MOVIE REVIEW
Red Hill (2010)
Strand Releasing
You’ve seen every bit of the modern-day Australian western “Red Hill” before, but writer-director Patrick Hughes plays the notes well. From the first-day-on-the-job hook to the backward small town, the silent aborigine killer and the complexly staged shootouts, the film plants itself firmly in B-movie territory and stays there for an efficient 95 minutes.
MOVIE REVIEW
The Loved Ones (2010)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Horror needs more female villains, killers filled with estrogen to rival the genre’s male big dogs (such as Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, to name a few). There have been a few women invited to join the murderer’s row: the below-middle-ground “Sleepaway Camp” series had Angela Baker; and the latter “Prom Night” entries introduced the homicidal specter Mary Lou. But the role of women in horror has far too often been relegated to victim, or heroine, or nude shower inhabitant.
First-time Australian filmmaker Sean Byrne flips that sad truth on its head with the gonzo “The Loved Ones,” an unhinged — in the best possible ways — blend of extreme gore, wince-inducing shocks and self-aware comedy. Antagonized by a psychotic high-school girl Lola Stone (Robin McLeavy), the film’s protagonist isn’t a damsel but a dude in distress. And that’s just one of the many aspects of “The Loved Ones” that feels fresh.
Continue reading “Before You Break Her Heart, Think It Over” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Wild Target (2010)
Nick Wall/Freestyle Releasing
In a just world, Bill Nighy would be accorded the national treasure status he so deeply deserves. While his firebrand “Love Actually” performance, as boozing singer Billy Mack, attracted some notoriety, the British thespian never has become a household name.
That’s unlikely to change with the release of “Wild Target” – Jonathan Lynn’s acute, precisely pitched absurdist satire about a fastidious hit man – but we fervently wish it would. Never less than hilarious – crafted in the classically deadpan British style – the movie’s a grand, quick-witted entertainment, a throwback in the best, most welcome sense.
MOVIE REVIEW
The King's Speech (2010)
Laurie Sparham/The Weinstein Company
The English royal family in a period film is a tried-and-tested setting for the British to examine their feelings about difficult subjects such as class, grief, entitlement, sex and the rights of women. These movies are also easy to sell internationally. To these ends, there has been a long parade of "royal" films — "The Young Victoria," "Elizabeth," "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" and "The Madness of King George" among them. While "The Queen" is the only one that has addressed any of these issues in a contemporary setting, "The King's Speech" is yet another period piece, albeit an expertly constructed. From another angle, it is an update of "Mrs. Brown," with Geoffrey Rush playing Billy Connolly and Colin Firth in the Judi Dench role — although there is even less sex in this movie than there was in that one.
MOVIE REVIEW
Route Irish (2010)
Joss Barratt/Sixteen Films
The most dangerous road in the world, Route Irish connects Baghdad's airport to the Green Zone. On this road, an ambush in early September 2007 kills four private security contractors, among them Frankie (John Bishop). Frankie's best friend Fergus (Mark Womack), an ex-soldier and former private contractor now in minor trouble with the law, attends the funeral despite resistance from his widow Rachel (Andrea Lowe). At the wake, he joins Frankie's family to meet two representatives of the contractor, Haynes (Jack Fortune) and Walker (Geoff Bell). It is unfortunate, they explain, that Frankie was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But Fergus is big enough and ugly enough to know better.
MOVIE REVIEW
The Arbor (2010)
54th BFI London Film Festival
About the late British playwright Andrea Dunbar’s turbulent life in a working-class housing project, Clio Barnard’s “The Arbor” is an unprecedented documentary told almost entirely through reenactments instead of conventional routes such as a dramatized biopic or an adaptation of Dunbar’s semi-autobiographical play.
MOVIE REVIEW
Conviction (2010)
Ron Batzdorff/Fox Searchlight Pictures
“Conviction” shouldn’t work. The film follows the inspirational courtroom drama template down to the smallest detail, so much so it often comes across as a film-school exercise in formulaic screenwriting. Hilary Swank plays another in her long line of big-screen martyrs, characters defined by the grand moral cause that leads them to sacrifice their lives (often literally). The whole thing, even the thick Bahstahn accents on display, has Oscar bait written all over it.
MOVIE REVIEW
I Spit on Your Grave (2010)
Steve Dietl/Anchor Bay Films
Consider this not a recommendation, but, rather, a warning: "I Spit on Your Grave" gets the job done. The film succeeds on nearly every level its architects, director Steven R. Monroe and screenwriter Stuart Morse, no doubt intended. When remaking one of the more notorious of '70s-era exploitation pictures (the same-titled 1978 button-pusher from director Meir Zarchi), the main goal, theoretically, is to up the ante. Mr. Monroe's take on "I Spit on Your Grave" most certainly accomplishes that. The drawn-out rape scenes pour over viewers' eyes like thick, slow-oozing acid. There's nary a sympathetic character save for the film's heroine, Jennifer (Sarah Butler), a city-bred writer unfortunate enough to pick a rural getaway with deviant redneck neighbors, five scumbags-in-flannels that defile her and leave her humiliated, decimated and mostly naked body to die. This makes her five-part revenge all the more satisfying in a pro-girl-power way, and extremely nauseating for those with weak stomachs.
MOVIE REVIEW
Stone (2010)
Ron Batzdorff/Overture Films
A cry of wounded, existential despair set against the backdrop of a bleak Michigan prison town, John Curran’s “Stone” explores nothing short of the disintegration of a soul. The metaphysical, religiously tinged Bergmanesque narrative comes disguised in a standard Hollywood inspirational drama sheen, but let there be no doubt of this: The picture is darker, more brazen in its ambiguity and less afraid of experimenting with downbeat sensations than you’d expect of a movie starring such top talent as Robert De Niro, Edward Norton and Milla Jovovich.
MOVIE REVIEW
Let Me In (2010)
Saeed Adyani/Overture Films
A swell of cacophony overwhelms most horror movies — an overwrought, heavily amplified soundscape of screaming, earsplitting terror. “Let Me In,” which deserves immediate comparison with the genre’s all-time classics, opts for a different approach. Matt Reeves’s remake of last year’s superb Swedish film “Let the Right One In” generates its terror in silence amid falling snow, in a world aglow with the yellowed haze of streetlamps permanently dimmed.
Sorry. No data so far.