[6] Meteorites strike a small Australian fishing village and begin turning the citizens into zombies. It may not sound all that fresh or original, but Undead is a bit more than it seems. Twin Australian brothers Michael and Peter Spierig (Daybreakers) continue the low-budget horror legacies of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson in their first feature film, Undead. Their humor and inventiveness are very much …
[8] A family tragedy reunites three men who share a traumatic childhood experience in Mystic River. Sean Penn and Tim Robbins took home richly-deserved Oscars for their performances in this Oscar-nominated best picture from the ever-reliable Clint Eastwood. Mystic River is a gripping, well-paced mystery that employs misdirection and plot twists better than any other film in recent memory. Eastwood is at his directorial best …
[4] David Mickey Evans, the director of Radio Flyer and The Sandlot turns in a teen sex comedy that reeks of ’90s made-for-cable or direct-to-video. Three high school dudes decide they can make a lot of money by filming a porno without their school or their parents finding out, and without getting murdered by a rival team of professional pornographers. Whackiness ensues. What Barely Legal …
[5] Director David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water) adapts Alexander Trocchi’s novel about a Scottish drifter (Ewan McGregor) who falls in with a family living and working on a river barge, all while hiding what he knows about an alleged murder being publicized in the local papers. Mackenzie captures a suitably dreary tone for the movie, but it’s a challenging story to get into. McGregor’s …
[3] A super-low budget Australian flick that tries very, very hard to be a heady psychological thriller. From start to finish, there are only five characters and a single beach setting, so the movie ends up feeling claustrophobic in a bad, cheap way. Once the characters have difficulty discerning fantasy from reality and one of them turns out to (maybe?) be the Devil, I lost …
[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 …
[6] Ron Howard directs Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones in The Missing, an estranged father/daughter bonding flick by way of The Searchers. The story is set in motion after Blanchett’s eldest daughter is kidnapped by an evil Apache mystic who is collecting young women to sell at the Mexican border. Blanchett and Jones are reliably good, and Jenna Boyd is superb as the youngest …
[6] Jennifer Connelly plays a woman wrongfully evicted from her home. Before she can go through the proper channels to get it back, Ben Kingsley and his family have already moved in. That’s when The House of Sand and Fog turns into a tug of war between the characters that spirals quickly and tragically out of control. At first, I thought this was going to …
[8] Charlize Theron stars as Aileen Wuornos, the infamous Florida prostitute who became a serial killer, in this film chronicling her last few months of freedom before being captured and executed in 2002. Writer/director Patty Jenkins doesn’t shy away from Wuornos’ crimes, but aims to paint a more complex portrait of the woman who committed them. Monster introduces us to Wuornos as she’s contemplating suicide, …
[7] How they shot Winged Migration is almost more fascinating than the film itself. The filmmakers rigged camera equipment to ultralight planes and imprinted with hatching birds of various species to get as close to their subjects as possible. The resulting cinematography is breathtaking, especially if you love birds. The film focuses solely on the migratory patterns of birds all around the world, so the …
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