> The first substantial buy of the Toronto Film Festival (Shame had sold first, but for art film prices) turned out to be Salmon Fishing In the Yemen, a modestly engaging romantic comedy from Lasse Hallstrom. Hallstrom has made a career out of “modestly engaging,” following his early distinction with My Life As a Dog […]
A DANGEROUS METHOD: Watch It At Home – A Visit to Dr. Cronenberg’s Clinic Throughout his career, David Cronenberg has been fascinated by twin compulsions: the aberrant and the repressive. The former was at the forefront of what are still his most celebrated films a quarter-century later, squishy biological horror movies like Videodrome […]
KILLER ELITE: Watch It At Home – Neither Killer Nor Elite The new KILLER ELITE takes little from Sam Peckinpah’s 1975 action movie apart from its title (Peckinpah used “The” in his) and the general notion of mercenaries and ex-spies double-crossing each other. This isn’t a huge loss, as the 1975 version was part […]
PROJECT NIM: Worth A Ticket – If You Can Stand It At first I wondered why on earth Fox Searchlight hadn’t grabbed James Marsh’s documentary PROJECT NIM at Sundance, to serve as an unofficial prequel to Big Fox’s release of Rise of the Planet of the Apes next month. It seemed like a […]
COWBOYS & ALIENS – Watch It At Home: Genre Mash-Up Zaps Itself In the Foot It’s admirable, in a way, that for much of its length, COWBOYS AND ALIENS is willing to be more of a western than a scifi extravaganza, even though scifi is a safer commercial bet. The problem is that […]
HORRIBLE BOSSES – Watch It At Home: Doesn’t Earn A Raise A comedy can get away with not being very good as long as it’s funny, and HORRIBLE BOSSES delivers some laughs. Most of those come from the chemistry between stars Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day, and since the funniest bits […]
> EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE: Worth A Ticket – Earns Its Tears If EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE accomplishes nothing else–and it actually accomplishes quite a bit–it’s served to let us know exactly where the third rail of current American popular culture is located. It’s not every day that the august NY Times informs […]
> Watch It At Home: For Fans of Florescent Green Another summer weekend; another superhero epic. What used to be an extravagant event genre is now hard-pressed to muster more than a yawn. What is there to say about GREEN LANTERN? Well, it’s better than January’s sophomoric Green Hornet, so at least it’s got color […]