“Pontypool” is an intriguing exercise in misdirection, a horror film that keeps you guessing until about an hour into it whether anything is actually happening – or whether it’s all the product of a fevered imagination. (More…)

Welcome back to the land of the dead, Sam Raimi. You’ve been away too long.

It’s been more than 20 years since Raimi made “Evil Dead 2” and launched himself into the mainstream, directing films that ranged from outstanding (“A Simple Plan”) to outlandish (“Darkman”) to entertaining (the first two “Spider-man” movies) to dreadful (“For Love of the Game”).

Until now, he hasn’t revisited the horror world of “Evil Dead” (except for “Army of Darkness,” which was even more of a spoof than the scary-funny “Evil Dead” films), his new film, ”Drag Me to Hell,” is the first pure genre film Raimi has made in ages. He hasn’t lost his touch. (More…)

There’s more than life and death going on in “Departures,” the film that unexpectedly won the Oscar as best foreign film of 2008.

In this film from Japan, director Yojiro Takita skillfully blends a variety of plot elements in a story about our relationship with the deceased and what it shows us about our lives. But he also examines the nature of art and the need for self-expression, as well as the hold the past has on us, no matter how firmly rooted we are in the present. (More…)

You’d think that “WALL-E” would be a tough act to follow – but here comes Pixar with “Up,” a movie that matches that Oscar-winner for heart, laughs and pure excitement.

And that’s not to mention the visual splendor – indeed, the sheer wonder – of the computer-generated images that comprise this dazzlingly entertaining film. You have to keep reminding yourself that you aren’t watching something that has been photographed. Despite a stunning level of photorealism, this is a movie painstakingly built from binary code – 0s and 1s. (More…)

Noel Coward created plays that dealt with human truths, examining the most basic urges of the upper classes. They were of their time, but the points he was making were timeless.

“Easy Virtue” should be simple pickings as a movie adaptation, with its clash of classes, pretensions and reality. Simple, that is, for a director who understands and appreciates Coward. Like Mary’s little lamb, if you leave it alone, the jokes will hit home, wagging the tale behind them.

But, like several recent Oscar Wilde film adaptations, director Stephan Elliott makes the mistake of trying to bring Coward up to date – and to play his work realistically. As a result, “Easy Virtue” misses the mark by a wide margin – because the director thinks he knows better than Coward. (More…)

“Terminator Salvation” doesn’t exactly squander the legacy of one of the movies’ richest sci-fi constructs. But it doesn’t do much to advance it. So I guess I consider it an opportunity lost.

“The future is not written,” was the message Kyle Reese relayed to Sarah Connor in James Cameron’s richly original 1984 sleeper. And that’s been the hinge for the subsequent two films and the undeservedly short-lived TV series. Change the past and you change the future, in ways great and small. (More…)

Here are just a few of the questions that came to mind as I watched “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian”:

Why am I watching this movie?

Why would anyone watch this movie?

Why was the first film – from whose 2006 loins this sequel sprang – a hit, when it was virtually laugh-free? (More…)

Humor doesn’t get much drier than Bent Hamer’s “O’Horten” (whose title, in the USA, might just as easily be “O. Horten,” signifying a first initial and last name).

The Norwegian Hamer builds his film around a public servant, a long-time train engineer named Odd Horten (Baard Owe). At the end of his career, he lets a retirement party throw him off his routine so that he misses his last train assignment.

Suddenly, it’s over – he’s off the trains and on the seemingly downward slide of retirement to death.

It’s the first time that Horten hasn’t been on-time in years and it throws him completely. Life for this man has been an endless series of schedules, arrival and departure times, destinations at which he’s stopped but seldom visited.

And now, suddenly, seemingly without warning, he’s got nowhere to go – nowhere to be.

That’s the subject of Hamer’s film, really: being and nothingness. (More…)

Whimsy only goes so far. In Rian Johnson’s “The Brothers Bloom,” it goes a long way – and yet not far enough.

Johnson directed the smart-mouthed teen noir, “Brick,” and “Brothers Bloom” represents a leap in style – influences-wise, from Dashiell Hammett (and VH1) to Wes Anderson and mid-late 60s cinema. (More…)

The mechanism creaks and groans as Tom Hanks tools around Rome, trying to halt an imminent threat to blow up Vatican City in Ron Howard’s clanking film of Dan Brown’s “Angels & Demons.”

“The DaVinci Code” was the sequel/prequel to this tale: sequel to the book of “Angels & Demons,” but prequel to the movie. It doesn’t really matter. It’s not as if one movie gains resonance from the other.

Once again, we’re in the realm of Harvard professor Robert Langdon, an academic symbologist and supersleuth of religious iconography. Naturally, when a group of cardinals are kidnapped, the Vatican City cops turn to … a symbologist. (More…)