that no one should have to bother with it at all.

Case 39 (review)

How sad is it when a horror movie appears to be aiming for overwrought and still ends up underbaked? This overly familiar, wholly unoriginal would-be psychological thriller provokes few reactions outside of boredom and — in, sadly, too few moments — derisive laughter.