Screen
Partly sunny
To steal from Mother Goose (don’t worry, she’s dead): When Cloud Atlas is good, it’s very, very good; when it’s bad, Hugo Weaving is doing a drag impression of Nurse Ratched. The ambition of writers/directors Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Twyker, working from David...
Violence that bores
In a new introduction to the eight-part comic book series Kick-Ass, which was created in tandem with the film version, Image Comics co-founder Rob Liefeld describes the chief strength of Mark Millar’s superhero lark as extolling “hyper-real super-violence,” “so far...
Bad cops, bad script
Everything that does and does not work in Brooklyn’s Finest arrives in Scene One. A twitchy, cashstrapped detective played by Ethan Hawke is driving around with a shifty associate played by unbilled Vincent D’Onofrio. They park by a cemetery. (Warning.) Director ...
You should mount ‘Olympus’
The only explanation that makes sense for the existence of Olympus Has Fallen is that someone found a 1990s action movie on VHS underneath Joel Silver’s bed and paid to have Gerard Butler digitally transposed over Steven Seagal. The Die Hard franchise may be hiking ...
‘Hangover’ hangover
For some movies, seeming funny is enough. The Hangover Part II only has to show up to succeed. At once pushy and lazy, the sequel follows the 2009 smash, which has become the most lucrative R-rated comedy in history. Isn’t that depressing? I find that depressing...
Take the psycho path
With massive mainstream media marketing rollouts and the box office boons reaped by free social media, movies so rarely surprise us these days. Shock cameos are spoiled in the space of a tweet, while most trailers render buying the proverbial “movie cow” moot when ...
