[7] Elijah Wood and Charlie Hunnam star in this story about a wrongfully-expelled college student who falls into the dangerous British subculture of football ‘hooliganism’. The closest thing we have in America are street gangs, but the British ‘hooligans’ are a little more organized and revolve around football (soccer in America). Wood plays the disenfranchised student while Hunnam plays a higher up in the Green Street Elite …
[7] Across the Universe follows a group of young people who come of age against the turbulent backdrop of the 1960s. The film is set to a constant stream of rejiggered Beatles tunes, which allows director Julie Taymor (Broadway’s The Lion King, Titus, Frida) to cut loose with her trademark visual splendor and poetic license in a wide variety of music video sequences. When the …
[6] Brad Pitt simply isn’t very convincing outside his own time and place. This limitation was used to intentional comedic effect in Inglourious Basterds, and to unintentional effect in Troy. It doesn’t help that his character isn’t the most interesting — that would be Eric Bana’s. It also doesn’t help to have Orlando Bloom in your movie. Pretty much ever (Lord of the Rings being …
[7] Director Bruce McDonald does a commendable job building tension and suspense in a movie that takes place almost entirely in one room with four actors. Think Talk Radio meets 28 Days Later. The film is also a terrific showpiece for character actor Stephen McHattie, who stars as Grant Mazzy, a disgruntled shock radio DJ stuck in a small Canadian town. The film is at …
[7] Bernardo Bertolucci (The Last Emperor) takes on the intimate tale of an American student (Michael Pitt) who falls into an intense, unusual relationship with French siblings (Louis Garrel and Eva Green). The sexually-explicit escapades earned the film an NC-17 rating, but there’s an underlying sweetness and shared vulnerability in the direction and performances. I love how Bertolucci embellishes the characters’ shared obsession with cinema …
[4] Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster star in this sci-fi thriller about astronauts who awaken from hypersleep with total memory loss. The filmmakers are hellbent on keeping everything mysterious to the very end: where are we? who are we? what are we doing? I’m all for a good mystery, but you have to give me something or someone to care about while you leave me …
[6] [Warning: This review contains spoilers.] Spike Jonze directs this meta tale of a screenwriter losing his mind trying to adapt a book called The Orchid Thief. While his twin brother moves in and begins mirroring him in many ways, he decides he needs to find the author of the book to excavate its meaning. If you can’t already tell, Adaptation is a very hard …
[5] There’s a good concept at the core of this Wes Craven/Kevin Williamson (Scream) collaboration — a brother and sister coming to terms with the fact that they may be werewolves. But serious werewolf fans will bemoan the cheesy Hollywood setting and the sub-par computer-animated effects. I liked Jesse Eisenberg as the brother, but Christina Ricci and pretty much the rest of the entire cast …
[6] A small, isolated village of puritan-like people come under siege by a killer in their midst, as well as woodland monsters that may not be what they seem… Whether or not you like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village ultimately hinges upon two big conceits (or twists, if you will). I’m okay with the first, as it comes organically from the hopes and fears of …
[5] Personally, I’m not sure when I’ll ever be “ready” to see any dramatizations of September 11th, 2001. I definitely don’t want to see those events sensationalized. Thankfully, Oliver Stone exercises restraint with the material, opting to show the film almost entirely from two characters’ points of view. World Trade Center is a claustrophobic survival story centered around real-life survivors John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and …
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