Recent Reviews

Daniel Ellsberg sits at a piano, sounding pretty good, distractedly answering questions. It looks like the documentary crew is setting up or screen-testing the location. "Did your sister play?" An innocent question from someone off-camera. Ellsberg's answer gives the key to his life.

I don't know when I've seen a movie as devastating as The Red Riding Trilogy, a three-picture adaptation of four novels by British author David Peace. The three movies -- which open Friday at the Starz Denver Film Festival -- originally were made for British TV and total five hours in length.

Alice in Wonderland is Tim Burton's most visually ambitious movie to date. The fanciful director of Batman, Big Fish, and Sweeney Todd has done outdone himself.

In Shutter Island, director Martin Scorsese decided to bring his considerable technique front-and-center. Scorsese pushed his ingredients into a hyper chamber of thrills where extravagant visual gestures become the norm. In his new thriller The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski -- another top-ranked director -- follows a different route.

Say "movie trilogy" and most people reach for Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. A few of us might mention Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy -- three thematically related movies set in modern France and Poland. Red Riding is a new trilogy that fits somewhere in-between genre films and art films.

Released near Charles Darwin's birthday, Creation is a mainstream British film that tells one story from Charles Darwin's life. It's loosely based on Annie's Box, which was written within the last decade by a descendant of Darwin who found a box of mementoes Darwin kept to remind him of his daughter Annie who died at 10 of scarlet fever.

Pol Pot was the Communist dictator of Cambodia responsible for the "Killing Fields." From 1975 to 1979, "Number One Brother" (as he was known) was responsible for the deaths of 20% of the population of Cambodia.

The quickest way to sum up Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island is with a mild distortion of a cliché every writer is encouraged to avoid: It's one hell of a dark and stormy movie. Drenched in weirdness and flooded with water (in the form of hurricane-driven rains and bobbing seas), Shutter Island makes you feel as if reality is receding as steadily as an outgoing tide.

I first read about Collapse during last year's Toronto International Film Festival, so I knew the film had a reputation for knocking folks off center, but who'd have thought that a single talking head could instill so much gloom and doom?

At the beginning, Shutter Island oozes with creepiness. Unfortunately, even the esteemed Martin Scorsese can't quite keep the mojo going from first frame to last, but the end result is still worth a look.

Clooney sparkles and MacGregor sags in a film that wishes it were directed by the Coen brothers.

Depending on how generous you feel -- or how cynical -- you will have a very different reaction to The Blind Side. Sold as a sports movie, The Blind Side is as much about race and class as it is about finding a way to win the big game.

The phenomenon of parkour, of moving quickly and gracefully through urban landscapes, was a natural fit for the cinema. Somewhere between dance and martial arts, parkour is as fun to watch as to do. And the first, best feature film to capitalize on the craze was Banlieu 13, or in the U.S., District B-13.

The Wolfman, a remake of the 1941 horror classic that starred the estimable Lon Chaney, puts some fury on display -- mostly as a result of violence that's introduced with all the subtlety of a sonic boom. But what's the point? Visually overstimulated and thematically hollow, this edition of Wolfman brings better technology to an old tale, but still finds itself hampered by ridiculously ominous dialogue, grandly inflated conflicts, and a tendency to turn its wolfman attacks into slashing arias of what one character describes as brains, guts and God knows what.

Director Michael Haneke -- never one to dabble in nostalgia or romanticism -- uses a village setting in pre-World War I Germany as a laboratory in which his characters are tested, and almost always fall short. Haneke jettisons the fondness and affection that some artists bring to such retrospective endeavors, replacing them with something akin to cinematic Calvinism -- only with no hope of salvation to temper the pervasive sense of sin.