THE LINCOLN LAWYER is a smart, taut, and well-told neo-noir. The setting is Los Angeles, among the low-lifes and the well-to-do, where they meet and the consequences thereof. It follows the formula for such genre flicks, but has an impudent originality in the telling. The titular lawyer, Michael Haller (Matthew McConaughey) is a savvy practitioner… Read More »
THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN
What SNOW WHITE was to the advancement of hand-drawn animation into a genuine art form, so is THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN to animation derived from motion capture and generated from a computer. Visually, it is a thing of singular and striking beauty. Story-wise, it is just as sublime, presenting a thumping good tale of action… Read More »
SOLARIS
In a move as audacious as it is disastrous, Steve Soderbergh has decided to push the edges of what filmmaking can be and created in SOLARIS not so much a motion picture as a still life. One that is more sleep-inducing than a warm glass of milk and a bottle of Seconal. It is remarkable… Read More »
THE RAVEN
RAVEN is a mess of a movie. An infuriating mix of amateurish writing and flowery antique speech; of sublime romance and hopeless pedantry; of atmospheric melancholy and risible smugness; of pointless melodrama and a movingly poignant performance by John Cusack as the damned soul, Edgar Allen Poe. The premise is Poe’s mysterious last few days… Read More »
IDENTITY
I suspect that IDENTITY wants to be more profound than it ultimately is. This adds a note of prissy pretension to an otherwise effective little thriller. Set on a dark and stormy night at a rundown motel situated on an Indian graveyard, screenwriter Michael Cooney toys with horror conventions but doesnt succumb to the clichés.… Read More »
CONDFIDENCE
Like many great noirs, CONFIDENCE is told in flashback, narrated, as is also a convention of the genre, by a corpse. How he came to be lying in a gutter with several slugs in him makes for an intricately plotted little tale of crosses, double-crosses, and cons that you wont see coming. As you watching… Read More »
IN THE CUT
IN THE CUT is not just a bad film, it is a laughably bad film. This would-be erotic thriller wants to discomfit us by delving into the psychological underpinnings of sex and violence and yet succeeds only in making us feel sorry for the people who tried so hard and came up with bupkis. One… Read More »
THE OTHERS
Are there things that are more scary than ghosts? Are close encounters with the other side, as it were, the ultimate in terror? Writer/director Alejandro Amenabar does a neat job of answering that question with THE OTHERS, a ghost story where neither good nor evil should be taken for granted. The story takes place entirely… Read More »
THE PRESTIGE
The first words heard in Christopher Nolan’s THE PRESTIGE come in a voice-over as the camera pans across an odd collection of silk top hats in disarray across a wintry landscape. It admonishes the audience to pay close attention to everything and that is excellent advice, but perhaps futile. David Attenborough, intrepid documenter of the… Read More »
ZODIAC (2007)
The pedestrian way to film the story of ZODIAC, the San Francisco Bay Area serial killer whose rampage extended from the late 1960s through the 1970s, would be to make a taut action thriller with snazzy directing tricks and gung-ho dialogue. Here was a psychopath who hunted people for sport and through a combination of smarts… Read More »
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