litrock (Level 18)

I really like high concept sci-fi movies. Yeah, most of them are trash, but they're so rare these days, with only a one or two a year getting any sort of notable release, that I can't help but trudge out to see them whenever they show up. This is doubly ...

I feel there are two types of successful foreign martial arts movies out these days. There's the colorful, character-based movies that owe more than a little to the Shaw Brothers films of old and Hong Kong 80s action cinema—Donnie Yen has been putting out a lot of great examples of ...

Let me be up front with you: THIS REVIEW IS INCREDIBLY SPOILERY. If you're here looking for advice on whether you should watch this movie, I give you a firm, unconditional 'yes.' It's smart, funny, and manages to get both effective horror beats and the often contradictory joy in subverting ...

The hardest reviews to write are the ones where you have to juggle your personal opinion on a movie with a more objective, critical appraisal. I'll admit this is something I don't have a lot of experience in, and so it's vexing that this review so calls for it. So ...

Watching the upswell of people react to The Hunger Games as a movie has been one of the more interesting experiences of my amateur career reading and writing about movies. The trilogy of books, from author Suzanne Collins, have been popular since they were released, but they occupied the part ...

So I went to see Silent House despite all of the apathetic to negative buzz I've been hearing about it. Part of that has to do with my fascination with Elizabeth Olsen post Martha Marcy May Marlene, part was due to the gimmick of a movie shot in one take ...

I don't think there's much novel about the idea that high school sucks. And movies about high school sucking are common enough to be their own genre, at this point. How are you going to take something so well trodden and make it worthwhile? In short: add some buddy cop. ...

Jeff, Who Lives at Home opens with an earnest monologue by Jeff (Jason Segel) as he expounds into a personal recording device his theory on how all things are connected, a theory he came to in multiple rewatchings of Signs. The universe, Jeff says, is simply a series of connections ...

Read this note: Normally I'm pretty light on spoilers, but this movie's been out a while and the most interesting parts of it require the full picture to discuss, so this review is riddled with spoilers. Many of them are things that probably wouldn't spoil the movie for anyone, but ...

Let's start with the basics. Fish Tank is a 2009 British drama directed by Andrea Arnold. It stars non-actor Katie Jarvis and currently hot property Michael Fassbender and it won a bunch of awards and is generally well-regarded. Certainly I only watched it because of Fassbender and because one of ...

By now it's probably impossible for anyone reading this not to have an opinion about John Carter. The incredibly lengthy gestation project decades in the making, an albatross of Disney's continually bloated budget, some trailers that were frankly really terrible, and the lamest title change ever. But I'm going to ...

Talking about Studio Ghibli films seems like a waste of my time, really. Director Hayao Miyazaki's animation studio has become one of the stalwarts of cinema. With each film he puts out, it is received with the similar aplomb of what Walt Disney had in his day, what Pixar used ...

* special note, there's no score on this review, because trying to add one seems nearly impossible. I recommend the movie, as the text shows, if you're willing to take it on its own terms. But I can't imagine what score, compared to any other movie, I would give it.I ...

Note on reviews: I try not to spoil what I would consider major plot revelations in any of my reviews, but I do like to talk about movies in a way that would be meaningful to someone who has seen the film. Thus, assume there are probably more spoilers than ...

Note on reviews: I try not to spoil what I would consider major plot revelations in any of my reviews, but I do like to talk about movies in a way that would be meaningful to someone who has seen the film. Thus, assume there are probably more spoilers than ...