Category: Film Review

“Upside Down” is a stunning visual experience spoiled by a trainwreck of
a screenplay. It’s an awful film that’s easy to watch, utilizing
intense CGI artistry to manipulate frame activity in a way that’s rarely
been seen before, out to manufacture a bizarre alternate universe of
swirling gravity defiance and megacity juxtaposition. Dramatically, the
feature goes nowhere fast, wasting the potential of the premise on
tiring clichés and absurdly earnest characterizations. Perhaps
writer/director Juan Solanas understood he had a clunker of a script,
watching him gradually downplay the story in favor of elaborate visual
effects. “Upside Down” is certainly something to see, but difficult to
sit through. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

With “The Machinist,” “Session 9,” and “Vanishing on 7th Street,”
director Brad Anderson has developed a reputation for smart, challenging
thrillers that embrace the art of manufacturing suspense instead of
pulverizing the audience with cheap thrills. Well, intelligence
apparently doesn’t pay the bills, finding Anderson in command of “The
Call,” an idiotic offering of tension (co-financed by World Wrestling
Entertainment) that plays like an exploitation picture made by a man
who’s never seen an exploitation picture. With plot holes galore, hammy
performances, and an easily telegraphed screenplay, “The Call” goes from
passably engaging to insulting in a hurry, finding Anderson unable to
make the sloppily cut puzzle pieces fit, relying on moldy trends in
horror cinema to maintain pressure. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” is a great title for a promising
premise involving dueling Las Vegas magicians fighting for stage glory.
Unfortunately, the feature moves beyond the basics to beef up a sense of
character and fuel formulaic story arc ambitions, dropping its sense of
cartwheeling absurdity to tend to a tale of spray-tanned rebirth I
doubt few will be on the edge of their seats to see played out in full.
Thankfully, it’s an entertaining picture when locked on silly business,
and hilarious when the gifted cast is permitted to let loose pantsing
casino entertainment icons long overdue for such a treatment. It should
be funnier and tighter, but there’s amusement to be had for those who
can endure a few considerable comedic roadblocks. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Even with the monster success of “The Artist,” the 2011 French
production that cleaned up at the box office and took home Oscar gold,
it seemed unlikely that similar silent film endeavors would follow. The
Spanish feature “Blancanieves” is proof that perhaps a renaissance of
the lost cinematic art form is in order, returning directorial ingenuity
and blissfully exaggerated performances to the screen. It’s a humorous,
heartbreaking return to old moviegoing habits, using fairy tale
inspiration to emphasize heroes and villains while retaining a
bittersweet quality that keeps the effort earthbound, despite a sense of
humor that tends to carry the picture away at times. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Lore” is a post-WWII picture, but don’t let the relative familiarity of
the setting fool you. This is a powerful, sensorial effort to
understand the mentality of hate and its programmed origins, mixed with a
survival story set during a dark period of countrywide evaluation.
Exceptionally crafted by director Cate Shortland, “Lore” is a film of
few words but contains robust atmosphere, sifting through the pieces of
soulful wreckage with an unflinching concentration on the erosion of
routine and the bitter challenges of truth, using a quaking Malickian
visual sense of nature and intimate struggle to bring a troubling tale
of acceptance to the screen. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Stoker” is Korean director Park Chan-wook’s English language debut. A
master of the macabre, Park’s previous ventures include “Oldboy,”
“Sympathy for Lady Vengeance,” and “Thirst,” solidifying his taste for
the violent and the extreme, though he’s a very patient filmmaker,
interested in manipulating his audience with baroque visual elements and
suffocating emotional weight. Refusing to go Hollywood, Park retains
his personality with “Stoker,” a vicious head-rattler of a feature that
blends horror and raw psychological exposure, while inspecting a most
diseased family tree. Unpredictable and enchantingly outlandish, the
movie is often extraordinarily composed. Perhaps it’s far from perfect,
but the atmosphere is deliciously thick with psychosis and the
characters ideally unraveled.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The animation masters at Studio Ghibli are well-versed in the realms of
fantasy, routinely offering odd creatures and faraway lands to
adventurous viewers (recent efforts include “Ponyo” and “The Secret
World of Arrietty”). “From Up on Poppy Hill” returns the filmmaking
collective to reality, avoiding the fantastical and the bizarre to focus
on a tender story of human connection, feeling out a delicate mood of
thinly veiled emotions while expectedly gorgeous animation supports the
characterizations. “From Up on Poppy Hill” might initially come off as
inconsequential, yet it actually isolates what Studio Ghibli does best:
constructing an evocative landscape of vivid personalities scrambling
around a compelling conflict dusted with idiosyncrasy and visual poetry. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

With “Ginger & Rosa,” writer/director Sally Potter searches for ways
to isolate the internal churn of adolescence as it’s rocked by troubles
ranging in intensity, from global fears to silent shame. It’s an
intimate story brought to life by a sharp cast, who locate the wounded
spirit Potter is looking to communicate, while the inherent burn of the
screenplay creates a welcome heaviness despite a few corners cut in
characterization. “Ginger & Rosa” is emotional and real, even when
it takes a few soap opera detours, always returning to a place of
scrambled teen introspection that’s engaging and, in many ways,
relatable. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The intimacy of “Into the White” is absorbing, helping to move a
familiar story about sworn enemies along. It’s based on a true tale of
survival and unexpected companionship at the outset of World War II, and
the feature gets plenty of mileage out of tense confrontations in the
freezing cold, with a sharp collection of actors chosen to embody
national pride as it’s tested in a most unforgiving environment.
Dramatically rewarding and geographically vivid, “Into the White”
generates a satisfactory amount of suspense and personality to achieve
its limited goals, successfully spinning routine with welcome attention
to character. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s extremely frustrating to watch “Dead Man Down.” Frustrating because
there are so many bright, inventive production participants making very
dim decisions with suspense and action, turning a promising thriller
about instability and revenge into a gun-worshiping DTV-esque downer.
Teasing complexity and a sincere pass at full-bodied characterizations,
“Dead Man Down” has the raw materials to redirect steadfast genre
elements into new and interesting directions. Director Niels Arden Oplev
only manages to tease potential, strangely second-guessing himself as
he brings a crude script to life. For every step forward, Oplev takes
two steps backwards, consistently undermining the positive aspects of
the picture by remaining so slavish to its palpable stupidity. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s been difficult to get a proper read of Abbie Cornish as an actress.
She’s done some interesting work in pictures such as “W.E.” and
“Limitless,” but she’s not a performer who commands the screen,
preferring coolness of character and deep introspection. Often, this can
read as simple disinterest. “The Girl” provides Cornish with a leading
role of substantial weight and patience. In fact, the entire movie
hinges on her body language, with the small-scale drama uninterested in
outbursts of melodrama, instead holding to subtleties of thought and
urgency to generate essential tension. Cornish is marvelous in “The
Girl,” finally proving herself to be a formidable actress after years
spent struggling to be noticed. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

After the raging success of 2010’s “Alice in Wonderland” reworking, it
makes sense to find Disney sniffing around for another literary property
open for a high-tech update. Mixing the world created by author L.
Frank Baum with the 1939 classic, “The Wizard of Oz,” “Oz the Great and
Powerful” comes into view, and mercifully, a few lessons were learned
after Tim Burton’s blockbuster fairy tale left many cold. While limping
along in a few areas of production, the “Oz” rebirth/prequel/tribute is
truly extravagant family entertainment, gifted an epic swell courtesy of
director Sam Raimi, who manages a troubling balance of reverence and
originality with style and sweetness. Obviously, it’s impossible to
touch the Judy Garland perennial, yet Raimi manages to return to this
well-worn fantasy world and find new notes to play, while retaining his
unmistakable filmmaking interests in dented valiance and spooky
developments. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“No” is a creative take on political filmmaking, using a simple step
backwards in terms of camera equipment to isolate a time and place with a
subtle sense of the video age. It also endeavors to tell a specialized
story of marketing, observing the use of television commercial
techniques and promotional stratagem to win an election, reducing the
urgency of the issues to play a mind game with the masses. It’s
fascinating work from director Pablo Larrain and screenwriter Pedro
Peirano, who manage to slip into the skin of a beleaguered country and
detail the urgency of a revolution, sold one jingle at a time. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Many films dramatize the aftermath of World War II, but few have tackled
the immediate steps of research after combat has ceased. There’s a
novelty to “Emperor” that makes it inviting, investigating conversations
concerning the reconstruction of Japan mere days after atomic bombs
were dropped in 1945. An historical treatment seems to be a perfectly
acceptable route for the production to take, yet “Emperor” is concerned
that hardened men talking procedural events won’t make much of a movie,
so a romantic subplot is introduced, trying to humanize the enormity of
war. It’s an unnecessary addition, but there’s a lot more disappointment
to come with this lackluster effort. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

I like where director Michel Gondry’s heart is at with “The We and the
I,” attempting to capture the impulse-driven behaviors of teenagers as
they journey home together on a city bus. It’s a movie that’s loose and
raw, using an ensemble of amateur adolescent actors to embody the free
flow of emotions and reactions that typically follow characters of this
age. Communicated with Gondry’s beloved sense of visual mischief and
devotion to the art of the non sequitur, “The We and the I” is a
production that’s worth at least a surface appreciation as it endeavors
to make a film about kids starring kids. However, such ambition only
carries the viewing experience so far, as most of the effort is
strangled by a persistent unpleasantness and Gondry’s tone-deaf way with
establishing sympathy for this public transit motley crew. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

We’ve been through this story before, on three separate occasions. Joe
Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s “Paradise Lost” documentary series
(including the 1996 original, “Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills,” a
2000 sequel, “Revelations,” and the 2011 conclusion, “Purgatory”)
triumphantly inspected the gruesome, astonishing details involving the
trial and conviction of the West Memphis Three. The pictures were
incendiary and mournful, blending journalism and outrage masterfully
over six methodical hours, walking through the case one step at a time.
While never intended to be the definitive document of the West Memphis
Three, the “Paradise Lost” movies became a beacon for national interest,
with celebrities, legal minds, and passionate observers manufacturing a
movement to free Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin
from the hell of life in prison for crimes they claim they did not
commit. Despite treading on well-worn cinematic ground, “West of
Memphis” swears it has something fresh to share with the world, taking
145 minutes to file through its theories and interviews. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Movies about submarines are a rarity, making the relative disappointment
of “Phantom” all the more troublesome. While far from a disaster, the
picture is exhaustively mediocre, attempting to generate suspense
without providing necessary detail, while some critical miscasting lets
even more air out of the viewing experience. Writer/director Todd
Robinson (2006’s “Lonely Hearts”) certainly has a vision with “Phantom,”
mixing masculine men and Cold War tensions in a claustrophobic setting,
peppering the effort with chases and torpedo-dodging, but the
excitement is ephemeral, washed away by a routine of sweaty stand-offs
that aren’t exactly rippling with urgency. “Phantom” has its moments,
but not nearly enough of them to rattle nerves in the manner Robinson
intends. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

One of my primary criticisms of 2010’s found footage horror hit, “The
Last Exorcism,” was its artificial feel and cringe-inducing
performances. Intended to simulate reality, the picture felt false
throughout, leaving me to wonder why the production would choose such a
subgenre to tell their tale when they didn’t seem prepared to take the
illusion seriously. The unfortunately titled “The Last Exorcism Part II”
brings the franchise to its senses, dismissing improvisations and
shaky-cam cinematography to find a more traditional route of terror by
switching the demon activities to the realm of scripted drama, treating
the next round of storytelling in a more cinematic manner, allowing the
audience to be pulled into the tension instead of randomly bopped around
by a flimsy sense of chaos. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The fairy tale “Jack and the Beanstalk” gets an aggressive update in
“Jack the Giant Slayer,” a vividly imagined fantasy film with an
unexpected appetite for destruction. Director Bryan Singer can’t lift
the feature off its feet, yet his vision for towering threat and lands
far, far away is virile enough to supply a hearty adventure, sold with
unusual visual effects and a welcomingly blunt attitude when it comes to
the violence of men and monster. It’s an impressively large-scale
endeavor, only lacking a sharp wit and a blistering sense of urgency
that could carry it to greater heights of grandiose entertainment. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

One year ago, there was “Project X,” a feature about a party populated
by teenagers swinging wildly out of control. “21 & Over” is similar
in many ways, with the primary difference being the legal drinking age,
allowing the characters to carry out their boozehound fantasies in
public. There are few surprises contained in “21 & Over,” which
marks the directorial debut for Scott Moore and Jon Lucas, the
screenwriters behind the two “Hangover” pictures, who try to resuscitate
the binge drinking formula for the college crowd. The result is a
shamefully calculated effort to merge party chaos with a coming of age
tale in a manner that tickles the audience while making them feel for
the dim-witted characters that populate the movie. Moore and Lucas do
not pull off the tricky juggling act. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com