AltWeeklies Wire
Bruce Willis, Tracy Morgan and Movie Mockery in Kevin Smith's New Featurenew
The film's opening shot, set to the Beastie Boys' No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn, is a slow-motion, toe-to-head tilt-up of white cop-black cop buddies Jimmy (Bruce Willis) and Paul (Tracy Morgan) swaggering stone-faced toward the camera.
L.A. Weekly |
Karina Longworth |
02-26-2010 |
Reviews
Martin Scorsese's Throwback Head Trip is the Good Kind of Insanenew
Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, a florid art shocker that Paramount welcomed into the world with the strained enthusiasm of a mutant baby's parents, begins with U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) seasick, head in the toilet.
L.A. Weekly |
Nick Pinkerton |
02-19-2010 |
Reviews
Portrait of an American Family, Stuck, From One Halloween to the Nextnew
October Country follows four generations of the Mosher family from one October 31 to the next, and, in between days of the dead, the spooks linger. Halloween itself is a Mosher obsession, a leveler across generations.
L.A. Weekly |
Karina Longworth |
02-19-2010 |
Reviews
'It's Complicated': Nancy Meyers' New Movie is Really Annoyingnew
Does Nancy Meyers hate women? The thought ran through my head not very long into It’s Complicated, Meyers’ biennial stocking-stuffer about the romantic trials and tribulations of obscenely privileged and narcissistic Southern Californians.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
12-28-2009 |
Reviews
'Nine': Rob Marshall Tries to Connect the Dance Numbersnew
An assault on the senses from every conceivable direction—smash zooms, the earsplitting eruption of something like music, the spectacle of a creature called Kate Hudson—Nine thrashes about in search of “cinema” the way a child thrown into the deep end of a pool flails for a flotation device.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
12-18-2009 |
Reviews
'Avatar': On Top of a Distant Worldnew
As we sit in the darkened cinema (or, increasingly, in our living rooms), so much of what is clearly meant to dazzle us feels like a demonstration more than an application, an elaborate demo reel in search of meaning and purpose. James Cameron returns to bridge the gap.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
12-18-2009 |
Reviews
'Frog' of the South: Disney's Song and Dance About a Black Princess Croaksnew
Six decades after unleashing persistent NAACP bugaboo Song of the South, and two after firmly suppressing it, that peculiar cultural institution known as the Walt Disney Company has made a symbolic reparation by creating its first African-American princess -- and plunking her down in the middle of Jim Crow–era Louisiana!
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
11-30-2009 |
Reviews
'Precious': The Sad Education of Precious Jonesnew
Hothouse melodrama one moment, kitchen-sink (and frying-pan-to-the-head) realism the next, with eruptions of incongruous slapstick throughout, this may be Lee Daniels' stab at finding a cinematic analog for the novel's inventive, naïf-art language -- a film style, like Precious' writing, seemingly being made up as it goes along.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
11-09-2009 |
Reviews
Tags: Precious, Lee Daniels
Sebastian Silva Takes a Searing Look Inside the World of 'The Maid'new
Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but for the title character of the pitch-black Chilean comedy The Maid, it's closer to infernal torment.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
10-23-2009 |
Reviews
1960s Period Piece 'An Education' Gets Good Marks, as Does Star Carey Mulligannew
Danish director Lone Scherfig's movie is something of a deceptively packaged Oscar-season bonbon -- a seemingly benign, classily directed year-I-became-a-woman nostalgia trip that conceals a surprisingly tart, morally ambiguous center.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
10-09-2009 |
Reviews
'Disgrace' Faces the Facts of Post-Apartheid South Africanew
This film adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's brilliant 1999 novel looks the chaos and hatred of postapartheid South Africa squarely in the face, probing the terrible fallout from white denial and pride without patronizing blacks by caricaturing them as noble victims.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
09-25-2009 |
Reviews
Michael Moore Sells the Same Old Shtick in 'Capitalism'new
I wish that more of the contradictions of late capitalism had made it into this scattershot, lazy slice of agitprop, which recycles Moore's usual slice-and-dice job on corporations, while bobbing a curtsey to the current crisis.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
09-24-2009 |
Reviews
'Crude' Dives into the Toxic Battle Between Big Oil and Dying Natives in Ecuadornew
Joe Berlinger's remarkable documentary recounts an infuriating litany of South American exploitation, backroom glad-handing and bureaucratic dead ends that has, among other collateral damages, created a Rhode Island-sized "death zone" of toxic pollution in the middle of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
09-18-2009 |
Reviews
It's a Battle of Thingamabob vs. Machine in '9'new
WALL-E would never get out alive in director Shane Acker's postapocalyptic hellscape.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
09-11-2009 |
Reviews
'District 9' Uses Alien Invasion as Apartheid Metaphornew
With its corrugated tin sheds and abject poverty, District 9 stands in for the township settlements where more than a million South African blacks still live without basic human services, two decades after the end of apartheid.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
08-14-2009 |
Reviews
