M. Night Shyamalan’s greatest talent, I think, is taking a brilliant cinematographer’s camera and pointing at something which is comprehensible but just off kilter, and doing it just so, in a way that makes the image and the content gel into an iconic Moment. In the preview of The Happening, we have a shot […]

Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Catch it on HBO
The short version:  Prince Caspian (the movie) is gorgeous and a total snore.  All the best effects houses worked on the computer and practical effects.  The locations are in the stunning environments of the Czech Republic, Poland, and New Zealand.  Every dollar of that budget is on that […]

I love Tina Fey. I loved the movie she wrote, Mean Girls. She’s smart, sexy, funny and endearingly normal and accessible. I love 30 Rock. Amy Poehler has great comic timing, even if she always sounds like she’s making fun of her own line reading. Together they snap, crackle, and […]

George Clooney has worked with an interesting assembly of directors, and spent years on episodic television. What I just figured out about Clooney the director is that he is a crafter of moments more than a story teller. He’s clearly watched and learned from Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), the Coen brothers, and Steven […]

Margot at the Wedding is, superficially, a story about Margot (Nicole Kidman) who is attending the wedding of her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to a man Margot does not think is good enough (Jack Black). The sisters have been estranged, and the movie leads me to believe that it is because Margot herself […]

Phillip Pullman’s excellent trilogy of novels captured my readership and interest (thank you, MT!) more than the Lord of the Rings trilogy. For those who have read them, the film version should resemble the truncated screen version of the Rings books, focusing on the primary good versus evil plot line, and dispensing with valuable, […]

I get it. I mean, I get the idea. Shoot ‘Em Up is a purposefully over-the-top video game level fantasy of gunplay, wacky action moves, and intentional winking. I was ready and primed for something with the crazy feel of the Transporter or old Tarantino or something like that. The experience […]

Nothing makes you appreciate the simple technical skill of making a generic movie than preceding it with Shoot Em Up. Rush Hour 3 on its own merits is pedestrian, simplistic, mildly funny, and painless. After seeing Shoot Em Up, Rush Hour 3 can also be appreciated for good camera work, talented stunts and […]

Day Watch (Dnevnoy Dozor)
Catch it on HBO
Fans of Night Watch, we eagerly gobbled up previews for this sequel.  The trilogy is based on popular Russian fantasy novel by Sergey Lukyanenko (1998), and began with the excellent film Night Watch.  We rushed out to our local art-house theater to fight the crowds we had fought the […]

Longtime Cinerina readers well know that I am no Shrek fan. Oh sure, the first movie was full of sly digs at Walt Disney animation studios and various corporate America icons - but funny? A little. Not better than Pixar’s Monsters Inc., which it inexplicably beat for the first ever Animated Feature […]