Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s Post Mortem will tease and torture you. This is the turgid, drab tale of a civil servant, Mario (Alfredo Castro), who transcribes the notes of a coroner in Santiago, 1973. Mario has a thing for his neighbour, Nancy Puelma (Antonia Zegers) a fading cabaret dancer with connections to some politically minded […]
John Madden’s murky thriller, The Debt, is a hodgepodge of dodgy accents, interwoven timelines and political machinations. Based on Asaf Bernstein’s 2007 Israeli film of the same name, it’s not lacking in star power, and though all make solid contributions, no single performance stands out. Beginning in 1997 we first meet the scarred Rachel Singer
Dario Argento’s “Suspiria” is one of his most renowned and best loved films, with his mastery of audio and visual language on full effect for this barely coherent horror movie centered on a coven of witches. Years after its 1977 release, the film has lost much of its weight; the gore and special effects are
Seeing horror movies has turned me into Morgan Freeman in Seven grizzled, embittered and always expecting the worst. Don’t believe me? Watch Halloween: Resurrection, They, 13th Child, and House of the Dead in the course of a year and see what you become. Still, I’m always rooting for horror movies because you’re never as alive
Rob Cohen’s The Fast and the Furious tapped into a subculture of gearheads and speed freaks as it transformed Vin Diesel and Paul Walker into overnight sensations. Its $145 million domestic gross guaranteed a sequel, even after Vin hit the brakes on his involvement. Not surprisingly, Diesel’s presence is missed in John Singleton’s lame 2
I finally got around to watching the newest Scorcese film, The Departed. This is weeks after the other Orble film freaks, Cinematrix and Movies and Life, reviewed it. Based on the infamous Hong Kong movie, Infernal Affairs, Scorcese replaced the Triads with the Irish gangs of South Boston, and injected his own stylish flair and
Not too long ago, I lamented on how comic books adapted to the silver screen have a nasty habit of being terrible. Well, it’s hard not to like the X-Men. The movies have stellar casts, the special effects are top notch, and the movies try to stay true to the original comic books. That’s good.
I recently finished reading the Ultimate Spiderman, a ‘remake’ of The Amazing Spiderman series, slingshotted into the 2000s by updating the era to make it accessible to a younger generation. The original Spiderman was published in the 1960s, where high school ‘jocks’ took cheerleaders to the school dance to do the Cha-Cha; now, Peter Parker
