Search for 2009

We all know the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses," and so does first time writer/director Darrick Borte, who has used that as the basis for his debut, called (appropriately enough) The Joneses. The subject matter is simple enough: Borte has ele...

When I was three years old and my playmates were happily watching Sesame Street and cartoons, I would sit in front of the television and gaze at the force of nature that was Julia Child (I also liked Graham Kerr, The Galloping Gourmet). Her larger...

The kids may be all right, but the adults aren't. That's the underlying premise of Lisa Cholodenko's unconventional family drama - a motion picture that uses wry humor and uncommon sensitivity to underscore some of the difficulties inherent in any...

Knowing is a classic case of a movie that is crammed with interesting ideas but is unable to conceptualize them in a compelling fashion. Knowing doesn't fail because of a lack of ambition or scope but because of flaws in execution. The movie trie...

What were they thinking? Not only does the concept of re-imagining a campy Saturday morning TV show as a Will Ferrell "family-friendly" big-budget movie sound bad, it is bad. A turd of T-Rex proportions, Land of the Lost makes one remember last s...

In a graphic example of how creatively bankrupt Hollywood has become, it's no longer good enough merely to remake older films - now the studios have begun to remake remakes. 1972's The Last House on the Left, the first feature effort of Wes Craven...

Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer), or - more properly - Lev Tolstoy, is one of the two best-known 19th century Russian authors. His masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are required reading in many high school and college literature clas...

The premise of Law Abiding Citizen - angry father seeks revenge on the system when his daughter's murderer gets off with a light sentence - probably sounded great in the pitch meetings but, as with all high concept motion pictures, the devil's in t...

In 1998, Todd Solondz's Happiness became one of the most talked-about and controversial indie films of the year - a black comedy that ventured into David Lynch territory to expose the rot underlying the placid exterior of suburbia. At the time, Hap...

The Limits of Control is a modern fable set within the approximation of a thriller. The slow, repetitious nature of the film, as well as the lack of a strong narrative, limits the level of suspense writer/director Jim Jarmusch is capable of genera...