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| Rossiter Drake's Articles: 1 to 10 of 231 | Previous Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ... Next Page |
 | A Showdown for the Ages Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars.
When British talk-show host David Frost first approached Richard Nixon about participating in a series of televised interviews that would touch on everything from the Vietnam War to Watergate, the disgraced former president wasn’t the only one looking to rehabilitate his image.More |  | Some Kind of Monster Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.
[b]The Reader[/b] has been criticized as being an excessively staid (or British, if you prefer) drama about a man and woman emotionally cut off from one another by the Holocaust and its aftermath. And while I understand those criticisms -- this is a movie about people who are aloof even in the best of times, oddly impenetrable types whose passions are evident only during the time they spend together -- there is nothing tepid about the conflict raging in the soul of Michael Berg.More |  | Faster, Punisher! Kill! Kill! Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars.
To complain that [b]Punisher: War Zone[/b] lacks subtlety would be, I fear, to miss the point entirely. During a year overcrowded with superheroes who appear surprisingly self-aware, enough to recognize and fear the darkness in their own souls, Frank Castle seems an archaic throwback, a gunslinger who kills on a whim and moves on. He shoots the Bad Guys -- most of the time -- so the police leave him alone. But the trail of colorfully mutilated bodies he leaves in his wake suggests more a serial killer who enjoys his work than a tortured vigilante driven by the need to inflict justice.More |  | A Powerful Voice Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.
Having spent much of the new millennium wandering the indie wilderness with dream-like ruminations on fallen rock stars ([b]Last Days[/b]) and dangerously disaffected youth ([b]Paranoid Park[/b], [b]Elephant[/b]), Gus Van Sant makes a temporary return to conventional storytelling with [b]Milk[/b], his beautiful and powerfully affecting tribute to slain gay-rights leader Harvey Milk.More |  | The Last Gasp of an Action Hero Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.
What would Jean-Claude Van Damme be without his roundhouse kicks? That’s the question [b]JCVD[/b], a loosely biographical slice of cinema vérité about the so-called Muscles From Brussels, dares to ask, and you might be surprised at the answer.More |  | Many Unhappy Returns Rating: 2 out of 5 stars.
James Bond is mad as hell, and you will be too as you try to decipher an often incomprehensible story that takes him around the world in a little less than two hours, making [b]Quantum[/b] his shortest adventure on record.More |  | Bungle in the Jungle Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
There is an audience for [b]Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa[/b], a very young audience not yet capable of discriminating between disposable larks like this one and the smarter, more sophisticated storytelling of [b]WALL*E[/b], [b]Kung-Fu Panda[/b] and [b]The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie[/b]. Perhaps that makes me the wrong person to review this movie.More |  | Sex and the Steel City It’s been 14 years since Kevin Smith made a noisy debut with Clerks, his low-rent, pop-culture-obsessed comedy about man’s struggle against the mind-numbing boredom of a dead-end job. If Smith’s directorial style seemed unrefined back then, he more than compensated with dialogue as unapologetically subversive as it was funny and honest.More |  | Lock, Stock and One Tired Retread Haven’t we seen this before? Charitably casting aside Swept Away, his amateurish foray into romantic comedy that (rightly) inspired a chorus of stupefied gasps, Guy Ritchie has founded his career on increasingly familiar crime capers populated by characters with names like Franky Four Fingers, Jack the All-Seeing Eye and Hatchet Harry.More |  | An Amateurish Stab at Sagacity Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars.
Let it never be said that Madonna’s self-serving fascination with sex, which once stirred enough controversy to make even her most calculated exploits seem like bona fide events, has diminished with age. It’s just that we’re no longer shocked, and only mildly interested. [b]Filth and Wisdom[/b], her directorial debut, has arrived with more of a whimper than a bang, and the results are surprisingly shoddy, even by the standards expected of a first-time would-be auteur.More |
| Rossiter Drake's Articles: 1 to 10 of 231 | Previous Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ... Next Page |
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