Rating: 2 stars
Outrage is a completely legitimate feeling for a film to evoke. Indeed, collective self-righteousness and indignation can be very cathartic for an audience. But Changeling spoon-...
Rating: 3.5 stars
For a completely different kind of heroine, I strongly recommend Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. His Poppy is willfully cheerful, loving, and giddy—at times obnoxiously so. Leigh...
Rating: 2.5 stars
Teen idols have always had to suffer the indignation of having to act wholesome, even if it couldn’t be further from the truth. (David Cassidy was notoriously hooking up with...
Rating: 2.5 stars
Have we simply run out of good cop stories to tell? Since Serpico, it seems that every other cop movie is some iteration of the same theme—corrupt cops, compromised values, and...
Rating: 2.5 stars
The trailers and poster art for Oliver Stone’s W. make it seem like a scathing work of satire but in reality, it’s a fairly standard biopic, with a healthy dose of Freudian...
Rating: 2 stars
What Just Happened? is the kind of film that presupposes we want to hang out with a stressed out Hollywood producer who’s having a few very bad days.
Films like this can work—when...
Rating: 2 stars
Turns out the ’80s teen sex comedies Losin’ It, The Last American Virgin, and The Sure Thing were cinematic classics. How else to explain why Sex Drive so shamelessly cribs from them...
Rating: 2 stars
Have you heard the news? People stink. They are self-serving, cowardly, cruel, and just a crisis away from abandoning all civility. Or so the producers of Blindness would have you...
Rating: 3.5 stars
Several weeks ago, Bill Maher had his favorite sparring partner, conservative political pundit Andrew Sullivan, on his HBO show, Real Time With Bill Maher. Sullivan was exasperated...
Rating: 3 stars
They can make a convincing haunted pirate ship, but Disney still hasn’t quite mastered the talking dog. Maybe I’m asking too much. After all, dogs can’t really talk. So trying to...
