The discordant assembly of images in "Shutter Island" are haunting and distressing. At first sight you believe that the film will take place entirely on an island that lodges the criminally insane, circa 1954....(more)

"Greenberg" is a movie about repellant people that just so happens to be fascinating, but only if you are into movies about extreme head cases. “I am really trying to do nothing for awhile,” Ben Stiller says, “I am doing nothing deliberately....(more)

Right off the bat, the problem with "Valentine’s Day" -- other than there are too many characters than the film can handle --is that there seems to be more storylines of jilted love than there are stories of actual love running through its intersections. Talk about traffic overload....(more)

After "The Wolfman," you would very much start to think that a full moon was every night, night after night, or that a screenplay can mandate sun and moon cycles as it pleases. But that is just one of many, many mistakes that this latest creature feature makes....(more)

The people behind the making of "From Paris with Love" wanted to make a sensational CIA intrigue action-adventure without caring whether or not the CIA details were accurate or realistic. The filmmakers' intention is to create an entertainment that is a blast, a rip-roaring adventure that doesn't need to mirror anything going on in real life....(more)

Dishonest advertising makes you believe that "Edge of Darkness" is just another vengeance with a bang thriller. Instead this paranoia thriller is far from the conventional assembly line, far from the routine and far from the mediocre....(more)

The Book of Eli is post-apocalyptic sci-fi with a drifting hero travelling west, and he is embodied by none other than Denzel Washington as the title character. This is a violent and graphic film, with gray skies and brown deserts, desaturated from realistic colors to the point that some of the visuals look black & white....(more)

The visual spectacle of "Avatar" is so cool that it almost becomes an overload of cool. Every shot in James Cameron’s blue world extravaganza is magnificent from left to right, packing it in, never giving into visual short-shrift....(more)

The road, one must assume, has got to be a great and exciting place for a musician. But when you’re 57 and travelling on the road, and alone… well it is just that....(more)