With the Oscars now less than 30 days away, I’m dedicating a lot of my archive reviews to some of the big winners. Here’s a film I watched recently, 1981 (1980 calendar year) Best Picture winner Ordinary People. The way “Ordinary People” depicts the family is tough to swallow. Is the Jarrett family really ordinary? […]

There’s no denying that “Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire” is a tough film. The harrowing story of an overweight illiterate 16-year-old girl pregnant by her father for the second time and living with her abusive mother is not the fare most of us go to the theaters for. But sometimes we need […]

Here’s my theory on how Paramount and Hasbro teamed up to make “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.” With the help of the film’s creative team, Hasbro designed an entire Toys R Us aisle’s worth of G.I. Joe action figures and accessories, everything from subs to jets to tunneling vehicles to Joes in accelerator suits […]

You won’t find a more visually immaculate film than “A Single Man.” Gucci frontman Tom Ford’s film debut is something out of an inch-thick fashion magazine. His eye for beauty and sensuality might be unparalleled in Hollywood with just this one entry. Applied to the story of a man torn apart inside with the loss […]

Side Note: Check out the next Julie Powell of Chicago cuisine, my friend Stephanie, and her  blog “Stephanie Eats Chicago.” She was featured on WGN Radio this morning, plus if you click you might find pictures of puppies amidst her food-pegs. “Julie & Julia” is not about food so much as it is about setting […]

R.I.P movie star Jean Simmons, who starred opposite Kirk Douglas in this film. She passed away last week just 9 days before her 81st birthday. “Spartacus” (1960) and “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) were the two great epic war films of the 1960s. That said, the latter is superior, but not for the former’s lack of […]

I don’t necessarily understand the phenomenon that “Paranormal Activity” became in the Fall of 2009, especially considering the success of “The Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield” bringing exposure to the documentary-style and low budget horror/thriller. Yet people demanded this film be shown in their cities and towns and this $15,000 movie grossed more than $100 […]

If one were taking a course on how to appropriately adapt a novel for the big screen, “Atonement’ would certainly need to be among the required materials. Though I personally have never read McEwan’s novel, the attention to detail that Joe Wright and his team bring to telling this story visually is superb.

Americans have long been ignorant of the comedic prowess of Ricky Gervais. The round- bellied Brit is the force behind “The Office” having played the Michael Scott equivalent, David Brent, on the original UK show and produced the American version. Yet to most of us he’s “the guy from the Night at the Museum movies.” […]

The problem with “Knowing” is that it goes too far. It’s a tough act to juggle so many overused story conventions such as decoding numbers, the apocalypse and the supernatural these days. Movies like “Knowing” have become almost a genre of their own thanks to Roland Emmerich and other disaster/end-of-the-world-predicting filmmakers. And with that comes […]

“Trading Places” is a modern-day “Pygmalion”: a couple old codgers make a bet on whether or not they can turn a homeless con artist from a petty thief to a proper wealthy businessman and the opposite to a prim and proper wealthy young gentleman. More than an opportunity for comedy, this social experiment premise offers […]

“Changeling” reminds me a lot of 1997 thriller “L.A Confidential” in that it deals with police corruption and P.Ds’ frightening level of power. The problem with that is “Changeling” takes place about 25 years earlier — same police department, same problems, different era. It’s unfortunate how incompetent our criminal justice system was and in many […]

The ’60s was the decade of the movie musical with “West Side Story,” “The Sound of Music,” “My Fair Lady,” and “Oliver!” all taking home Best PIcture. It’s fair to say “Funny Girl” might’ve been on that list had it not came out the same year as “Oliver!” But the Academy had it right in […]

Everybody’s talking about what happens after the apocalypse these days. “The Book of Eli” is sort of the boiling point of this science-fiction concept, a combination of last year’s “The Road” and George Miller’s “The Road Warrior.” America is a post-apocalyptic wasteland and Denzel Washington is the only self-sufficient badass. So originality is not exactly […]

No matter the premise, a film puts itself at a disadvantage when it calls for a one man show. Sam Rockwell, as talented as he is, cannot generate enough interesting conflict with nothing at his disposal but the skin-tingling monotone voice of Kevin Spacey. In other words, films like “Moon” have to work twice as […]