reviews by year

You know those “In a world where…” movie trailers? Well, *Premonition*’s would start out: “In a world where no one has ever seen *Groundhog Day*…”

I am not the audience for this flick. I don’t need a tortured justification that the choices I made are the “right” ones no matter how unhappy I am about them. I don’t need the release of laughing at my own suffering.

This is a smart, elegant, sophisticated film that should be everything I want to see in a movie and yet fails to be because it’s missing that one enigmatic element, the hardest to capture, the most unfakeable: spirit.

Big scary black man keepin’ the little blonde white girl in chains? Oh *my.*

So this is the big question, then: Are so many American men so oppressed by the “horrors” of modern life — high cholesterol, uppity wives, smartass children, cell phones, boring jobs, the general dead-eyed awfulness of suburbia — that they need a stupid movie like this one to tell them that if they don’t like their lives they should do something about it?

To say that they don’t make movies like this anymore — splendidly, quietly angry in a folksy, old-fashioned kind of way — is to prove its point…

There’s not a lick of dialogue for maybe the first 15 minutes of this daring action Western… unless moans of pain count as dialogue.