No Country for Old Men (review)
Here’s the thing about Joel and Ethan Coen: they can make anything, absolutely anything, intensely profound and deeply weird — and weirdly deep — and cruelly magnificent all at the same time.
Here’s the thing about Joel and Ethan Coen: they can make anything, absolutely anything, intensely profound and deeply weird — and weirdly deep — and cruelly magnificent all at the same time.
So I’m sitting there in the dark with my little reporter notebook, diligently taking notes and formulating theses to support my contention that *The Pacifier* fails as a film, and I think it was during a burst of abject whimpering from the very famous critic sitting next to me, whom I guarantee you’ve seen on TV, that I suddenly and finally realized the futility of life, the ubiquitousness of pain, and the infinite emptiness of the universe that we puny humans on our puny planet in our puny corner of the cosmos cannot hope to ameliorate.

Steven Spielberg has never made a film like this one before, sharp and bright, lighthearted and witty, underplayed and — dare I say it? — hip.
Sequels are hard. Science fiction sequels are a bitch. Every once in a rare while, we get an ‘Empire Strikes Back’ or an ‘Aliens,’ a sequel that expands and deepens the original, a sequel better than the original. Usually, alas, we get ‘Highlander II.’ ‘Men in Black II’ is, thankfully, no ‘Highlander II.’ But it ain’t no ‘Aliens,’ neither.
What a difference it makes to a movie when it’s real actors — as opposed to, say, studio executives’ personal trainers — blowing things up. The Fugitive stood out in the action movie genre by drawing its energy from the intense performances from both Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones (Oscar winner for a popcorn flick!). And now Ronin shows just how smart car chases and gunfights can be when thinking actors are the ones behind the wheel and behind the trigger.
Even better the second time around…
Several factors elevate Volcano from the merely boring to the actively annoying.