This is an abridged version of a review I wrote for Christianity Today Movies. To read the rest of this review, click here.

Weird and wonderful, The Fall is nothing short of a contemporary The Wizard of Oz, a hypnotic and intoxicating tale of ravishing beauty and spellbinding imagination. [Read more →]

When Speed Racer works, it is like nothing you have ever seen. And when it careens off the track, cartwheels end over end through the air and disintegrates upon impact with the hard, unforgiving earth, it is still like nothing you have ever seen. I’m not saying I liked the film, but I have to revere its outlandish audacity. [Read more →]

Were it not for some of the more mature subject matter, I’d strongly suspect that a rabble of feral children, abandoned on a desert island well before completing middle school and weaned only on episodes of Punk’d, wrote What Happens in Vegas. If you’re looking for a film that, at the very least pretends to pander to thinking adults, you’re looking in the wrong place. [Read more →]

I am on record for bemoaning the black hole into which good children’s films have disappeared. When I was growing up in the 80s, movies like The Goonies and The Explorers fired my imagination and created worlds of excitement and adventure in which children had it within themselves to conquer pirates and outer space all in the span of two hours. Say what you will about contemporary moving-making, there is nothing like those films being crafted today. So when I saw the trailer for Son of Rambow, about a pair of 1980s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finns who go on a series of adventures in rural England, I felt more than a little twinge of nostalgia. However, I walked out of the screening deeply conflicted. Admittedly, the film delighted me. So why was I also so disappointed by it? [Read more →]

If you’ve been wondering where Helen Hunt has been hiding these past few years, the answer is behind the camera. Hunt has been indulging in her passion project, Then She Found Me, a small, graceful film adapted from Elinor Lipman’s novel of the same name. Hunt’s feature directing debut (she also produced, co-wrote and stars in the film) reveals tremendous promise for her directing future even as it succeeds beautifully in the here and now. [Read more →]

Let the Summer Games begin! Iron Man is an admittedly bombastic yet quick-witted, funny and thoughtful entry into the superhero arena — part throwback, part hi-tech wish fulfillment. [Read more →]

When critics bemoan dreary, uninspired, conventional, paint-by-the-numbers romcoms, Made of Honor is exactly the sort of film they are talking about. Admittedly a difficult genre to keep fresh and original, Made of Honor doesn’t even try for novelty. Why come up with something innovative when you can plagiarize older and better scripts? [Read more →]

Of all the grim and somber films over the past year skewering America’s mismanagement of the “War on Terror” — each of which have run aground at the box office — who’d have thought that an absurdist stoner comedy would be the one to get it right?! Significantly more politically charged than the original, this completely over-the-top and shockingly un-PC sequel to Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle levels its sights on radical Muslim terrorists, Homeland Security xenophobes, inbred Southerners and, of course, President George W. Bush. And just as in the first film, Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay hits you between the eyes with some very real and very serious moral outrage while you’re distracted, doubled over in laughter. [Read more →]

Amy Poehler yelled at me. It was about a year ago. My best friend was acting in an improv comedy marathon with Poehler’s Upright Citizen’s Brigade in New York City and when I went to take a picture of her, sans-flash (not against the rules, by the way), she stopped in the middle of her sketch, glared straight at me and told me to knock it off. I still carry the scars of that terrible day. And now, after seeing her and Tina Fey’s new comedy, Baby Mama, I have but one message for Ms. Poehler: “All is forgiven.” [Read more →]

The Life Before Her Eyes is a lush and beautiful film based on the novel by Laura Kasischke. Kasischke, a writer known for her ability to make prose read like poetry, is ably interpreted by director Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog) who translates her material with soft lighting, supple colors, gentle water motifs and languid pacing. However, the attractive The Life Before Her Eyes is an exercise in indulgent misdirection and manipulative dread, a film of such laborious tedium and style over substance that it will, in order: beguile, bore, confuse and ultimately infuriate. [Read more →]