Feb
06
The balmy days of February have triggered an uncommon sense of renewal, nowhere more so than in the cinema, where, after a customarily dismal January (we’re looking at you, THE DEVIL INSIDE), there now come glimmers of hope in the entertaining and atmospheric THE WOMAN IN BLACK. Featuring a post-Potter Daniel Radcliffe as an emotionally …
Feb
03
What starts out as common, garden-variety crime thriller turns… bizarre, and then frightening, in director Ben Wheatley’s twisty new film, KILL LIST. The tale of middle class hit-man Jay (Neil Maskell), who with colleague Gal (Michael Smiley) goes out for one more job and discovers blood oaths, strange rites, and disturbingly grateful targets have been …
Jan
30
A story as relevant as yesterday’s headlines, or too late a tale? Some thirty years ago, Cinefantastique hailed Robin Hardy’s THE WICKER MAN as “the CITIZEN KANE of horror,” lauding the Anthony Shaffer-scripted story of a god-fearing police detective trying to solve a mystery within a community of Scottish pagans for its bold eroticism and …
Dec
18
Abandon all propriety, ye who enter here. Once again, under the direction of Guy Ritchie and as embodied by Robert Downey Jr, the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes shakes off his tweedy cobwebs and gets down, dirty, and flat-out physical in SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS. Centered around the inevitable confrontation between Holmes and the …
Dec
08
Long for the heady, Cold War days of espionage, when spies were spies, ideologies were economics-based, and there wasn’t all this religious brouhaha muddying up the motivations? (Enhanced interrogation, though, was still pretty much the same thing.) Well, director Tomas Alfredson (LET THE RIGHT ONE IN) takes us back to that furtive, paranoia-laced era in …
Dec
06
I know the past can come back to haunt you, but who knew that my childhood icons would be making guest appearances at this late date? Hanna-Barbera’s classic cartoon character, Yogi Bear, had his debut some fifty-three years ago, yet when my sponsor, Müller, built an epic commercial around a whole host of pop culture …
Nov
25
Of all the film clips director Edmon Roch uses to compose his WW II documentary, GARBO THE SPY — and they include such eclectic sources as documentaries, dramas, both Allied and Nazi propaganda, and cartoons — the ones that he seems to rely on most come from Carol Reed’s OUR MAN IN HAVANA, the film …
Oct
21
You gotta love an alien invasion film where the aliens make the serious mistake of trying to invade some council estates (read, “projects”) in London and discover that the street-tough kids there are not going to yield the territory without racking up a body count. That’s the idea behind ATTACK THE BLOCK, Joe Cornish’s directorial …
Jul
18
And so it comes to this: one determined, no-longer-a-boy-wizard versus one living incarnation of evil, facing off in a battle to the death. Meanwhile, millions of loving fans watch on, thinking, This is the culmination of all my dreams made real, while a smaller contingent of more critical spectators settle into their theater seats praying …
Jun
27
Kids love cars, and kids love CARS — that seems to be the calculation behind Pixar’s latest animated offering, CARS 2. Abandoning the original film’s theme that celebrated the romance of exploring off-the-beaten-superhighway U.S, director John Lasseter and crew have devised an espionage plotline for this sequel, with cocky racecar Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and …
