SXSW
MOVIE REVIEW
Gone in the Night (2022)
Starting off as an indie drama before sliding over into thriller territory and then getting slightly fantastical on top, “Gone in the Night” doesn’t have the voltage to jolt any of those departments into vivid life, although it stitches them together with the best of intentions. It hinges on middle-aged characters feeling fragile and insecure in the face of their mortality when confronted by the vigorous young; a solid theme slightly dented by the casting of Winona Ryder and Dermot Mulroney, both of them carrying the quarter-century since they dated in “How to Make an American Quilt” with ease and apparently holding up splendidly.
Continue reading “Bad Old Days” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Homefront (2013)
Justin Lubin/Open Road Films
In many ways a movie is all about timing. What seems like a good hook when a script begins doing the rounds can lose its freshness by the time it makes the screen. And of course the trouble is television has gotten so good lately, it can be almost impossible for movies to keep completely separate identities. But “Homefront” is particularly unlucky, since it comes across as a mash-up of the two most distinctive settings of recent long-form television: “Breaking Bad” set in the world of “True Blood.”
Continue reading “Braking Bad” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Black Swan (2010)
Niko Tavernise/Fox Searchlight Pictures
Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” arrives in theaters amid a torrent of hype, a swirl of anticipation spurred by the glamorous sex appeal of high-end ballet, sapphic copulation and Grand Guignol melodrama. But what really makes the picture tick is its insight into the performer’s soul, the striving for perfection, the quest for complete immersion in a part that spurs the proverbial blurred line between the real and the imagined.
Continue reading “Pirouetting Out of Control” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009)
Screen Media Films
You’re sure to recognize Pippa Lee (Robin Wright Penn). She’s a pretty, devoted housewife, a regular at the stores near her Connecticut home. Her passivity — her devotion to the blandest of routines — blends her inextricably to her surroundings. They seem to have shaped every contour of her life; whoever she once was and wherever she came from buried beneath a sort of high-class suburban malaise.
Continue reading “Blast From the Past to Kingdom Come” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Star Trek (2009)
Industrial Light & Magic/Paramount Pictures
Few cinematic ventures could be more fraught with peril than a revamping of the “Star Trek” franchise. No single pop phenomenon of the last half of the 20th century has amassed a more expansive, devoted following, and most ardent Trekkies tend to react to any changes to the canon as one might respond to the murder of a family member. Couple that with the fact that the most recent movies and TV spinoffs suffered a precipitous drop in quality and director J. J. Abrams can truly be said to have had his work cut out for him.
Continue reading “Boldly Revisit Where No Man Has Gone Before” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Informers (2009)
2009 Sundance Film Festival
“The Informers,” Bret Easton Ellis’s adaptation of his own series of short stories about the greed and decadence of 1980s' Los Angeles, plays like a rote museum piece evocation of the era. Director Gregor Jordan brings a sense of verisimilitude to his depiction, with pitch perfect hairstyles, wardrobes and me-first, cocaine-snorting snob attitudes on display. But he can’t compensate for a ludicrously concocted, thoroughly unconvincing narrative and the pervading sense of style supplanting substance.
Continue reading “City of Demons” »