My Sister’s Keeper

Kate Fitzgerald (Sofia Vassilieva) isn’t a celebrity, isn’t a supermodel. She’s a 14-year old girl who has lived most of her childhood suffering from acute promyelocytic leukemia. Her sister, Anna (an uncharacteristically thoughtful performance by Abigail Breslin), was engineered in a test tube at the suggestion of their physician, Dr. Wayne (Jeffrey Markle).
Some [...]

Year One

Zed (Jack Black) and Oh (Michael Cera) are outcasts. The former because he ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the latter because, well, he’s the token sensitive guy (read: pansy). As hunter-gatherers, their primary objective is, according to Oh, to “find all the food with the least [...]

The Taking of Pelham 123

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, based on the novel by John Godey and related to the 1974 film directed by Joseph Sargent, begins with an establishing shot of New York that looks beautiful for about three seconds, until it is interrupted by a typical Tony Scott opening credits sequence—loud music, fancy title effects [...]

The Hangover

Even a formula can exceed expectations now and then. That’s what I discovered watching The Hangover, a film about, of all things, a foursome who travels to Vegas on their bachelor party. After the wedding montage, we cut to the disheveled group and Phil Wenneck (Bradley Cooper, looking like a cross between Ralph [...]

My Life In Ruins

I still can’t figure out how or why movies like this are greenlighted. From the opening, postcard-styled titles, Georgia (Nia Vardalos) nearly beats us to death with exposition for the subtextually-impaired. “People come here from all over to see the ancient ruins,” says Georgia. You don’t say? I thought they went [...]