In the Valley of Elah is not a war film, though at times it looks like one. In the Valley of Elah is not a murder mystery, though at times it sounds like one. In the Valley of Elah is a national requiem, a tortured dirge for the loss of American innocence and humanity, an […]

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Following hard on Paul Haggis’ mournfully powerful In the Valley of Elah, The Kingdom represents another Hollywood entry into this fall’s post 9/11, Iraq-conscious line-up. Of the upcoming battery of films, The Kingdom may be the most unobjectionable, accessible and ultimately, most entertaining.

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Rumor has it that Trade is being positioned for a tidy fall release so that the film will stick in Academy voter’s minds once the Oscars come around early next year. If that is the case, its producers are bound to be monumentally disappointed. Trade is a dreadfully hollow film, empty of everything except pretension […]

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The premise of Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution is already quite familiar: a female spy attaches herself to a high-ranking enemy officer in order to learn his secrets and, ultimately, kill him. Usually, these sorts of films involve the Nazis (Paul Verhoeven’s recent Black Book comes to mind), and while Lee’s Venice Film Festival winner is […]

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Some filmmakers produce their greatest work in their youth and then fizzle with age. Others are consistently great, producing triumph after triumph until the end of their lives. Sidney Lumet belongs in the latter camp. The 83-year-old director of 12 Angry Men, Network and Dog Day Afternoon returns with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, […]

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You cannot walk out of David Cronenberg’s new masterpiece, Eastern Promises without thinking of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy. Its gravity is that palpable. It is not that Eastern Promises is guilty of regicide or succeeds in actually usurping the throne. But the film effortlessly and majestically takes its place as a great crime epic […]

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If it weren’t for the fact that The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford boasts such well-known, contemporary actors, one might be tempted to think that the film was accidentally locked in a studio vault sometime during the 1970s and only recently rediscovered. There is something splendidly musty and blessedly anachronistic about […]

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In 1845, Henry David Thoreau “went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived…” While the great Transcendentalist certainly lived […]

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The Brave One is being advertised as a revenge pic even though it is nothing of the sort. It has more in common with M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable or even the TV series Heroes than with Charles Bronson’s Death Wish. The Brave One feels like a superhero movie, charting the familiar origins story of an […]

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This is an abridged version of a review I wrote for Christianity Today Movies. To read the rest of this review, click here.
Hollywood is not above misrepresenting a film in hopes of drawing an audience. It’s not that the trailer for Silk misrepresents the film, so much as it does not tell the whole story. […]

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