Recent Stories
In Darkness
Life Underground: Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness portrays the dark terror of the hunt for Jews in WWII Poland.
Based on actual events, this claustrophobic epic is as emotional as they come: a Holocaust story shot through with a layer of darkness both literal and figurative. Set mainly beneath the streets of Lvov, Poland, ...
We Need To Talk About Kevin
The Kid is Not Alright: Questions of innate evil and disastrous parenting collide in We Need to Talk About Kevin.
Nature, nurture or just plain evil? That’s the question at the heart of this savage and sorrowful portrait of a mother attempting to survive after her teenage son goes on a premeditated killing spree at ...
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
Inane Island: Journey 2: The Mysterious Island smears steampunk legacies; shines dimly with CGI creatures.
Every time the Rock (Dwayne Johnson) stars in a film nominally based on the writings of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Robert Lewis Stevenson – or any combination thereof – somewhere a steampunk baby dies. That ...
Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol
Mission: Impossible gets an action-packed fourth installment, but it’s all been done before.
Perhaps it’s the fact that I just finished reading Jaron Lanier’s counterintuitive but deeply persuasive polemic You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, or maybe I’m just suffering from sequelitis, but my reaction to Ethan ...
Blackthorn
Butch Cassidy and the Great What If: Mateo Gil takes the iconic character into old age in the Bolivian backcountry.
What if Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hadn’t died at the end of George Roy Hill’s genre-redefining 1969 classic, but instead lived on – one of them, anyway – in the Bolivian backcountry? That’s ...
Apocalypse Nuts
Bellflower feels devoutly bad ass and almost nauseatingly unique.
As I write this, London is burning, Japan is irradiated and Rick Perry is on the verge of formally announcing his presidential intentions. In short, the Apocalypse—or something more secular, and therefore worse—is ramping up ...
Transformers - Dark of the Moon
The newest Transformers soars over low expectations.
Former film director Michael Bay isn’t known for his subtlety, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon has about as much of it as a phased-plasma rifle to the back of the head. I say former ...
Skateland
Weighty Eighties 'Skateland' unspools a tender and nuanced understanding of a time in Texas.
“The future’s open wide,” sang Modern English’s Robbie Grey on the band’s 1982 single “I Melt With You.” For a time, if you were coming of age but maybe not trying so hard to grow ...
Shotguns and Knives
Osio debuts a Hobo With a Shotgun and Forks Over Knives.
This Hobo started life as one of the faux trailers in the underloved Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez mash-up Grindhouse, and it’s to be commended for truth in advertising, since the bluntly accurate title pretty ...
Everything Must Go
Will Hunting: Funnyman Will Ferrell searches for right dramatic touch in Everything Must Go.
Recall, if you will, Adam Sandler’s impressive dramatic turn in Punch Drunk Love. Like that film, Everything Must Go is a drama starring a comic who is an alumnus of Saturday Night Live in a ...
