It’s been a while since a movie really kicked me in the face. Well, at least in a good way. This particular type of facial assault only occurs with the most visceral, vigorous action movies during which fists and feet become weapons of mass destruction. Boisterous, brilliant face-kicking is at the top of the agenda [...]

Who knew Tarsem Singh Dhandwar had a sense of humor? Well, apparently not me. So color me pleasantly surprised that the imagery-obsessed filmmaker behind such stony-faced pictures as “The Cell” and last fall’s “Immortals” has finally revealed a different side of himself with the playful fairy tale movie Mirror Mirror. A lighthearted interpretation of the [...]

Fear in real time. That’s the most tantalizing hook the horror genre has offered since “The Blair Witch Project” opened the “found footage” floodgates more than a dozen years ago. That genre reinvention eventually led to the 2007 Spanish horror masterpiece “[Rec],” my pick for the scariest movie of the past decade. That movie was [...]

Christian Bale has used quite a few different voices throughout his career (this is the guy who actually made Batman sound like the complete opposite of alter ego Bruce Wayne), so when he shows up in Zhang Yimou’s Chinese drama The Flowers of War, I sort of half expected Bale to start speaking in Mandarin. [...]

Susanne Bier wants us all to know that bullying is bad and she’s willing to go to great lengths to make sure her message is heard. The Danish filmmaker’s dreary drama In a Better World paints a portrait of bullying that begins and ends in black-and-white territory, while managing to occasionally flirt with the gray [...]

It’s a curious situation when so many people get a kick at the same cinematic can and none of them can get it right. Is the material to blame? The filmmakers? The whole bloody idea? Let’s call it a three-way tie. Following in the footsteps of occasionally decent (but you wouldn’t know it from this [...]

I often feel like I don’t have enough time in the day to get everything done (I could always use a few more hours for movie watching!), but such complaining pales in comparison to the plight of the citizens of Andrew Niccol’s sci-fi parable In Time. For them, time is their lifeblood and not having [...]

Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, known sometimes as Tarsem Singh or merely Tarsem (maybe just “T” one day), certainly has an affinity for pretty, shiny things. His third and shiniest film to date, the plodding, silly, wake-me-when-it’s-over Greek mythology pic Immortals has its fair share of impressive images. Well, more than its fair share, really. Every shot [...]