One of the brilliant posters for American Teen echoes the iconic poster for the movie The Breakfast Club, including its overly dramatic tagline.  While “Heart-throb” Mitch seems a little shoe-horned into Judd Nelson’s “Criminal” position, the other leads in this film slide effortlessly into their pigeonholes…at first.  It’s true that today’s teenagers are the most […]

Wow, what an experience! The movie starts hard core with a crime in progress, a common every-day cinema crime. All the rules are being broken again and again, making what was a workaday heist into a peek into the madness behind the perpetrator’s madness. The Joker’s paradigm is eschew predictability, and the […]

The ads for this movie tell you all you need to know about it: it’s a major attack on New York City shot entirely from the point of view of one consumer digital video camera. I would never spoil the surprises that await you, wanting instead to urge you to go see it. […]

Cynically, I thought War/Dance would be one of those documentaries that is nominated just by virtue of being about Africa (see also: Holocaust). It focuses on a group of Acholi tribe primary school children in war-torn northern Uganda who get to compete in the National Music Competition of 2005. The film highlights the […]

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a true story about Elle power player Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffered a severe cerebral-vascular accident that resulted in a rare condition known even in French as “locked-in syndrome.” He is completely paralyzed save for one eyelid, but fully alert and conscious. His only means of communication […]

Some movies feel like they are going to be so quirky and precious that you instinctively brace yourself before seeing them, ready for some kind of regurgitated and safe formula to ruin what could have been a good idea. Juno is NOT that kind of movie. Ellen Page plays Juno, a high schooler […]

Going into Enchanted, I was surrounded by the free screening unwashed at their most crass; my companion still had simmering road rage from her 12 mile, 1 hour commute to the theatre, and two people were on cell phones in the stalls in the bathroom. We came out glowing, humming the movie’s signature tune, […]

Oh goodness, my expectations were high. Despite my disappointment in Knocked Up, Judd Apatow’s name still throws a lot of weight around my house. Jonah Hill has done no wrong since I first laid eyes on him in Campus Ladies. And of course, my Arrested Development-owned heart beats strongly for Michael […]

I love love love the Broadway soundtrack to Hairspray.  So much, in fact, that I went without dinner and still bounced a check in order to own it, it’s so infectious and cheerful and fun.  Marc Shaiman’s music (South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut, Down With Love) can capture a feeling in a bottle like […]

As a sequel with a new director and cast, 28 Weeks Later had the potential to just be a franchise for franchise’s sake, like Halloween 3, or any direct-to-landfill profit release, like Bring It On Again. Thankfully, director/co-writer Juan Carlos Fresnadilla took the psychological zing of 28 Days Later and turned it into an […]