[8] Two brothers plot to rob their parents’ jewelry store, sending their lives and the lives of their loved ones into a tragic, downward spiral. Sidney Lumet (Network, Dog Day Afternoon) directs his final film with a stellar cast in this melodramatic thriller. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the scheming brother who holds a grudge against their father, while Ethan Hawke plays the more insecure younger …
[7] Two high school buddies discover a girl chained to a table in an abandoned mental hospital. At first she appears dead, but she’s actually one of the “living” dead. And she’s all theirs… Yes, just when you thought zombies had been completely used up as cinematic metaphors, along comes Deadgirl, a provocative and deeply disturbing exploration of the slippery slope between male sexual impulse …
[2] John Carpenter has given us a handful of gems over the years, but Ghosts of Mars is not one of them. The movie’s too exotic for its own good. It starts with some quick but tedious exposition, then plops us off in a confusing, alienating environment with little to latch onto. The story has something to do with ghosts and a bunch of leftover …
[7] Hannibal Lecter is still on the lam (no pun intended) after the events in The Silence of the Lambs, but now there’s another killer who wants to bring him to justice. Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner) directs this time, taking the subject matter into far more operatic territory. Where The Silence of the Lambs showed restraint with violence and gore, Hannibal does not. The …
[5] A prim and proper lady discovers she is infertile and hires a street-smart gal to be her ‘Baby Mama.’ As much as I like everyone in the cast — from stars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, to Steve Martin, Sigourney Weaver, Greg Kinnear, Holland Taylor, and Dax Shepard — Baby Mama comes off oddly restrained, never allowing Fey or Poehler to cut loose and …
[4] A dude (Matthew Perry) gets an opportunity to go back in time (where he’s played by Zac Efron) to better appreciate his life. I’m not sure what it would take to overcome a scenario as stale as the one at play here, but for a dug-up corpse, it’s not as rank as I thought it would be. Zac Efron shows (eating a little crow …
[3] The fourth Saw film isn’t nearly as clever as it tries so desperately to be, and the death traps for which the series is so famous are woefully uninspired. The movie also deflates the mystique of its central character, Jigsaw, by giving him a cheezy, cliched back story. Director Darren Lynn Bousman shows a knack for imaginitive scene transitions, but everything else about this …
[7] 28 Days Later is a bright feather in the multi-colored cap of director Danny Boyle, who also gave us Trainspotting, Sunshine, and Slumdog Millionnaire. Cillian Murphy wanders post-apocalyptic England after a virus has turned most of the population into zombies. Boyle’s twist on the zombie sub-genre is speed — the zombies move like lightning. 28 Days Later unfolds very nicely and builds to a …
[4] Sarah Michelle Gellar (TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer) stars as a woman who has visions of a murder, eventually coming to realize the murderer may be coming for her, too. This supernatural thriller is okay for the first half-hour, but then it completely reveals its hand when there’s still half the movie left to endure. For all the mysterious build-up, the concept turns out to …
[6] This story of a widower struggling to be a good father to his two boys refrains from indulging in too much sentimentality, but never fully shakes that “Lifetime Movie” feeling. Clive Owen and young George MacKay are very good, and the Australian setting makes for a beautiful backdrop — overall, the movie’s all right. It just isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. With Laura …
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