Search for 2009

Watching Cheri, I felt like someone had turned back the clock by about 15 years. The early-to-mid-1990s were a fertile time for literate, lavish adaptations of period piece literature, with frequent destinations being Europe between the early-1800...

Since imprinting his name on the international indie box office with his mid-'90s one-two punch of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, Toronto-based filmmaker Atom Egoyan has been struggling to regain his footing. In one way or another, his last few ...

Review based on a 2-D (standard) screening. If I ever wanted to know what A Christmas Carol might look like as a high-end video game, I need search no farther than this motion picture, which takes the Dickens classic and converts it into somethi...

Is it too much to ask that a narrative film have a beginning, a middle, and an end? Apparently in the case of Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, a loose adaptation of Darren Shan's Vampire Blood trilogy, the answer is "yes." Developed with...

One could make a cogent, compelling argument that no individual had a bigger impact on the 20th century fashion industry than Coco Chanel. Larger than life in both image and influence, she shaped the way women dressed from the Flapper era until he...

The chief pleasure to be derived from watching Cold Souls is that it's a journey into the unexpected. To one degree or another, even the best screenplays tend to follow projectable trajectories, even when the specifics are obfuscated. Cold Souls ...

It has been a long time since I came as close to walking out of a movie as I did with Confessions of a Shopaholic. Not only did I find this production to be irritating, unfunny, and lacking in entertainment value, but I found its underlying slavis...

Henry Selick has a particular sensibility and, when choosing material for his movies, he seeks stories that fit into the slightly twisted, quasi-fairy tale realm where he feels comfortable working. Thus, in the past, he has collaborated with Tim B...

At the very least, it's necessary to respect what the filmmakers try to do with Couples Retreat, even if the end result isn't fully successful or satisfying. Their goal is to take the basic template for a raunchy sex comedy and change it up by ins...

The setting of Cracks - an elite British all-girls boarding school during the 1930s - is a classic exploitation film locale. For her feature debut, however, Jordan Scott (daughter of Ridley, who co-executive produced the film along with his brother...