Thor (review)
I knew it! I knew Kenneth Branagh was a geek. Oh, sure, he got famous for all that snooty Shakespeare stuff, but deep down, he’s mad for comic books and superheroes and all that pulp-fiction stuff. He’s a dork.
Anthony Hopkins
question of the day: What movie has made you angriest, and why?
PopWatch wonders whether you saw The Rite this weekend, and if it made you mad. (I wonder why anyone would expect anything at all from a January thriller, but that’s just me.) Which makes me think about the movies that have good cause to make us angry…
trailer break: ‘The Rite’
Will the 187,543rd movie about exorcism be any more rationale than 99.99 percent of the rest of them? One hopes…
Alliance of Women Film Journalists 2010 EDA Awards nominees
The AWFJ is one of the critics’ groups I belong to; my input helped determine these nominees, and I will vote in the final balloting to narrow it down to the winners. I still have to watch a few of these nominees…
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.
quick list: five terrible spy movies
As a followup to yesterday’s five great spy movies, herewith five really terrible ones… and I find it interesting that the spy movie seems to go so wrong when comedy is attempted. Given the ubiquitousness of terrible movies, this list is far from comprehensive, so please do chime with more really awful spy movies. The … more…
The Wolfman (review)
The metallic tang of blood is all over the elegant facade of this mysteriously disappointing, dispassionately underpowered story of a British aristocrat who dances with the devil, in the form of a werewolf curse, in the pale moonlight.
Mission: Impossible 2 and Shanghai Noon (review)
Can it be a coincidence that both of the big new flicks this Memorial Day weekend — the kickoff for Hollywood’s first summer movie season of the twenty-first century — are basically Hong Kong action movies? The people who think about these kinds of things — current-events journalists, mainly — have already predicted that if the 1900s were the American century, the 2000s may well be the Asian century… but they were speaking economically and politically. I guess it’s probably inevitable that Asia would start to hold some cultural sway in the West, too.
The Silence of the Lambs (review)
The Silence of the Lambs is a psychological thriller of the highest order, and well deserving of the unusual Oscar nod for Best Picture, never before bestowed upon a film like this. Before or since, action/horror has never been done so well or so cerebrally.
