Search for 2009

Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, which won the Golden Palm Award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, is the quintessential art film: slow, demanding, and rewarding for those willing to put forth the intellectual effort necessary to puzzle out its a...

Wonderful World feels like a modern-day half-baked riff on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Despite a film festival pedigree (it was shown at a number of local festivals on the 2009 circuit), the movie is so lightweight and inconsequential that ...

Death was once considered the great equalizer. These days, it's the best way to reconstruct a damaged reputation. Lionizing the dead isn't just a cottage industry; it's universal. The sins of the living are washed away in death, leaving behind a ...

2008 was the year in which the comic book superhero came of age. Films like Iron Man and especially The Dark Knight illustrated what was possible when a motion picture dared to take its characters out of the comfortable box in which too many super...

Two weeks ago, I wrote that, while watching Land of the Lost, I felt a sense of depression. That feeling revisited me during Year One, an inexplicably unfunny comedy made by two people who have proven they can do much better: director/co-writer Ha...

The Young Victoria, which was selected as the closing film of the 2009 Toronto Film Festival (a position that often attracts mediocrity), isn't so much poorly made as it is uninspired. It's hard to determine whether the root cause is that the earl...

From the beginning, it's apparent that there's something "off" about Youth in Revolt. It's not that the film is fatally flawed, but the tone is uneven, the satire is blunt, the comedy rarely generates more than feeble laughs, and the lead characte...

Simply put, most horror films are not scary. There are exceptions, of course, but those are increasingly rare. I think the last horror movie that had me on edge may have been The Mist, and that was released two years ago. Nevertheless, the genre...