Step Brothers is little more than an opportunity for two master riffers to face off in the ultimate Man-Child challenge.  There is a plot, but it only exists to give Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly (co-creators with director Adam McKay) some focus for their juvenilia.  While this sounds like a negative comment, it’s actually […]

I was fortunate enough to see this film with two fellows who had not only read the book on which it’s based (Ben Mezrick’s Bringing Down The House), but also had, um, taken the resulting inspiration to more practical levels, shall we say. 21 could be described as a loosely faithful interpretation of a […]

Dear Diary –
Chicken tortilla soup again! Ugh. I need a raise. Sat down today to write reviews of American Zombie and Miss Pettigrew, and found notes in my own handwriting on a movie called Doomsday. Forgot I had seen it – hadn’t heard of it before we saw it, and […]

Did you see the movie Caveman, with Ringo Starr? Some of the buzz is making 10,000 B.C. (or 10KBC for the hipster crowd) out to be a worse movie than Barbara Bach’s furry bikini debut. Look, no one, I mean no one, expected this movie to be high art. Roland Emmerich directed […]

In Bruges is marketed as a much faster-paced shoot-’em-up than it ultimately is. This is not a bad thing, but it might come as a surprise to a moviegoer. However, like the enjoyment of Bruges the city, taking it slow and savoring the quieter moments brings a great deal of pleasure in the […]

Vantage Point prepared us for its premise with a snappy preview showing caught footage, multi-cultural faces in a crowd, and the shock of an assassination and explosion. Grab! The film plays and rewinds the key 23 minutes (not in real time) of the day in question – an imagined summit between America and […]

Yes, it’s a Jack Black movie, with Mos Def costarring. However, it is more than that – it’s a film by Michel Gondry, who tamed Jim Carrey for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Jack’s unique brand of mania works for this film, but it does not turn into School of Rock. […]

Looking a bit like a rangy Ed Harris, Viggo Mortenson plays Nikolai, a tough Russian mobster whose dealings collide with Anna, a British OB/GYN. The collision comes in the form of a young Russian girl’s tragedy, but their paths do not immediately cross. He is entangled in the vor v zakone Russian Mafia and […]

Director Adam Rifkin takes an interesting idea - that of the preponderance of surveillance cameras in all our lives, and runs with it. Look is a narrative film, our characters meeting and developing gradually via footage from mall stores, ATMs, cop cars, convenience stores, parking lots, lobby cameras, etc. It would be tempting […]

This movie is not bad, I just couldn’t connect with it. I cried a little and my heart was warmed a little, but I felt all the interesting avenues were only explored by a few cobblestones before the film returns to teasing us about Gogol’s name. I must admit straight out that I […]