FASTER sails through its first 90 minutes or so as a thrill-packed action flick. Riotously surreal and willfully so, it showcases Dwayne Johnsons star power, not to mention his pecs. Glistening with sweat and straining beneath the flesh, they are the first image on screen. Johnsons character this time is and ex-con Driver, the job… Read More »
GHOST ACTRESS (aka DON
GHOST ACTRESS details the odd doings at a movie studio in Japan. Unlike the usual make-them-jump-and-scream approach to telling this story, writer/ director Hideo Nakata, who wrote and directed the Japanese film, THE RING, on which the current American release is based, has opted for creating a mood of gradually increasing unease tempered with the… Read More »
THE WARRIOR’S WAY
THE WARRIOR’S WAY starts strong, ends with a slick tableaux and in between disappoints with a steady acceleration that not even a quietly charismatic performance by star Dong-Gun Jang, nor the image of a clown with a gun during the films climactic shoot-out, can surmount. A fanciful mix of spaghetti-western bad guys, colorful carnival folk,… Read More »
TRON – LEGACY
The original TRON was a film very much of its time, a time before e-mail and VOD, when those who had them looked upon the strange box sitting their desks with a mixture of awe and trepidation. Not having grown up with them, the population whose closest encounter until then with a computer had been… Read More »
THE GREEN HORNET
THE GREEN HORNET is not a great film, but it does get one thing very right. It is filled with the exuberance that a kid finds in living through the exploits of his or her favorite super hero or heroine. For all the faults to be found with its pacing, there is something enormously refreshing… Read More »
IP MAN 2 — LEGEND OF THE GRANDMASTER
IP MAN 2: LEGEND OF THE GRANDMASTER finds the eponymous master newly landed in Hong Kong after the turmoil of his escape from Japanese-occupied Foshan. While the film as a whole is a graceful, yet lethal, dig at chauvinism as well as imperialism, that is no impediment to it also being both an engrossing drama… Read More »
SANCTUM
James Cameron neither wrote nor directed SANCTUM, but his fingerprints as the executive producer of same are all over it. Visually, it’s an exhilarating experience. As for the storytelling, the word lugubrious comes to mind. The writing is stiff and ridden with clichés, with cheese-ish motifs overwhelmed by swelling, overwrought music cues that forge straight… Read More »
MECHANIC, THE
THE MECHANIC is slick, stylish, and fun. In short, everything for which an audience turns to an action flick for a few hours of escapist entertainment. Jason Statham again proves that he is the quintessential genre protagonist: cool, efficient, with an ironic edge and credibly cerebral. This last is critical, inasmuch as he is a… Read More »
RANGO
RANGO triumphantly trades on the peculiar appeal of the well-executed excursion into the grotesque. Channeling spaghetti westerns, Cervantes, Castaneda, and a dash of CHINATOWN as refracted through the visual sensibilities of Dali, it is a fiendishly clever concretion of high- and low-brow in a story that is both vision quest and farce. The eponymous and… Read More »
RIO
RIO is as bright, fun, and dramatic as the Brazilian Carnivale where its final chase takes place. The animated musical as a whole is one exhilarating race to restore a bird to his human companion, thwart an evil gang of bird smugglers, and make sure that love conquers all. Eventually. The bird is Blu (Jesse… Read More »
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