Search for State

Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. Mike Nicols' Wolf. Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein. Suddenly, horror of the old genre (as opposed to the '80s slasher flicks) is back with a vengeance. The latest, and arguably the most ambitious, to enter this p...

On some level, I feel that I should have been able to enjoy Into the Blue. It has all the elements one would expect from a "so bad it's good" feature: cheesy dialogue, a script that could have been written by two chimpanzees, acting that would mak...

Into the Storm is as straightforward a disaster film as you're likely to find. It has all the characteristics of the genre. The narrative trajectory is linear and uncomplicated. The two-dimensional characters are entrenched in their own flimsy, soa...

There's something seductive about the idea of turning one's back on civilization and all its trappings. Many of us entertain this thought during a daydream or in those gentle minutes between wakefulness and sleep, but we don't view it as the act of...

Into the Woods left me out in the cold. The long-gestating cinematic adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's fairy tale-infused Broadway musical, Into the Woods can claim a clever screenplay and a few enjoyable performances but little else. The generic ...

For whatever reason, the Coen Brothers' comedies (such as Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy, and The Big Lebowski) have always garnered less critical attention than the filmmakers' more serious fare (such as Blood Simple, Barton Fink, and Fargo)...

The Intruder is an unwelcome throwback to the late 1980s and early 1990s when titles like Unlawful Entry, Single White Female, and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle were inexplicably the rage. This new take on an old idea won’t challenge The St...

Based on the evidence at hand, it's impossible to say whether director Oliver Hirschbiegel's (Downfall) original cut of The Invasion would have been any good. What can be said is that the mismatched blending of Hirschbiegel's low-key horror and th...

It's Ghost Town all over again. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for those who enjoyed Ricky Gervais' previous feature, but The Invention of Lying feels a little too much like a wasted opportunity. In many ways, it's a similar anima...

With the election of Barack Obama, we have apparently entered a kinder, gentler world in which films about racial harmony and goodwill to all men are becoming commonplace (at least during awards season). How else to explain the presence of both Th...