In choppy, frizzed, black and white video, Sally, a boisterous leader with a southern drawl asks, “Are you still an effective team?” Agreeably, the woman on the other end of the line, Victoria, responds with a nod and Sally labors forward with technical orders. But I too, can respond to this inquiry in agreement. Director…
A character in the fifth installment of the “Scary Movie” franchise utters the line, “Wow, there are so many pans.” He doesn’t know the half of it, since almost every critic worth his or her salt has seemingly panned this film with wild abandon. Plotless, pointless and with little redeeming value, Scary Movie 5 will…
Making a film based upon an iconic figure, such as Lincoln or Gandhi, forces one to walk a thin line between legend and humanization. How do we show the warts (no pun intended in Honest Abe’s case) and foibles and yet still uphold the impeccable character of the subject. Such was the task of writer/director…
Jurassic Park 3D is probably one of the most hyped about films this season, and it’s easy to see why. Audiences have been raving that the film is just as thrilling as it was twenty years ago, that it absolutely begged to be converted into 3D, and that it’s an eternal testament to Steven Spielberg’s…
It’s been done, this whole alien taking over a human’s body thing in movies. It’s been done and done better. The concept goes back at least to the 1950s with “The Thing from Another World” and the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Now, for the umpteenth time, we get the same premise — only…
Loud, confusing, pointless and plotless are not exactly words one likes to use in a film review, but in this case, these terms are more than an apt description of G.I. Joe: Retaliation, the second G.I. Joe movie (the Hasbro Studio generation, not the classic 1945 picture starring Robert Mitchum). And like the company’s last…
Set in Communist East Germany in the early 1980s, cold war paranoia is in full view in Christian Petzold’s Barbara, winner of the Silver Berlin Bear for Best Director at the Berlinale. In Barbara, Petzold has fashioned not only a superb character study but a film that illuminates the effects of oppression on the human…
