Silent Hill, the bizarre survival horror series from Konami, has a lot of great stories to tell. It’s this nebulous concept of a place that never appears the exact same way twice. The town of Silent Hill changes to reflect…
Superhero films based on existing material have a hard road ahead of them at this point. With critical acclaim for a wide variety of stand alone stories (like The Avengers, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger), the writers of…
I’m a big fan of L. Frank Baum’s Oz series. I’ve read all of the books multiple times and know the main stories and characters inside and out. There could be a dozen more great Oz films based on the…
A retirement home for professional musicians is in trouble. Almost all of the funds each year come from a huge benefit gala honoring Giuseppe Verdi’s birthday put on by the residents. However, the star performer is unable to perform this…
Director Lee Daniels follows up his Academy Award-nominated genre-fluid coming of age masterpiece Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire with the not-Academy Award-nominated genre-fluid pulpy noir psychedelic coming of age crime thriller The Paperboy. The film opens with…
Mama is hard to describe because the film itself doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it a horror story about a ghostly presence taking over a young couple’s lives or a fantasy about defining family? Is it a…
I feel like I owe a lot of people an apology right now. For years, I have fought as hard as I could against the term “torture porn.” I have written screeds all over the Internet explaining why this was…
You can’t ignore context when evaluating a film. But what happens when context itself is the substance of the film rather than the film itself? Zero Dark Thirty is the story of how one C.I.A. officer’s tireless search for Osama…
My glib, sarcastic response to Lincoln is “How much suspense can you really get out of whether or not congress voted for the 13th Amendment?” I had that thought before and after the film, but it was honestly the furthest…
Les Miserables is an epic pop/rock musical adapted to the screen as a slight and claustrophobic show. Jean Valjean is released after 19 years of hard labor incurred from stealing a loaf of bread for his starving nephew. He vows…
William Friedkin and Tracy Letts get each other. They made that clear in their first collaboration Bug and the second go around proves it. Letts and Friedkin share a vision for Killer Joe and, for better or for worse, they…
O is the narrator and central figure of Savages. She works for and dates Ben and Chon, two friends who run the largest independent medicinal marijuana farm in California. After receiving a threatening tape from the representative of a Mexican…
When The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ended, I turned to my brother in the theater and said, “Well, Peter Jackson sure took liberties with that one.” I knew going in he had to. After the runaway success of the far…
Bernie is an adaptation of the real life story of the sweetest man you never met. He is a kindly assistant funeral director who randomly buys gifts for people in his small Texas town and leads the choir in the…