Starbuck

Starbuck is the kind of movie certain cynical critics love to pooh-pooh, and which audiences love to love. Guess which one is out of touch? A warm human comedy wrapped up in the guise of a sitcom, the French-Canadian hit, about a forty-two-year-old Montreal…

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Spring Breakers

The not so fine line between satirizing and wallowing in excessive tits, ass and gunplay informs the wannabe provocation Spring Breakers, about four teenaged bimbos conquering South Florida in a hail of hedonism, or something like that. Written and directed by Harmony Korine (Gummo,…

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The Call

By all rights, The Call—starring Halle Berry as a frantically overpermed 911 operator trying to save the life of a kidnapped teen—shouldn’t have been this good.  Featuring a committed performance from its star and shrewdly effective direction from indie filmmaker Brad Anderson (The Machinist,…

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Oz: The Great and Powerful

The bombastic CGI spectacle Oz: The Great and Powerful, directed by Sam Raimi and starring James Franco as a two-bit Kansas magician circa 1905 who becomes an unlikely wizard, is a let-down, a movie so consumed by technology that its spirit gets crushed.  A…

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Stoker

The flower of evil grows within a teen girl in Stoker, a deliriously stylized psychological thriller from Korean director Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy), about some increasingly disturbing family dynamics that take root after the husband and father’s accidental death. But that’s not really what Stoker…

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