Calvary trailer: thou shalt not kill (except with comedy)
Or maybe with wry black dramedy.
Brendan Gleeson
The Smurfs 2 review: a smurfeit of Smurfs
I am haunted by the crazed desperation in Jayma Mays’s eyes. She may have been blinking out a Morse-code SOS, but I can’t be sure…
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!/Band of Misfits (review)
Implies that science! and scientists! could be fun! and adventurous! Oh noes, the kiddies! Brainwashed into thinking science is awesome! Who shall protect them from such horrors?
Safe House (review)
Oo oo oo, it’s CIA action porn when Safe House finally gets going, all mysterious black SUVs and “kill the surveillance cameras” and stoic badassery all round…
The Guard (U.S. and U.K. trailers)
Funny stuff. And a most interesting look at how films are marketed differently on either side of the Atlantic. Compare and contrast the U.K. trailer with the U.S. trailer…
Green Zone (review)
Spoiler alert! Jason Bourne does not find the WMDs in Iraq. Sorry to ruin *Green Zone* for you, but surely reality already did that years ago.
trailer break: ‘Green Zone’
Take a break from work: watch a trailer… Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon together again? Excellent. It’s The Hurt Locker meets The Bourne Supremacy. How can it go wrong? Is it just me, or shouldn’t Matt Damon finish up “I came here to find weapons and save lives” with “and I’m all out of gum”? … more…
awards contenders on DVD: the studio films
December can feel overwhelming, for movie watchers, with all the awards contenders flooding the arthouses — if you’re in New York and Los Angeles — and multiplexes this holiday season. But it’s always true, too, that films from earlier in the year manage to get notice from critics groups in the pre-Oscar-nominations territory… and some … more…
In Bruges movie review: Ray and Ken live for a day
Imagine if Laurel and Hardy were Irish hitmen caught in a web of existential angst…
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.
