Screen
‘X-Men’ meets ‘90210’
Imagine the cast of Beverly Hills, 90210 being dropped into Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters from the X-Men movies and you’ll have a sense of the uneven pastiche that is I Am Number Four...
Crass and fun
It`s not good to start a review by saying that the film wasn’t anywhere near as bad or as stupid as I was afraid it’d be, but that’s exactly how I felt about the inane satire MacGruber. Crude and sophomoric, it still had lots of laughs and a surprisingly polished ...
How to make friends
A cross far too many stretches of our movie-going lives, we see movie after movie without seeing one that really moves. At once stealthy and breathlessly paced, The Social Network scoots at a fabulous clip, depicting how its version of Facebook founder Mark ...
A wee whee, mon ami
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets has the exact problems you would anticipate an adaptation of a 50-year-old French sci-fi comic book...
Black humorless
Low-brow. Just expect it from Gulliver’s Travels. When Gulliver ( Jack Black) first arrives at the kingdom of Lilliput and puts out a raging fire by dropping his shorts and urinating, I was astonished by the audience laughter. This is a film unabashedly aimed at teen...
‘Every leaf, every ray of light’
“Someday we’ll fall down and weep, and we’ll understand it all. All things.” —Mr. O’Brien, The Tree of Life
For two weeks every May, the...
It whistleblows
There’s a good movie to be made about the controversial whistleblowing actions of Edward Snowden. It’s a documentary called Citizenfour, and you should really...
Solid-iron fun
Iron Man 2 is not a perfect movie, but it’s sure fun and engaging. The new story twists, the health issue that Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) faces and the half-baked but disturbing archenemy Whiplash (Mickey Rourke) add up to a film that’s sure to be the first ...
What you make of it
The first thing you should know about the International Film Series (IFS) is that, when you go, you will watch your movie in peace....
Scary? Shh! ‘It’…
When figuring out how to word-hump all the “amazing details” from a five-bazillion-page Stephen King novel into a movie’s screenplay, maybe filmmakers can start...
‘The world’s biggest student film’
It was 1983 when British filmmaker Alex Cox turned in his first feature film to Universal Studios. That same week, Cox optioned the rights to one of his favorite science-fiction novels for a future project. The movie was Repo Man. The book was Harry Harrison’s Bill, ...
