About ten minutes into Michael, you realize that there is no angel from Saturday Night Fever coming to shatter the innocent veneer or heavenly ideology. The protagonist of Markus Schleinzer’s Michael is a quiet insurance salesman. He smokes like our aforementioned angel, has a beer over dinner, but aside from the ten-year-old boy he keeps locked in […]
Cowboys and Aliens is a cocktail of fun, silliness, and attempts at transparent meta-commentary. The film begins with a mystery as Jake Lannergan (Daniel Craig) awakes in 1873 in the Arizona dessert, and we, by default, are introduced to our first alien: a man unaware of his surroundings and completely foreign to the rest of the characters […]
The Avengers is an exercise in giving characters enough screen time without making them seem exploited and underutilized. And, for the most part, it works and successfully builds off of the characters limned in previous installments leading up to this supergroup of an action hero film. By far, the Hulk is the best part of The Avengers. […]
Say what you like about Roger Ebert, but the guy is probably doing more to turn me on to movies I haven’t seen these days than anybody else. Such was surely the case with Tyrannosaur, a darling of British film critics last year. I finally got around to seeing it this weekend, and I was immediately struck […]
Directed and adapted by Gary Ross, The Hunger Games deviates from its literary counterpart penned by Suzanne Collins. The difference is not so much in the events of the story. Those stay, for the most part, the same. Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) sacrifices herself to save her sister, Prue, whose name is unluckily called as the girl […]
On April 15, 1912, The Titanic sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. In those fateful hours, and amidst the fifteen-hundred casualties, the ship sparked a century’s worth of intrigue and became one of the most versatile metaphors in history. In and of itself, the ship was a small island, containing twenty-two hundred people, all separated […]
The Cabin in the Woods opens in a sterile environment, white walls ascend to high ceilings, and two scientist-looking types discuss child-proofing homes as they climb into a golf cart. Some of the tertiary conversation is vague: a young woman dressed in a white coat mentions that other countries have failed and only the Japan and the […]
Based on the series of comic albums by Belgian artist Georges Remi (Herge), the 2011 movie The Adventures of Tintin has clever moments and stunning visual effects, but, at times, it falls victim to its release as a 3D film. The gyroscopic cinematography is stellar, particularly when Tintin, our intrepid adventurer / reporter, chases after a pickpocket […]
Despite its title and premise, Drive is not a film about speed and Bullit-like car chases. Rather, Nicolas Winding Refn’s film is about fragmented identity. The primary example of this is the unnamed Driver (Ryan Gosling), whose occupation overtakes any given name. Throughout the film, we learn little about him, other than he “can do anything in […]
Like his misogynist personality that overshadowed the critically ignored but socially relevant Antichrist, Lars von Trier – with the help of truncated sound bites taken out of context – submarined the recognition of his follow up, Melancholia. If there’s nothing else we can learn from both von Triar and Oliver Stone, it’s wise to remember that any […]