reviews by year

Bad things happen when you leave the city. Like you discover that the creepy old house you inherited is surrounded by goblins enthralled to an evil ogre, the house itself is home to a goofy brownie who hulks out into a boggart when he gets angry, and more.

Well, that’s how ya do it, I guess: you teleport right past all the boring stuff like character and background.

‘I don’t know what it is about you, but the more you talk, the more you give me the willies.’ So says one of the James gang to Robert Ford, whose syrupy-sweet quality we recognize today as the unctuousness of a stalker…

I should have walked out at the ‘comical’ dog-sex scene. Instead I endured until Martin Lawrence got skunked in the face — that should have made me happy, and yet I felt dirty all over, and had to escape.

And then there are movies, like *Fool’s Gold,* in which absolutely *everything* goes wrong. In which not one single element works… in which not one single element seems even calculated to have worked in the first place.

We forget that it’s a job. We go see people in movies or in concert or we stay at home and watch them on TV and they make us laugh or they make us cry or they make us dance and when they’re good they make it look so effortless… but it’s a job.

Sydney Wells sees dead people. I see a dead movie. I’m not sure which of us got the better deal.

The only explanation is this: They — the big Hollywood They who dominate our mass entertainment — are now actively making movies for the Stupid demographic.

Kids are kids the world over: it sounds so obvious, even banal, to simply say it, but seeing the compelling and haunting — and rousing — evidence that that is true even for kids in the worst possible circumstances is a sharp reminder that we all share more than we don’t.