The Time Traveler’s Wife (review)
They didn’t ruin the movie, I promise. But some will disagree with me.
Chicago
Public Enemies (review)
I’m wildly intrigued by *Public Enemies* even though I readily concede that character development is all but nonexistent, and that it leaves me more wanting to know who notorious bank robber John Dillinger was than I did before I went into the film.
Nothing Like the Holidays (review)
Surely the concept of ‘family’ is one of the laziest bits of shorthand Hollywood films use as a shortcut for bypassing all the necessary drama that should otherwise be transporting a character from Point A to Point B over the course of a well-told story.
M Squad: The Complete Series (review)
I kept expecting to hear, with every episode of *M Squad* I watched, the voiceover guy saying, “*M Squad*! In Color!” over the opening credits.
A History of Violence and Derailed (review)
I knew nothing about *A History of Violence* before I sat down to watch it, absolutely nothing except that it starred Viggo Mortensen, and that that was enough to make me want to see it. I had even managed to avoid hearing that this was a David Cronenberg film, knowledge that certainly would have colored my expectations about it, as would have the knowledge, which I did not have until just before the movie began, that this was based on a graphic novel.
top 11 movies of 2002: the great, the good, and the really, really ugly
About half my best-of’s for 2002 were clear and ready choices, films I fell instantly in love with, that completely blew my mind, that utterly awed me in their fabulosity — I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which those were. Filling out the rest of the list was tough … more…
Chicago (review)
Their *Chicago* — based on the stage musical by John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse — is utterly singable, danceable, cheerable, with musical numbers that straddle the unwillingness of today’s movie audiences to suspend our disbelief about movie characters breaking into song unless they’re Disney lions or talking candelabra.
Road to Perdition movie review: pulp fiction
There’s not a thing that isn’t hauntingly, quietly electrifying about this, the first truly grown-up comic book movie. Fans of the medium have known for years that the form had no trouble being Important, but the film industry (though perhaps not all filmmakers themselves) has stubbornly insisted on treating comic adaptations as juvenile.
Home Alone movie review: man of the house
The king of 80s teen angst, John Hughes will be forever be venerated by Gen-Xers as the writer/director of our Holy Flick: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But his favorite movie with the rest of the world is probably Home Alone, which Hughes wrote. One indication, admittedly drawn from an extremely tiny sampling of moviewatchers: To this day, ten years after the release of the biggest-grossing film of 1990, my mother — who tends to refer to actors as ‘the guy from that TV show’ or ‘the one who was married to that other one in that movie’ — calls Macaulay Culkin, adoringly, ‘Home Alone.’
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (review)
As everyone who loves Planes, Trains and Automobiles knows: Wrong. One of the few movies set around Thanksgiving, it was bound to become a perennial favorite — and the fact that this is probably 80’s teen-movie king John Hughes’s most adult movie certainly helped it become an instant classic. It’s the pathos under the boisterous, noisy comedy that helps fuel its continuing popularity today.
