Search for 2009

Paper Heart is the latest in the so called "meta documentary" genre that mixes and tangles a fictional narrative with actual documentary footage. Like last year's American Teen, the ability to see the seams and sniff out the fictitious elements de...

The familiar looks different at night. Incandescent lights don't quite chase away the shadows with the effectiveness of the sun. The rooms and hallways of a home, so comforting at noon, can become cloaked with unease past the witching hour. This...

After stumbling through a lackluster first 30 minutes that features all the tepid humor one might reasonably expect from a mediocre comedy, Paul Blart: Mall Cop does something unexpected: it becomes watchable, perhaps even passably enjoyable. That...

There are times when a filmmaker tries so hard to surprise everyone that he ends up surprising no one. Such is the case with A Perfect Getaway, a film that exists for one reason: the twist. Writer/director David Twohy (Pitch Black) puts so much e...

I approached The Pink Panther 2 with the firm belief that, no matter how ill inspired it might be, it certainly couldn't be worse than its 2006 predecessor, which set a new low bar for all things Clouseau. In fulfilling those expectations, The Pin...

Despite arriving on North American screens mid-way through the month of November with a cast that features three previous Academy Award nominees (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson) and a similarly honored writer/director (Richa...

These tough economic times, with the national unemployment rate inching toward double digits, would seem to offer the perfect opportunity to release a movie about the difficulties faced by a recent college graduate in obtaining not merely the "perf...

Precious (saddled with the unwieldy subtitle: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire) manages the task of being both heartbreaking and heart-warming, all without resorting to the kind of manipulation so often evident in dramas about underprivileged ki...

When Disney mothballed traditional animation in 2004 following a series of disappointing box office underperformers, the blame was placed upon changing tastes - that viewers preferred the more eye-popping style of computer-generated images to the "...

A Prophet (Un prophète in its home tongue) is director Jacques Audiard's gangster-themed twist on the rags-to-riches story. Although it's a genre staple to present the story of an innocent corrupted by the criminal world and rising to a position ...