The latest Pixar film Up is being received as if it were better than the Second Coming. It represents the Pixar team’s effort to be even more lugubrious than in their last animated film—more lugubrious than in their last five …

I seriously thought my eardrums had burst a couple of times during Terminator Salvation. The movie sounds like jets crashing into a junkyard, one after another, with intervals of loud pompous narration delivered via public address system between the screeching collisions. The …

Armin Mueller-Stahl and Ewan McGregor acting the hell out of their roles

So far Angels and Demons has racked up a pile of money and a load of bad reviews. It deserves the bad reviews, …

So Star Trek ’09 is out, it’s a big hit, and response to it is way over the top. This is highly enjoyable if you like to see people grappling with a popular culture artifact as if their …

A short while back I wrote a review for the appalling hit movie Twilight, mourning the fact that vampires and werewolves were being ruined by soft-serve sex fantasy addicts, but rejoicing that at least zombies were safe. No way to …

We’re monitoring the development of theatrical 3-D, which is supposed to revolutionize the cinematic experience as we know it. It’s currently being tested out in animated films like Monsters vs. Aliens and Coraline, and is soon to be unleashed in …

This is a vengeful slagging of previews I’ve seen at least ten-thousand times, maybe through bad luck, bad timing, bad karma, it’s hard to say. They’re all for movies opening March 20th. Except for The Soloist, which may never open, …

Watchmen is one of those movies that is so thoroughly slimed with promos and recycled opinions by the time it opens, you’re already sick of it. The film industry term for this is “a saturation release,” meaning a liquid shitstorm …

If you haven’t seen a slasher film lately, Marcus Nisbett’s reboot of Friday the 13th feels paradoxically fresh. That’s probably because the genre is delivering a very specific product, so well-tested in eleven sequels that the only real challenge is …

There’s a shootout at the Guggenheim Museum in the middle of The International that’s about as cheery a spectacle as an action film can offer. One minute a cathedral hush prevails in Frank Lloyd Wright’s creamy architectural spiral, …

This will necessarily be a short article.

The Academy Awards are so great because they keep us in touch with the ratty old values of our forefathers and foremothers. We no longer know how to churn butter, or why it’s improper …

Liam Neeson tries to be reasonable.

Genre films are beginning to creep back into theaters after the big parade of Oscar-contenders—praise be to God—and one of them, a little actioner called Taken, is now tops at the box-office and …

Ossified baby, anyone?

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button—is it one of the worst American films of 2008, or THE worst American film of 2008? Can’t be the worst, you’ll argue, not while we have Australia to …

Klaatu has a bad day.

Number One at the box-office over the weekend, The Day the Earth Stood Still is a great study in all the things that can go wrong with a movie. The plot’s all …

The problem with Twilight isn’t that it’s an embarrassing fantasy for teenage girls—hell, I was a teenage girl myself once, so whatever celluloid dreams get the poor addled kids through seventh grade are okay by me. No, the problem is that Twilight …