Back in the days when I pursued film criticism as a semi-fulltime activity, I always tried to hold myself to professional standards. Anything that I felt might color my view of a film, I left outside the theater. I felt it was the proper way to handle my duty of analyzing and recommending or not […]
Category Archives: General Movie Reviews
Note: This review is from a sneak peek of Vannin’ presented by the Chicago Cinema Society on November 16th at the Patio Theater. As much as I like documentaries, it seems there is an overwhelming belief that only those films that focus on difficult, often dark subject matter are worth watching. Obviously, there is a […]
Joe Dante has spent most of his career making quietly subversive exploitation films. Movies like Piranha, The Howling, The Burbs, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Small Soldiers, Matinee, and his segment of The Twilight Zone: The Movie, while meeting genre requirements, also gently poke fun at different aspects of American culture. From commercial overdevelopment of […]
The Woman is an incredibly difficult film about which to write without getting into spoiler territory. Because of this problem, I have decided to split this piece into two parts. The first part will be a straight review that steers clear of plot specifics beyond the first act setup. The second part will be a […]
An early scene in Last Ride, director Glendyn Ivin’s stark road movie, finds Kev (Hugo Weaving), a low-rent criminal on the run, cutting his long hair and shaving his beard in a restaurant bathroom. It’s a half-hearted and largely useless attempt to change his appearance because of the actor playing Kev. It doesn’t matter his […]
Depending on your point of view, 13 Assassins is either very familiar or very unusual. For those with even a casual knowledge of Japanese cinema, the film is immediately recognizable as a remake of the better than average The Thirteen Assassins, a film that was a lesser riff on Seven Samurai. As a remake of […]
Hanna has been marketed as a cross between an art house film and an action flick. While the film definitely boasts a more interesting and eclectic cast than most action movies, it eventually does nothing more than borrow bits and pieces from The Bourne Identity, Run Lola Run, and Léon. This lack of originality doesn’t […]
Super is the type of movie that thrills me by its very existence. It’s a whacked-out burst of intelligent, inventive filmmaking that does a great job of juggling wildly shifting tones while never forgetting where the heart of its story rests. I watched the film with a huge smile on my face as writer-director James […]
Obsessive Movie Nerd 