Agora | Director Alejandro Amenábar | Score: 6.0 During intermission of a play on an ancient stage in 300 A.D. Alexandria, a young philosophy student suddenly stands up before the crowd. Pledging his love and devotion to his beautiful philosophy…
The Kids Are All Right | Director Lisa Cholodenko | Score: 7.4 The characters and lives in Lisa Cholodenko’s films always appear fully realized and well-lived in, like a closet filled with slightly wrinkled and worn clothes. Her previous works,…
Salt | Director Philip Noyce | Score: 3.6 According to the film’s production notes, the screenplay was penned by a man named Kurt Wimmer, a screenwriter with a dozen other titles under his belt, but having seen this trampy action…
The Girl Who Played With Fire | Director Daniel Alfredson | Score: 4.9 Watching the second cinematic installment of Steig Larsson’s wildly popular novel trilogy, I was struck with a certain kind of filmic déjà vu. Almost all the flaws…
Predators | Director Nimród Antal | Score: 5.5 Adrien Brody might have the most unlikely nose of any cinematic action hero in recent history. True, many action icons have had their fair share of facial quirks (think Bronson’s moustache, Schwarzenegger’s…
The Killer Inside Me | Dirrctor Michael Winterbottom | Score: 5.4 Jim Thompson was, perhaps, our most effectively amoral pulp writer. Dubbed the “Dimestore Dostoevsky,” many of his legion of better than 30 books concern bad women, miserable drifters, corrupt…
Cyrus | Directors Jay & Mark Duplass | Score: 6.6 It’s possible that no actor gets more out of their face than John C. Reilly. And what a face it is: All molten features, with an overhanging forehead, pinched, deep-set…
Knight and Day | Director James Mangold | Score: 3.8 The two-star vehicle is alive and well this summer. Or, at least alive. This precious spy thriller/romantic comedy comes to us from James Mangold, who started out making small, indie…
The Natural: Blu-ray Edition | Director Barry Levinson | Score: 7.7 Sometimes, you can bypass film theory, and drop your critical credentials and your professionally sustained disbelief by the exit door. Sometimes, you can hunker down in your seat and…
MacGruber | Director Jorma Taccone | Score: 6.2 Talk about damning with faint praise. The film’s producers couldn’t have been terribly happy that Michaels-Goldwyn touted a film critic’s praise “The best SNL movie since Wayne’s World” as one of its…