One of the film’s unexpected pleasures is that it manages to evoke a very specific time period without becoming mired in it. Stillman pulls off a unique balancing act of conveying the specificities of theContinue reading
Category: Mainstream U.S. Cinema
Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009)
An assured riff on zombie traditions, smartly playing the most basic concepts of the genre absolutely straight (the desolation of the post-zombie-apocalyptic world, the ravenous horrors of raging flesh-eaters, etc.), but allowing us to viewContinue reading
Pandorum (Christian Alvart, 2009)
When Alvart sticks to his story’s central mystery, the film is an eerily effective mixture of ecological science fiction and horror. Unfortunately, it is constantly undercut by the perfunctory deployment of cannibalistic humanoids and inaneContinue reading
The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh, 2009)
Soderbergh’s darkly comic riff on true-life thrillers is serious about not being entirely serious. He tweaks the material into the realm of dark humor, but without ever losing the sense that the story he isContinue reading
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (Phil Lord & Chris Miller, 2009)
The fast and furious pace of this 3-D computer-animated comedy bears little resemblance to the easier pleasures of the original book, although that is not to say that the film itself is lacking in pleasure.Continue reading
High Crimes (Carl Franklin, 2002)
One of a string of Ashley Judd-in-danger films released in the late ’90s and early 2000s, this straightforward military thriller about a wife trying to save her former Marine husband after he is accused ofContinue reading
Jennifer’s Body (2009)
In Juno, screenwriter Diablo Cody was able to turn the teen comedy genre inside out with a ticklish mixture of the hilarious and the humane, and here she is trying to do something similar, butContinue reading
Whiteout (Dominic Sena, 2009)
Take away the extreme setting at the South Pole, and Sena’s adaptation of Greg Rucka’s graphic novel doesn’t have much. The frigid temperatures, blasting snow, and constant threat of freezing to death (or at leastContinue reading
All About Steve (Phil Traill, 2009)
Perhaps it was because my expectations for Sandra Bullock’s latest were greatly diminished by rumors of sheer awfulness, but I found myself actually enjoying the lunacy of the film’s ridiculously off-kilter romantic comedy, which throwsContinue reading
9 (Shane Acker, 2009)
A weird and wonderful but narratively lacking post-apocalyptic fantasy about rag-doll creatures battling the remnants of a fascist machine culture, Acker’s expansion of his 2005 Oscar-nominated short film features harrowing action setpieces and magnificent imageryContinue reading