What works best about 28 Days Later, a film about post apocalyptic London that you flat-out believe, is how snap tight it feels. Boyle - seemingly scarred for life by the tightrope of his Hollywood two-fer - seems to have found the trick to shooting a film on DV that most directors who tinker with it out of poverty or [sic] art's sake have missed: Low ambition. (Nothing remotely complex going on here, old fashioned filmmaking prevailing, please send viewers). Watching a virus cleansed no man's land that doubles as Britain's countryside makes for a deeply simplistic on the outside, ooey-gooey moralistic what-not on the inside film; Rage infected "zombies" lunge, barely as scary as a reality on the fringe and the biggest success in 28 Days Later is Boyle's return to a genre that's not altogether horror - but masquerades as such. Both Shallow Grave and Trainspotting (his best films) unfolded an unchangeable reality that had suddenly turned on its inhabitants. Here, this idea of acceptance and the violence that comes with a clean slate - - the military gents, headed by Christopher Eccleston, are ready to start the human race up again - with the only two female survivors - - is at the forefront of the film, dread llooming and oozing from every frame. It turns out to be less a zombie movie than a cautionary for cautionary's sake film with the skin of a modern, low budget horror film. It's entirely enthralling and simultaneously full of a strange sense of wonder, the kind that's usually reserved for science fiction films. Just how would our future look like as a deserted train wreck of civilization gone empty, only a few mad stragglers bouncing around?

No better than Blood Work (stop screeching with the "year's best" crap already), Mystic River is a particularly transparent brand of sweeping (usually the result of Eastwood's fetish with shooting banal police procedural - 4 of 'em now - in scope) and also a ridiculously distant brand of intimate. But what irks me more about the film is that, for some reason, Eastwood equates realism with everyone looking perpetually hung over. No more spiky or cunning than anything you could tune your box to any night of the week, with banter is painfully forced and blatantly charged with important clues to file in our memory banks for later in the film, Mystic River doesn't lack for interest, but it has the sort of heavy subject matter that consistently whines that we take all of this more seriously than could come naturally. Should I have to be working not to find the friends-since-childhood, that-was-when-everything-changed-for-Davey Boyle set-up a little preposterous? It seems to work best when it's a police procedural, with Penn's Jimmy (who could qualify as a split personality) under the thumb of dorky sad sack/childhood pal and his partner (Messrs.. Bacon and Fishburne, respectively). Luckily, no matter how divided the two sides of Jimmy are, Sean Penn plays both with equally cool calculation and numbness, often just short convincing us that we've confused devastation for villainy (and vice versa); He wouldn't look out of place in his own The Crossing Guard, another film that expects more that it deserves in the sober gravity department (Here, the last fifteen minutes gives that films' communal gravestone weeping a run for its money in the unofficial "silliest fucking thing I've ever seen" contest; At least that film didn't occasionally employ a bafflingly unnecessary subplot wherein Kevin Bacon's silent wife calls him and doesn't speak). Once solved, the murder mystery seems to have baited us with the idea that it everything might add up to something of interest of value - or even surprise - when, all it really does is cast light on larger, less believable issues (Yes, issues like the far-fetched full circle wherein Sean Penn's daughter was really killed because Penn killed the killer's father years ago and, oh yeah, CRIME DOESN'T PAY). After spilling all its beans, Mystic River begins a period of fifteen final moments where it becomes so completely out of line, so goofy, and so unbelievably off-the-wall that it's impossible not to wonder why anyone would wreck a highly serviceable rubix cube of morality with a left field Lady Macbeth speech, when the film suddenly - for no real reason - turns into a gangster epic (My reaction to Laura Linney's "You could rule this town" monologue was a purposefully audible "What?"). This is followed by a sequence where the main characters all trade glances (through a noisy parade) for about five minutes. Then the obligatory shot of the names in the cement sidewalk, frozen in time, uh, and amen.

[Full disclosure: I've hated the film a little bit more every time I think about it. I originally gave it a C+, but my word of mouth has been more like a D-].

Probably the only movie I've ever seen that was as pre-conceived, obvious headed and lacking in surprise as is possible, but remained nevertheless fresh, funny and consistently pleasing. Imagine High Fidelity as a kids movie/live action cartoon with Black in the forefront and Cusack in the background and you're close...

Largely lacking in substance; Good enough film - didn't seem to warrant a narrative; Ofteen felt like a legend that would have been passed from person to person - but wouldn't have been a 101 minute motion picture, you know? (I spent a good bit of it at odds with myself: If I'm going to watch this old man be a prick to this little girl there better be a towering catharsis to foot the bill; It's a decent one - but by no means an equal on the scales....)

As with nearly every other reissue in existence, it's the sound that's king. Unfortunately, I made the dumbass mistake of seeing it blown up on 70mm which, however all-inclusive, went out of focus (big time) off and on throughout the bottom three reels. Nevertheless, I continue to scoff at you lunkheads who consider the second film to be superior. (What are you people, insane?)

Wildly random, almost painfully inconsistent songs mix with a sudden lack of political correctness, all on a canvas meant to look like the paintings of Albert Bierstadt. And Brother Bear still feels like second tier Disney aping its more successful cousins (especially The Lion King and Tarzan). The very human first act is largely exciting - - - second and third animals-talk-as-theey-trek acts are not as successful. There's something hollow about Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas pimping their MacKenzie Bros. routine through dunderheaded moose, set up as background comic relief to a story whose moral pretty much tramples its intentions under foot until they're barely visible through a schmaltzy, ham handed slopping-on of familiar elements (the lost youth with a dead mother is a particular forehead smacker). But, then, there's been something rather alarming about the way Disney seems more in tune with eyeing the market than churning out great films lo' these last dozen or so quarters, er - I mean - years. After awhile, its pretty hard to pretend you haven't already been sick to death of learning the same boring lessons over and over. Luckily, the kids are now learning these lessons from a much more terrific set of animators. (Rhymes with Mix-ar) I'm starting to tire of the giddy thrill I get at being disappointed with Disney.

Essentially a valentine to mild cinephiles (encrypted with the message: "There are many worse than you"), though the only real centerpiece of the filmmaking is how thankfully short it is. Never a towering piece of work, it's one of those fun documentaries that only lasts 80 minutes and tells you something entertaining as opposed to extraordinary. Film seems distracted, often, by the relative smallness of its subjects (I mean, how much can you possibly say after "These people go to the movies...all the time"), almost embarrassingly at one point (was there really a shot of a unrelated man in the front row zipping up his fly after a screening? Did I dream that?) Still, the specific personalities of each of the five - - two look like homeless people, the othher three could double as nerdy drop-outs from philosophy grad programs - - are what keep the film from getting too terribly repetitive (Bravo, again, to the editor: The DVD boasts a spread of deleted scenes that runs almost as long as the feature). It gives you a shudder when you realize that, yes, I've thought about changing my bathroom habits to suit my film going obsession - and yes - seeing a print of a Godard film would take precedent over a loved one.

Finally delivered: This year's blueprint for generic indie filmmaking. ("But Ben, the blue car in the title means so much more than you're giving it credit for...")

Look - shut up; I don't endorse films where little girls dress up like angels and collapse on alters in churches. Films where people throw their now meaningless poetry into the ocean and watch it sink below the waves. Films where people substitute a spur-of-the-moment anger doctrine for a long prepared piece of work at a Big Contest. Films where teenage daughters say to their mothers: "You had her, you raise her". Films where the blue car has a double meaning - and both meanings are meant to make me so sad I want to curl up with a bottle of Jack Daniels in a Motel 8 whimpering for my mother. Fuck this movie, in my opinion.

It's a cautionary tale - but with all the annoying facets usually associated with that tag left, safely, outside the frame (In other words, it's less a film about the addiction to gambling than it is about a gambler addicted to a double life full of such cheap irony: Trusted banker secretly rides wave of fraud into nosedive of debt. That he seems to openly realize and feed off of this - that is what makes Owning Mahowny a great film). Philip Seymour Hoffman continues to make it difficult to articulate anything remotely original sounding about him. Here, there's a drowning feel as he quietly - and repeatedly - acknowledges to the camera how aware he is of the reality of his situation (that's he, for all intensive purposes, only addicted to losing); Withdrawn to the point of invisibility, I'm carefully picking over his profile on the imdb as I write this, attempting not to upstage several previous hyperboles. (So, in other words, I'd like to say this is his best performance to date - but somehow I doubt anyone would find any real meaning in those words.) Kwietniowski previously helmed 1997's Love and Death on Long Island - a film I quite liked - and invests the same incredibly rare talent for genuine understatement here. Eschewing any sort of loud, stylistic volume, he has a terrific ear for tiny, incidental dialogue and snags a wonderful set of characters (the ensemble cast - even in a film that's as centered around a single protagonist as this one is - is magnificent) in a milieu that feels like a series of  doomed guilt vacations, experienced through advanced sleeplessness; Mahowny's world is a self-fulfilling prophecy that skips like a broken record. Hoffman's performance is - sorry, I just couldn't let it go - nothing short of dazzling.

I'll probably end up spilling an electronic pen's worth of ink on this one when I watch it again (dust is presently gathering in its netflix queue spot; I've withheld it from my usual watch-mail-drool routine to re-experience it in one sitting, without interruption). Needless to say, the aching emptiness and almost overwhelming beauty in the landscape gave me enough pause to want to re-evaluate my initial response, which was one that pretty much glanced over the characters. Their situation, indeed, was potent and somehow almost transcendent of something much, much larger, but them, they, the Gerrys never really sold the connection between themselves and this unbelievable, unending barrage of moody imagery and reflection. But I kept feeling annoyed that I'd have to stop it (three or four times, ugh) for various reasons throughout. I'm becoming less and less bend able when it comes to inhaling these puppies in one viewing.

Mostly a workspace for moody cinematography (and an absolutely rapturous score - and you know it's good if I stoop to using a pretentious descriptor like rapturous); The main characters meet in a traffic jam and proceed to bounce about, sometimes gazing, sometimes screwing, mostly just posing. It's all very, very pretty for the eye - but rarely does it stay engaging long enough to sustain a sequence. Denis without gravity, though, still pretty much blows anything else that's playing in the romance scene right off the damn table. This is marvelous visual storytelling (there are about 20 or 30 lines of dialogue in the film), and wonderfully evocative (somehow Paris looks different in every film and it looks awesome here), but it remains just shy of terrific.

Elf starts out sharp (the North Pole is a bizarre, almost TV-Rudolph bizarre place), but degenerates right quick into character after character confronting, being annoyed by and, finally, being unconvincingly won over by Ferrell's lovey-dovey Christmas antics. Comedy ranges from absolute genius (the vain children's book writer Miles Finch played with maximum restraint by Peter Dinklage is a brilliant creation) to Dear God Please (you'll kindly roll you eyes for charity in lew of watching ONE MORE GODDAMN fish-out-water set-up). It's often very sad, as we realize that control with the cookie cutter is clearly preferred to letting Ferrell stray from what's already set in script-stone (so successful in Old School). Big ol' extra points to Favreau for casting himself in an absolutely meaningless role, nudging us with a possible commentary on his own participation: "Hey guys, I don't mind letting the big bosses push me around. At least they're not still mad about Made. Also, you'll note that there are zero plugs for my pretentious Dinner for Five half hour." Get ready to be right about how it ends.

Pure genre pleasure. Probably wouldn't have been a peck as successful if the elements weren't so fresh and terrific. Weir is obviously borderline obsessed with period detail (at times, to a fault, as the action sequences veer - occasionally - into some Aussie version of Tony Scott's blur-is-better technique); Crowe is, as ever, absolutely brilliant/charming/loveably gruff; Bettany is humanity and dry wit (and the one you walk away really having enjoyed). You expect, from the first moment, that the film is far too expensive to turn a profit, which makes the whole thing seem all that more important and thrilling (because, unless it wins an Oscar, I doubt Weir, Crowe and the two studios who footed the bill are going to churn out another one). So, along with the immediacy of it, and the impossibly brilliant timing (it's as far removed from the coming Pirate trend as it is desperately alone in a definite moment of period action doldrums), and the classical look (it's lit like Amistad and Quills, with the lack of light and flares predominant almost to excess) - - - Master and Commander is pretty much impossible to dislike or resist. It's entertainment from a vein that is at once recalling the past and reveling in the megabucks of the present. It's the sort of film you want to go out and re-experience.

Not much of a movie, per se. As a funhouse of horror artistry, creepy mileaus and frightening superfluity, though - it's a gas. Zombie obviously isn't much of a director, but he's clearly very passionate about horror movies themselves (it's a B-rendering of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre teens-lost-abducted-and-butchered filmsin the same way Kill Bill is an homage to kung fu and spaghetti westerns). The debacle with the production and the release probably forbids - - and, likely, turned off - - Zombie from future productions (and the promise of his eye for freaky shit makes that a bit teary). The obvious cuts and errors in continuity that mark the film as a hacked-to-pieces studio casualty don't make its brevity any less welcome (I whined almost to a ban, initially, about not seeing the one hundred fifty minute version; i'm glad I ended up taking the less-than-stubborn route of actually watching this version). I think if it had been clips and bits from old horror films weaved with video and scratchy 16 mm footage, we'd be talking modern horror classic.

The inevitability of any man's death is not measured by his occupation, what kind of life he has lead or what kind of person he is. We all simply die. In Man on the Train, Patrice Leconte foolishly attempts to make this point the central focus of the film about twenty minutes before it ends (That it's built so steadily on a foundation of quirk transcending sincerity only makes matters worse). Rochefort is a retired French teacher who lives in a giant mansion and Hallyday is in town to rob a bank. With hotels closed in the off season, Hallyday shacks up in the aged professor's mansion. On Saturday, the octagenarian will go for a triple bypass and the sparingly spoken Charles Bronson look-alike will knock off a bank.  Their conversations, wherein they seem to find a comfort and intimacy in the other's identity, are completely absorbing and often, downright literary. The embarrasing finale, however, betrays this tightrope of cameraderie that makes the first two acts so carefree. Though the somewhat forced thematic weight of Man on the Train - the self-tallied bill staring one down at one's death - practically begs a humbled subtlety, everything becomes blatant and syrupy when the time comes to pay said bill. Whereas in Leconte's The Widow of St. Pierre, sybolism and melodrama diluted the film's moral complexity, here everything is visualized and stated with shockingly unmistakable and self-conscious purpose; It's the sort of boisterous and distracting conclusion that's usually drowning in its own irony and violin strings.(For example: Is there any curiosity or confusion of motive when a car full of the hoods pressuing Hallyday to rob the bank passes a car driven by the doctor who will perform the next day's surgery?)  The first hour is wrought with a sort of familiar smirk of opposing hierarchies of lifestyle, a pleasant meeting of worlds unknown. Rochefort and Hallyday have a terrific chemistry. There are wonderful and quiet moments shared. The ending is messy.

Remember the hilariously stupid trailer where Miramax dredged up footage from Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones' Diary? The poster that read: "The Ultimate Romantic Comedy"? The cast that seemed too jaw-dropping to be true (i.e. - Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Alan Rickman, LLiam Neeson, Bill Nighy, Laura Linney, Martine McCutcheon, Keira Knightley, Emma Thompson, Billy Bob Thornton and Rowan Atkinson)? Grand set-ups for a blinding misdirection, all. Instead of it being a rotating pick-n-snatch of nine different romantic comedies at once, Love Actually turns out to be one of the most darkly self-deprecating anti-romantic comedies ever made. Instead of lifting our spirits - which, artificially, it does, just to show you it can (and because it was probably contractually bound to) - Curtis' film seems to scoff at the very idea that these romantic interludes are anything more than pandering fantasies meant to cater to a roundtable demographic. It's obvious in the way that, a) Curtis chooses the kitchen sink route of including nine (rather than, uh, one) semi-connecting loves gained and lost riffs (they're more like songs on a greatest hits album that's meant to be a joke); b) the level of sugar never stops rising even long after it has hit an unusually high level (if you were thinking "Hugh Grant is the Prime Minister? Do I really buy that?" - wait until you see where it goes from there); c) The whole thing has a lovely abandon to it, as if its a locomotive that's been set off at top speed sans attention to destination or, in fact fuel (eventually it runs out and the credits roll). I am convinced that it's one big, long yank at the audience's expense (an, probably, the actors).  In other words, it's THE ULTIMATE ROMANTIC COMEDY!

[Also, I'm convinced that Rowan Atkinson could comfortably steal a movie from nearly any actor living today.]

There's a rather tiring list of things in this film that really annoy me, but what I'm going to do, I'm going to just assume that you'll assume that you know what's on that list (here's an abridged version for the unimaginative: Bay's music video theatrics constantly overstylizing, perhaps tolerated soley to complement the film's pre-packaged toe-tag of "fun"; Lawrence and Smith having one extended (unfunny, for the most part) conversation that's broken up evenly between loud, rarely anything but loud, action sequences (while we're on the subject - Lawrence's eternal new-age healing playeed over a whine on top of a whine on top of a whine about the stress of his life is nauseating at best, while Smith's now preposterously implausible hyper-cursing "bad boy" attitude slams headfirst against the image he's spent, oh, the last several very profitable years (excepting Ali) of his life boring us with); the very moment when Bay appears in the film (as crappy car driver #1) is like a chapter heading, as seconds later, he'll be pilphering his own film - this film - with a watered down car chase in which things fall from the back of a truck and threaten to stop our "heroes" dead in their tracks (similar to a moment thirty or so odd minutes prior when slightly larger things fell from the back of a slightly larger truck "threatening" to stop our heroes dead in their, ahem, tracks); yet another action film that uses the patriotic symbol of the US of A as its coda, in this case the backseat message that since Sept. 11 of 2001, drug smuggling has been impacted by heightened security: Apparently, that means Bruckheimer should cough up an action "epic" wherein a dinky drug Lord from Cuba (he's bad, you see, because he chopped a man up in his mother's house) is pummelled at the expense of taxpayers to the tune of (cough) million in damaged this and that, culminating in a sequence where - that's right - the good Americans blow up his house and fight a Communist army that was protecting him. Veiled? No - stupid.)

I refuse to take seriously any film wherein a girl gets pregnant with her dead boyfriend's baby during the summer and doesn't realize she's pregnant until several months into Autumn (we're told time is passing and things are changing (and blech!) in one of those lovely, wholeheartedly embarrasing montages where leaves start to gather on a pool). I refuse to take seriously movies where characters go to the big New Year's Eve party and I'm right (and so would you be) when I predict that a car crash will follow, changing things forever. I refuse to acknowledge Peter Gallagher's career from this moment forward. I refuse to buy Mandy Moore as a tortured rebel who just wants to encompass the title over and over (I suspect we're supposed to flip our eyebrows when she continually doesn't want to fall in love because her parents are divorced.) She calls her new male "friend" and they kiss and stuff. Jedi Mind Trick references ensue (not homages, mind, but mockery). Like Serendipity, it is a romantic comedy where the actual romance is cordended off - in this case, to a musical montage - and treated as if it is taboo and uninteresting. Apparently, life issues can be solved with a wacky wedding and the wisdom of a dope smoking grandma. Also, by the way, FUCK this movie for using both "Do You Realize??" by the Flaming Lips and (gulp) "Wild World" by Cat Stevens. Let's save the good songs for the films with a chance, shall we?

It's an odd grade to give a film that's pretty much a bloated framework singularly reminiscent of Fellowship's expository urgency, but sometimes painfully herky-jerky motion. However - and this is a big however - instead of wwalking out of of Return of the King in blatant anticipation of relief (that is, new answers to old questions), this film, in fact, is that relief. There are places where it clearly suffers from a syndrome forced on it by two preceeding works - a terminal syndrome, unfairly laid at its feet in the form of a technicality: (What I mean is), there's no film to catch the overflow. Luckily for us - in its tremendous battle sequences, its fateful immensity, its teary finale - Return of the King is one of the most thorough films in existence. Forget for a second that, occasionally, it feels as if it is merely listing its desperately important information; when was the last time a film with just around six hours' worth of explanation bothered to secure precious symmetry by including a sequence wherein we see the transformation of Smiegel - decades before he would be known as Gollum - for a sole purpose: To show you the depth of his capabilities - and to confirm the wickeness of his inteentions (as paraded in The Two Towers). This film is two hundred minutes long and has taken serious flack for its exclusion of Christopher Lee's ten minute Sauroman sequence - and yet it takes the time to make sure tthat one of the most complex characters in the film (and, digitally, still the most exciting, by far) has a working psyche to match that of his companions (Wood and Astin, still amazing as ever). Battle scenes are excellent (not Helm's Deep-excellent - but potent, nonetheless), seething with passion and inventive little bits (the Olyphants presence is breathtaking); Return of the King is as good as the former two films - and yet, for all its hugeness and closure and what not, it leaves us quiet. At first, I thought it was the film itself, but I realized that it was the sad void left over after the credits: Coming December '03, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. And that's it. (Full disclosure: Dear Hollywood: "Make The Hobbit or stop making films altogether, please").

Nope, everyone was right, or, come see that which is tantamount to a car wreck as a circus attraction, with no amount of exploitation or pandering sacrificed in its inimitable quest to really just, um, be one of the worst films I've ever seen. Affleck kidnaps a retarded fellow and J. Lo is sent in to make sure he can handle the job. The extended monologues about nothing interesting whatsoever (delivered by two actors who make the retarded fellow seem deeply intelligent by comparison), the constant long takes of yoga posturing and mirror admiration, the constant flow of dated, unfunny jokesterism, Affleck's strange mock-Sopranos accent, J. Lo's inability to pull off playing a lesbian (you don't even believe it through the next statement after "You're not my type...because you have a penis"), the hamming cameos by Walken and Pacino, the slap-happy joyous ending - - - there's simply nothing to make fun of that isn't already fairly obvious. It's like mocking a guy who just got his arm cut off and can't seem to tie his shoes properly: Yeah, it's kinda funny, but the guy's in pain.

It almost feels like an achievement that Bad Santa can keep a consistently anti-sentimentality rule in place from start to finish, but once you're past how awesome that is, you have no trouble recognizing the second rate repetition and half-baked plot line that are in place to sustain this remarkably cruel tone. It's a dirty cartoon - from start to finish and I laughed an awwful lot, but I did get around to asking someone if they thought it might turn out to be a yearly cult tradition and, as soon as I said it, I realized how tiresome it would be to watch it every year. Thornton is absolutely spot-on and, for awhile, the film seems almost to bridge the gap between the standard gross-out fare and a singular, sly mockery of family holiday traditions. But eventually, the framework betrays it, begging for some level of plausibility in order to go forward (i.e. - this drunk can open safes? The "kid", he doesn't attend school? Lauren Graham - hot as hot gets - is interested in Thornton?) Again, it is a cartoon, to some level, but eventually, it seems to ask the audience to buy into more realism-based details in order to make gags work (since anything is possible in a cartoon and this is merely a feeling I got, I have no evidence to back it up. Sorry.) I dug it. It was hilarious in spots and well-worth a viewing. The critic, however, who delegated a comparison to The Simpsons - is severely misguided.

The thirtysomethings have gathered for an idie film! And they're going to sit at dinner and talk! Seriously, though, when Alex - the career-driven female character who sits closest to the door - starts on about how she killed a little boy by accident with her car one summer and now his ghost appears to her to apologize for all the trouble he caused - - - any semblance of entertaining fluff that existed before became like lead and my eyes, my beautiful eyes, went straight to the DVD counter to see just how much longer I was going to have to muster patience with this film and it's "wacky", "real-life" "characters". It reminds me of a mid-life Breakfast Club, everyone meeting almost without meaning to and revealing every single last dirty detail they've had under they're hat since the beginning of time. Unfortunately, the characters never reach a level that's even remotely comparable to that film - or most of the other dodgy sundance-paid flicks I've seen of late. My reason for viewing it, sadly, was a mirage (see Director credit).