Search for 2011

Eleven years after Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and her posse last tangled with a mad slasher/killer, the Scream series has been exhumed. Ignoring or forgetting that the final part of the original trilogy, Scream 3, underwhelmed in terms of pop...

It's the 14th century somewhere in the middle of Europe. In the name of verisimilitude, the filmmakers of Season of the Witch have covered everyone with dirt and filmed only at night and on cloudy days. At times, it looks like Monty Python and the ...

Seeking Justice is making a token theatrical stop on the fast track to home video (which is where the distributor, Anchor Bay, makes most of its money). A cheap and cheesy thriller that feels like it was (badly) adapted from a beach novel (although...

A Separation, Asghar Farhadi's universally acclaimed 2011 feature, is many things, none of them trivial. It's an indictment of a culture in which religion and tradition poison a legal system. It is an exploration of the power of a lie. It is a myst...

Spoiler warning: In discussing the movie, I have revealed more about the plot than I normally do, including a brief, oblique reference to the ending. Although Shame is not narrative-driven, those who want a "pure" experience may wish to read no fur...

It can be argued that few things embolden a filmmaker more than success. When Guy Ritchie re-invented the world's best-known detective for his 2009 Sherlock Holmes, no one knew how the movie would be received. Ritchie's vision was validated by a s...

For about 50 minutes, Silent House represents one of the most intense, unsettling horror movies I have recently viewed. This is Halloween territory, where the tension is so thick as to be almost unbearable. It's the kind of experience hard-core hor...

The Sitter fits neatly into the mediocre, generic comedy category - a classification reserved for films that are neither funny enough nor raunchy enough nor smart enough to do more than consume time and dull the senses. One could argue that these a...

The Skin I Live In is an old-time horror movie told in anything but an old-time horror movie fashion by the iconoclast Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar. There’s a mad scientist, a faithful servant, a beautiful woman trapped in a prison, and...

Sleeping Beauty is one of those self-consciously artsy motion picture that promises more than it delivers. A fascinating collage of ideas that fails to gel into a movie and collapses under the pretentious weight of the attempt, director Julia Leigh...