Insidious is a rotten movie getting unaccountably good reviews in some quarters. For instance, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly says: “Insidious is a haunted-house movie that has some of the most shivery and indelible images I’ve seen in any horror…

Rango is this crazy animated movie about a lizard in a state of existential crisis. His tale is narrated in song by a mariachi band comprised of four owls, and they sing about his imminent, heroic death throughout. Rango keeps…

Unknown isn’t good, but that doesn’t matter these days. Movies are so rotten lately we’ve all lowered our standards out of sheer desperation. The new standard for movie-going is, “Can I risk it? Will I hate it so much it’ll…

True Grit is a big hit for the Coen brothers, giving them their best opening weekend ever. Their growing popularity cues two inevitable reactions: 1) the claim that they’re improving as filmmakers, finally learning how to do it right, “it”…

There’s a new movie out called The Warrior’s Way, and it’s flopping like a doomed fish. It was so unpublicized I wouldn’t have known it existed, except I was hunting through the movie openings for the week in my dogged way….

Clint Eastwood’s latest, Hereafter, looks at the life-after-death question. I went to see it because I like it when movies plunge into the life-after-death question, which so often involves ghosts and paranormal weirdness and crazy psychic visions and mystic hoo-ha…

After a summer like the one we’ve just had, you’d be justified in asking, once again, “Why are movies such a pile of crap lately?” According to Peter Greenaway, British filmmaker, it’s because, as he puts it, “Cinema is dead.”…

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a financial flop so far, I don’t know why exactly. It’s aimed directly at the prized demographic of Young People Who Still Go to Theaters to See Movies If Anyone Does, In Order to…

I found Predators to be amusing as hell, but then, I was in just the right mood for it. I’d had one of those brain-melting work weeks when you do nothing but talk to people, prepare to talk to people,…

I’ve hated Tom Cruise for twenty-five years now. It’s been one of my favorite traditions, hating Tom Cruise. It involved refusing to go to his biggest blockbusters like Top Gun, then occasionally, foolishly succumbing to the temptation to see just…

Seriously, it beats me how people managed to develop such an appetite for sloppy sentimentality. With each successive hit feature, Pixar tests the limit of that appetite, and finds that there is no limit. Audiences drink up vats of Pixar’s…

It’s pretty simple, really. If you don’t like action films, don’t go see The A-Team. That is, if you complain when a film has explosions, and a lot of shooting and punching and special effects crashes and whatnot, and no…

We’re desperate for a laugh these days. Life was bad enough already without oil-covered seabirds. So naturally some gits arranged to provide us with oil-covered seabirds, really glopping the oil on them so they’re clearly immobile in the photos except…

Feck, as the Irish say. Feckin’ independent film, it’s not worth shite. I just watched Ondine, this Neil Jordon thing set in contemporary Ireland about a soulful fisherman played by Colin Farrell, who catches a young woman in his fishing…

Iron Man 2 is such a huge hit, it’s clear everybody’s going to see it regardless of critical praise or condemnation. Each of us can—or will soon be able to—fulminate about why it’s good, bad, or meh. We don’t need…

I woke up for the second morning in a row with a vague feeling that something terrible had happened. Then I remembered I watched the Oscars.

Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is messed up in some ways—we’ll get to that in a second—but it’s seriously beautiful at intervals that command attention. There’s a war theme in it that’s pursued with surprising gravity. Example: the Mad Hatter (Johnny…

On Shutter Island, there’s a lighthouse where patients are supposedly taken to be lobotomized. The movie has about thirty-five shots of this lighthouse against a gloomy sky, so many that you begin to wonder if director Martin Scorsese has had…

For a good time, call Robert Downey Jr. Of course, some people don’t want to have a good time. That’s one of the mysterious facts of our modern lives, and that’s why there’s a market for films like Precious: Based…

What are the best movies of the decade? How the hell should I know? To hear the critics tell it, it’s Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, plus a lot of other solemn bummers I didn’t see. However,…