Maleficent movie review: fatal enchantment… you know, for kids!
Please leave your desire for a well-rounded story in the lockers provided, and keep your arms and legs inside the ride while it is in motion.
Imelda Staunton
Arthur Christmas movie review: sufficiently advanced Christmas magic
Is there sweet? Absolutely. But it is cut with funny: sometimes wicked, sometimes manic, often hysterical, always clever funny. And a whole lotta poignant, too.
The Awakening (review)
An elegantly creepy tale of a haunting that, wonder of wonders, one may approach equally well from the perspective of total supernatural belief or entrenched skepticism…
Taking Woodstock (review)
Isn’t it a nice fantasy, that music and comtemplation (even if it’s enabled by LSD) and just chillin’ out with 500,000 of your closest friends might change the world?
trailer break: ‘A Bunch of Amateurs’
Take a break from work: watch a movie trailer… Oh, great. Every stupid cliché about England, with a few bonuses thrown in, like the little dog piddling on the luggage and the horny landlady. Poor Imelda Staunton. If it’s so gross that Burt Reynolds — age 72 — is kissing that hot young blond chick … more…
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (review)
Holy shit, but this may be the best straight-up horror movie of the year — I was riveted by the sinister sophistication of it.
best performances of 2004: ready for their closeup…
BEST ACTOR Don Cheadle, Hotel Rwanda It’s a role that, in the hands of even another very competent actor, could have descended into pathos and sentimentality, but Cheadle’s performance goes way beyond mere competence: As an Oskar Schindler-type figure in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, he approaches incomprehensible horrors in a way that makes us intimate partners … more…
best and worst movies of 2004 (and why I’m gonna spend a lot of money on DVDs)
Damn, but I had a good time at the movies this year. I sat through a lot of cinematic toxic waste, it’s true, but I also had a tough time winnowing down my best-of list to only ten films: the top 25 or 30 films in my annual ranking delighted me, made me laugh, moved … more…
Chicken Run movie review: rage against the machine
A witty Aardman-brand treat: Chicken Run is a sneaky, cheeky parody of prison and escape movies that nevertheless finds decidedly unsentimental pathos in the predicament of farmyard chickens.
