Tom Tykwer is a director whose name shouldn’t really raise my hopes, thought it always does. The reason it always does is the director’s 1998 masterpiece Run Lola Run, one of the finest and most innovative movies of the 1990s. Whereas the reason it shouldn’t is that Tykwer hasn’t really made anything good since then. […]

Taken on straightforward terms, Fired Up! is disposable teen comedy at its most perfunctory: fitfully amusing if we’re being generous, cursed with two unusually unlikable lead actors, needlessly contrived, completely predictable, aimed squarely at the lowest common denominator. I do not choose to take the film on straightforward terms. When I watch this film, what […]

“You may talk o’ gin and beer When you’re quartered safe out ‘ere, An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it; But when it comes to slaughter You will do your work on water, An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ‘im that’s got it. Now in Injia’s sunny clime, Where I used to spend […]

By turns irritating, confounding, and endlessly fascinating, the animated Israeli documentary Waltz with Bashir is, at the very least, not the kind of movie that comes along all that often. I can’t say that it’s unlike any movie you’ve ever seen before, not knowing what movies you’ve seen, but it’s certainly unlike any movie I’ve […]

I had hoped that the new Friday the 13th would be up to the standards set by the same filmmakers’ remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – it isn’t – and that it would therefore be the finest entry in the Friday the 13th franchise – it isn’t that, either. Where Michael Bay’s production of […]

In Laurent Cantet’s The Class (Entre les murs, or “Between the Walls” in the original French), there is a Parisian teacher named François who wants very badly to help his students become the smartest and best people they can be. Those students – 14 and 15-year-olds from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds – do […]

2009 is just barely a month old, but I’m already prepared to call it a better year for movies than 2008. After only 37 days, we’ve been gifted with the year’s first masterpiece; at the very least, it’s much superior to all five films currently jockeying for the 2008 Best Picture Oscar. The film is […]

For a grimy crime B-film released in 1948 to no more fanfare than any other film noir programmer, He Walked by Night has quite a remarkable family tree. Without this film and its docudrama-style boot- on-the ground approach to storytelling, which so impressed co-star Jack Webb, there would of a certainty be no Dragnet, and […]

Once upon a time, a twist ending was a very special thing that was broken out because the screenwriter had some exceptionally clever idea to redefine an entire story and give the whole affair an extra dramatic heft. Nowadays, we all expect a twist ending in pretty much everything, especially horror films and thrillers, which […]

Maybe I was just in a really good mood when I saw it. But I found Taken to be an absolutely great movie. It is unquestionably a trashy action movie of no particular aesthetic merit, a shallow pleasure at best. But oh, how very pleasurable it is. The movie stars Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, […]

So here I am, writing about a porn film. They don’t teach you how to do that in film school, and I’m not really sure what the proper form is. “I was aroused at the following points, and masturbated for X minutes at the film’s conclusion.” Is that you tell a successful porno? This is […]