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 […]

Jake Kasdan (Orange County, The Zero Effect) wrote and directed this little movie, which disappeared in theatres despite its gimme cast and major production team. Executive produced by comedy wunderkind Judd Apatow, Kasdan’s little movie has the feel of so much of their shared body of work: a fun time being had by all […]

Zach Helm (writer of the delightful Stranger Than Fiction) writes and directs this film, one that is, by discussions I have had, either going to be a massive classic or vanish into obscurity. From these two works of Helms, it is clear that he loves the notion of inanimate objects being more in tune […]

Neither as terrible as it could be nor as funny as it should be, with that cast, Fred Claus is a painless way to catch a new holiday movie this season without getting into a fight about what part was the lamest. The premise is interesting - Fred is the never-measures-up older brother of […]

Bee Movie is smarter than it is funny. That’s not to say there isn’t funny stuff in there, it just means that Jerry Seinfeld and his writers probably had very little intention of dumbing down their writing for animation purposes. And thank heavens for that! There is plenty of kid-movie slumming in […]

Rendition is the latest filmic attempt to draw attention to what’s already numbing us in the news. In this case, we have a citizen who is, um, renditioned on the way home to the US for a crime about which he is utterly ignorant, never mind culpable. Writer Kelley Sane seems to want […]