Screen
Double Take: ‘Source Code’
When you die, the last eight minutes of your life remain electromagnetically imprinted in your brain. If we could inject someone into that persistent memory, they could solve crimes after the fact. It’s the fascinating premise for director Duncan Jones’ sci-fi ...
‘Fury’ is missing fast
Inside of writer/director David Fury is “we will hold this line” war movie populated with complex characters and surprisingly good performances. Problem is, it was slipped into the carcass vAC of a dirty, confused, overly serious, inconsistently grotesque snoozer in...
‘Nine’ is sexy, engaging and stylish
Films are dreams, whether the director is aiming for hyper-realism or whether we’re allowed to fly through the odd, the dreamy, and the troubling of their imagination. Director Rob Marshall’s Nine is a sexy, engaging, stylish and enlightening journey through the ...
‘Horrible’ pretty good
You can practically hear little coils of contempt tightening inside Jason Bateman every time he’s in a pickle on screen. In the new comedy Horrible Bosses, the Bateman specialty is the are-you-trying-to-tell-me response. At one point in the film, when confronted ...
BIFF: Alive Inside
Alive Inside confirms what many of us already knew: The healing, soothing power of music has been underestimated by the medical community for decades. This moving documentary focuses on individuals in nursing homes who have Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, and who ...
Getting lazy about slackers
The Art of Getting By is a screen romance that echoes its title: It gets by. Barely. It’s another wan tale of an anti-social teen who finds himself irresistible to the sweetest, prettiest girl in school. But the film has flashes of wit and some interesting teen ...
Child’s tale come to life
Know how to give mild G-rated fare a little something special? Cast Sandra Oh as an elementary school teacher who enjoys her orderly ways and who regards the Ramona half of Ramona and Beezus, taken from the venerable Beverly Cleary children’s books, as more ...
Corruption of small-town innocence
They were staples of popular literature, Broadway and the movies long before the movies could talk: comic yarns in which small-town naifs pack their bags and hit the big city, where they learn about life and love and what they’ve been missing...
Cross-cultural animation
Five years ago, the Bristol, England-based Aardman animation folks — who created the stop-motion legends Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep and therefore are eligible for sainthood — made the digitally animated British/American co-production Flushed Away. Jam-...
Leave only memories; take only pictures
Images hold a very special place in the mind of the viewer. Simultaneously of one time and timeless, objective and subjective, images bring forth textures and dimensions often lost in memory that can reduce the complex into simplistic categories of black and white...
You’ve seen this film before
The mystery of Topher Grace’s film career, and why it isn’t better, continues with Take Me Home Tonight...


















