Since I’m not a 13-year-old girl, Twilight didn’t do much for me, and if Weitz’s adaptation of the second book in Stephanie Meyer’s insanely popular series is a slightly better film than Catherine Hardwicke’s original,Continue reading
Category: Mainstream U.S. Cinema
Downhill Racer (Michael Ritchie, 1969)
In Ritchie’s visually audacious, but emotionally chilly directorial debut, Robert Redford sheds his golden-boy charm to play an aloof and self-centered competitive skiier. The film is, in many ways, a deconstruction of the uplifting sportsContinue reading
2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009)
The scope and scale of devastation in Emmerich’s latest widescreen disaster opus often verges on the abstract, and so much happens with such ferocity that much of the potentially disturbing imagery, such as office workersContinue reading
A Christmas Carol (Robert Zemeckis, 2009)
Every generation gets the version of Dickens’ “Ghost Story of Christmas” it deserves, thus Zemeckis’ Disney-branded 3-D computer-animated spectacle is right up the alley of the all-digital-all-the-time era. The CG wizardry allows Zemeckis free reignContinue reading
The Men Who Stare at Goats (Grant Heslov, 2009)
The whacked-out premise of Heslov’s directorial debut—that the U.S. military has been and continues to experiment with psychic phenomena—is intriguing and funny and also a bit unnerving, traits that screenwriter Peter Straughan tries to stirContinue reading
Night of the Creeps (Fred Dekker, 1986)
Dekker’s cultish directorial debut (which he likes to describe as a “stewâ€) is very much a reflection of his feverish imagination, fed by years of B-movie fare cutting across every conceivable generic boundary, which weContinue reading
This Is It (Kenny Ortega, 2009)
Culled from hours of rehearsal footage, Ortega’s document of the concert that never offers irrefutable evidence that Michael Jackson could still move like no one else on earth and put on the kind of showContinue reading
Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore, 2009)
The irony of Moore’s latest documentary-cum-polemic is that, in our brave new world of Glenn Beck-style paranoia, anger, and histrionics masquerading as political discourse, Moore’s sarcastic mugging seems very nearly quaint. For those who areContinue reading
Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009)
Leave it Spike Jonze to turn a 10-sentence children’s classic from the early 1960s into an arty, thoughtful, and brooding meditation on the difficult nature of childhood, loneliness, and being misunderstood. Although a bit tooContinue reading
The Invention of Lying (Ricky Gervais & Matthew Robinson, 2009)
Gervais’s co-directorial debut starts out with an inherently funny premise (a world in which no one can lie) that is nicely sustained for roughly half the movie before it collapses beneath the weight of theContinue reading