Pompeii may have razor-thin characters and the least-convincing romance of the past few years, but one thing it is not is boring. As sort of a cross between Dante’s Peak, Gladiator, and Titanic, it blows up people and ancient architecture as efficiently as any disaster movie could. There are plenty of… Continue reading
How rare it is to see something that you’ve never seen before. Spike Jonze’s Her takes the romantic comedy/drama genre, one desperately in need of a genre-buster, and turns it upside down with one of the sweetest, most heartfelt films to come along in quite some time. In an era… Continue reading
Safety Not Guaranteed is a charming Indie project with an original story and plenty of laughs. If it has a flaw, it’s that it’s actually so charming that it never truly dives into the heavier themes that it presents. Nevertheless, it leaves you thinking about the consequences of our actions… Continue reading
Larry Crowne is as lightweight, innocent, and conflict-free of a romantic comedy as you’ll ever find. It’s charming, but very leisurely paced and underwritten given the gravity of the situation that the main character finds himself in. Fortunately, veteran actors Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts elevate the material with likeable,… Continue reading
The Adjustment Bureau somehow successfully combines romance, comedy, and science-fiction into an elegantly woven tale of the lengths in which we’ll go to defy Fate to be with the one we love. It may sound heavy, but the film introduces just enough ideas to keep interest and provides just few… Continue reading
I Am Number Four is being billed as a high-octane superhero movie. It does eventually become one in the third act, but it happens long after anyone could possibly care about the story, characters, or anything else in this teenybopper cross-pollination of every superhero film ever made and the Twilight… Continue reading
From the “guaranteed to depress” files comes Blue Valentine, writer/director Derek Cianfrance’s exhaustive dissection of a relationship from beginning to end. Put an accent on “end,” because the film spends much of its runtime wallowing in its own misery and piling catastrophe upon catastrophe. Where Cianfrance does succeed, however, is… Continue reading
Life As We Know It contains what has to be the most unappetizing setup in romantic comedy history. Usually people bump carts at the grocery store or trip over each other on a New York City street. It’s what Ebert calls the “Meet Cute.” We have the two young and… Continue reading
The Switch, originally titled The Baster (how’s that for a mental image?), is a surprisingly effective and genuine romantic comedy. You’d never guess it from the premise, which with just a few rewrites could have been turned into one of the raunchiest comedies ever made. A shaky first act settles… Continue reading
In a sea of sameness, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World emerges as a fine work of originality and energy. It merges everything that twenty-to-early-thirty-something men have ever loved in life: video games, crazy action, humor, and the pursuit of women. While the core story is hardly anything special, director Edgar… Continue reading