There has been a certain distinct tendency towards “cringe humor” in a lot of recent films – comedy based in making the viewer feel as uncomfortable as possible, usually through humiliating the characters or presenting them as cluelessly offensive – but the style has hit something like an apex in Observe and Report, the second […]

At this point it’s hard to say whether early April is still comfortably in spring dumping ground season or if the studios are actually trying to push the summer blockbusters up by a full month. Given the ridiculous sum of money that Fast & Furious made in its opening weekend, I suspect the latter, probably […]

To judge from the advertisements – and even some of the reviews – you’d be forgiven for assuming that Adventureland sees director Greg Mottola returning to the goofy, dirty comedy blended with sweet nostalgia that made Superbad a big ol’ hit back in the summer of 2007. It is not. Oh my, no. No, no, […]

Alien Trespass is a weird thing, all right, neither fish nor fowl: it’s a feature-length recreation of a schlocky 1950s “it came from outer space!” horror picture that is far too straight-laced to accurately count as a parody, but at the same time too knowingly bad and winking to feel like an honest-to-God homage. I […]

Oh, Henry Selick has absolutely pwn3d Jeffrey Katzenberg. Pwn3d the hell out of him. For what feels like about five years, Katzenberg has been promising everyone who would listen that the first quarter of 2009 was going to bear witness to THE 3-D movie, the one that would knock us all on our asses with […]

Early in 2007’s Oscar season, Tony Gilroy – then best known as the writer of all three Jason Bourne movies – made his directorial debut with Michael Clayton, a sober-minded, unexceptional and very well-crafted thriller with pretensions to social commentary about the evils done by corporations in the name of profit; its reward for this […]

In The Haunting in Connecticut, we find an example of a phenomenon that I’d expect to be at least a bit more widespread than is the case: it is a motion picture in which nearly every individual element is either tremendously good or completely horrible, with virtually nothing left hanging in the middle ground of […]