Thursday, May 13th, 2010
Iron Man 2
Iron Man 2 isn’t your daddy’s superhero movie. It’s your granddaddy’s. The steady torrent of wisecracks on the screen is indebted to the ’30s screwball comedies that accelerated newly audible dialogue to supersonic speed; and in this high-grade hybrid the screws are actual screws, and the balls energy-based projectiles launched from our hero’s metallic palm. [...]
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Thursday, May 6th, 2010
Ajami
An elderly woman recently told me that when she saw The Silence of the Lambs, back in 1991, she couldn’t follow the plot. What would she think of Ajami? This Israeli import seems to be well-intended, and the international film-festival circuit tends to laud the good intentions of those whose cameras examine the streets on [...]
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Monday, February 15th, 2010
The Wolfman
If the hair on my knuckles spiked, the muscles in my back contorted, and I let out a bloodcurdling howl during The Wolfman, it was probably just a yawn. Maybe my failure of intuition—and unwarranted heeding of publicity—had left me crabby. But shouldn’t the remake of a 1941 monster-movie classic indulge in just a little [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
Ninja Assassin
In its first few minutes, Ninja Assassin has some of the most creative dismemberments that you’re likely to have seen; and then, disappointingly, the satirical blade goes dull. In fact, it takes a considerable amount of time before another weapon is unsheathed, and you start to wonder why the hell we’re in Berlin—or why the [...]
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Thursday, September 24th, 2009
District 9
In Alive in Joburg, a film that was only six-and-a-half minutes in length, Neill Blomkamp toyed with an ingenious idea. Aliens are marooned in South Africa, and come seemingly in peace; but when they start moving into human neighborhoods, the authoritarian apartheid government locks them away in concentration camps. They’re treated as subhuman and forced [...]