Search for 2009

For those who are principally familiar with Sir Michael Caine from his work during the past two decades, his role as the rough-and-tumble Harry Brown may seem a little out-of-character. After all, this isn't the sort of thing one expects from the ...

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince represents the immensely popular series' first outing without the net of having new books waiting in the wings. As far as the written word is concerned, Harry's tale is done. Cinematically, there are still t...

Sometimes I wonder why I bother with PG-13 horror films. They're a dime a dozen and most of them aren't worth the celluloid the projector's light passes through. For every pleasant surprise like The Uninvited, there are about ten lifeless regurgi...

He's Just Not That Into You seeks to mine the same vein of romantic comedy ore as Love, Actually - the multi-arc story in which characters cross each others' paths and interact in an attempt to show different facets of one emotion. Unfortunately, ...

I Am Love falls into the select category of films that are easier to admire than like. Director Luca Guadagnino's arm's length approach to the story creates a buffer between the audience and the main character - something that works well during th...

I Love You, Beth Cooper contains a share of effective elements wrapped around the core that, overall, isn't very good. Although masquerading as a generic teen romantic comedy, the film touches on topics that are atypically introspective for this s...

It has long been my contention that the male bonding movie, or so-called "buddy movie," is actually a romantic comedy without the sex. I Love You, Man makes this explicit - it's a buddy movie with all of the rom-com elements exaggerated out of prop...

With each release, Pixar explores new themes and ideas. Meanwhile, animation studios like Fox retread tired "franchises" like Ice Age. Never representative of more than mediocrity from a technical or story-based standpoint, the Ice Age series has...

If I was a teacher and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was a student's paper, I would give it an "incomplete." After all, how can one assess a project whose nature was irrevocably altered when the lead actor died? Whatever vision director Ter...

Watching Imagine That, I was beset by a feeling of intense depression. Is this what Eddie Murphy has become? Once moviedom's most high-octane comedian, a combustible mixture of raunchy, non-holds-barred verbal repartee and kinetic physical mayhem...