Reviews
• The Twilight Saga: New Moon
• An Education
• The Blind Side
• Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Summit)
The Stab: A satisfying second chapter to the Twilight saga, improving on its predecessor in every way possible. Even with [...]
Reviews
2012 (Columbia Pictures)
The Stab: A poor excuse for filmmaking lacking in virtually every department. Even sequences of grandiose Earthly devastation are dim and dull. With a two-and-a-half hour runtime, this isn’t a movie: it’s torture.
2012 is just as the ancient Mayans predicted: an earth-shattering, cataclysmic event unleashing [...]
Reviews
A Christmas Carol (Disney)
The Stab: Visually spectacular, then some more—to the point of monotony. A scary story more than a Holiday moralistic tale, with emotional resonance suffocated by its showy display.
Stuffed fuller than a Christmas goose, Disney’s animated adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic tale is [...]
Reviews
A Serious Man (Focus Features)
The Stab: Rich with style and substance. Moves slowly but holds strong. A must-see for serious filmgoers.
This darkly ironic comedy will make you go “huh” a lot more than “ha ha”—unless you are one to find humor in another’s misery. Larry [...]
This weekend, the Town of Bel Air Film Festival is being held at the Bel Air Reckord Armory on N. Main Street.
The festival opened on Friday with guest speaker Michael Sragow, film critic for the Baltimore Sun, and a screening of the 1937 Victor Fleming film Captains Courageous. Two [...]
The film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s beloved story Where the Wild Things Are is ambitious, built from a mere eighteen illustrations and ten (grammatically-flexible) sentences. Sendak promotes childhood escapism from a world of increasing anxiety, and Spike Jonze’s film vibrantly honors this spirit.
The world weighs heavily on Max, our rambunctious [...]
Three sets of slackening spouses pack up and ship off to “Eden,” a tropical marriage rehab resort, to try to strengthen their holy unions. Actually, only one couple, played by a frigid Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell in business-class chic, hopes to rediscover marital bliss. The others attend at the [...]
“I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree.”
American writer Joyce Kilmer penned these now ubiquitous words nearly a century after the demise of English poet John Keats. Perhaps Kilmer should have better studied the forefathers of his art. During his tragically short life, [...]
“Whip It” is sure to generate a huge new interest in “roller derby,” a thriving underground sport in which two teams of fierce females race around an oblong track on roller-skates to score points. But the roller derby reputation far exceeds that of a battle royale on wheels: it has [...]
The premise of “The Invention of Lying” seems destined for laughs. In a world where everyone tells the truth, where humans are physically incapable of the neurochemical processes behind fabrication, one man discovers that he has the ability to lie. The film uses both its unfalteringly honest universe and its [...]
Fame, a remake of the 1980 mini-classic, is, simply put, an incongruous mishmosh.
Director Kevin Tancharoen attempts to give us an unflinching look at the intensity of an arts school, rendering and pacing his shots with documentarian-like grit. Meanwhile, a screenplay by Allison Burnett wants to be a character study, offering [...]
Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…
“The Informant!”
Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh (“Traffic”) heralds his newest offbeat comedic entry with exclamation (indeed, with an exclamation point), as if portending the arrival of a superhero. While central character Mark Whitacre dons no cape, his ever-increasing delusions convince [...]
“Hell is a teenage girl.”
These are the first words spoken in “Jennifer’s Body.” It is also a truth universally acknowledged. And while the film doesn’t quite have the polish of a Jane Austen novel, Oscar-winning writer Diablo Cody (“Juno”) does provide a thorough analysis of a young woman’s role in [...]
The whiteout: a terrifying natural phenomenon during which heavy snow and raging winds collude to completely obscure visibility. Imagine being trapped in such a nothingness with temperatures cold enough to turn your bare skin into black ash, all while on the most secluded land mass on Earth. It’s the perfect [...]
