May 5, 2015

Seven Pounds (Gabriele Muccino, 2008)

Seven Pounds is a great concept but executed with poor vision. The supporting cast is well chosen, with Dawson, Harrelson and Pepper being high points.
April 24, 2011

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

Black Swan is marked by Nathalie Portman's grandiose performance, but Aronofsky’s regresive aesthetic hinders the movie’s themes and narrative.
March 26, 2010

The Savages (Tamara Jenkins, 2007)

In The Savages, Tamara Jenkins explores the importance of family and the effects of dementia in this hard depiction of growing old.
March 22, 2010

City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002)

A reviewer compared City of God to Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) and many parallels could be made between the two. As they both fall into the genre of gangster films, they depict violence in a raw, uninhibited way, in a realist fashion. City of God, with its documentary-style aesthetic—camera shakes, voice-over narration, etc., uses that realism to emphasize its story’s […]
March 29, 2010

Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, 2007)

Michael Clayton suffers from its intellectualism, just as Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 2005) did, and never lets you connect to the stakes emotionally.