1/2
This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.
You know what I’m talking about. We’ve all seen it. You’re walking through the mall when a couple passes you. He is average, possessing no traits one would even remotely identify as handsome. But she is mind-bogglingly gorgeous, a caliber of beauty so far beyond the man holding her hand that it makes you stare, your mouth agape, trying to unravel a sudden and vexing mystery. The surprisingly enjoyable She’s Out of My League capitalizes on that very feeling, and while it’s a bigger fantasy film than The Lord of the Rings, it owns its implausibility in a way that endures rather than repulses. [read more]
This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.
It turns out Robert Pattinson sparkles after all. Known around the world by millions of teenaged girls as the heartthrob vampire from the Twilight franchise, Pattinson proves in Remember Me that adults should take him seriously too. Remember Me is a moving and gentle film about the healing power of love and the indiscriminant agony of loss. [read more]
This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.
When did you last see a truly great Tim Burton film? Sure, there have been respectable entries (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Sweeney Todd), but the last truly exceptional Burton film was indubitably Edward Scissorhands, exactly 20 years ago. It cannot be argued that Burton picks quintessentially perfect material for his gothic, off-bubble sensibilities (what could be better suited to his warped imagination than Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow?) And yet, these films never quite come together as one might hope. They are more interesting than good. [read more]
“One of these things is not like the other,” Big Bird used to croon on Sesame Street. “One of these things just doesn’t belong.” It is fairly obvious that Big Bird was playfully commenting on the fact that Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer is far too good a film for its February release date, a sort of cinematic orphan in a month usually reserved for Hollywood detritus. A prescient story strained through the cinematic vocabulary of mid-20th century Alfred Hitchcock, The Ghost Writer is a sophisticated and meaty thriller. It’s also deliriously entertaining and funny. [read more]
1/2
This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.
Sometimes the sign of a master artist is not how he produces a product of bracing originality, but how he interprets a long established genre. In tackling Shutter Island, only his second thriller since the 1991 remake of Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese, who is a master artist in the eyes of even the most jaded cynic, takes a type of story familiar to all of us and dresses its decidedly ghoulish Hitchcockian bones in something gossamer and graceful. [read more]
This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.
Despite months of real life, on-set horror stories and presumptive bad press, I went into The Wolfman with the excitement that comes with seeing a good monster movie, especially one that follows in a long tradition of genre classics from a studio that made its name spinning horrific yarns in Hollywood’s golden age. Much to my disappointment, however, the only thing scary about The Wolfman is the movie itself. [read more]
This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.
Valentine’s Day, I saw Love Actually, I knew Love Actually, Love Actually was a friend of mine. Valentine’s Day, you’re no Love Actually. [read more]
This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.
If Mel Gibson is obsessed with suffering as some sort of Dark Ages redemptive penance, than Nicholas Sparks, on whose book the film Dear John is based, has a fetish for personal calamity, for creating sentimental, overly precious characters only to later squash them for maximum audience effect. Sparks is the shock artist who holds up an adorable kitten on stage, waits for the chorus of “ahhhhhhs” to die down and then drops it in a meat grinder. And still audiences return to his work time and again. In God’s name, why? [read more]
1/2
From Paris with Love is like The Odd Couple with automatic weapons. This enjoyable, low rent Bourne actioneer may be preposterous, but that’s half its cheeky charm. [read more]
