Title	Excerpt	Author	Date	Total Comments	Recent Comment
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant	John C. Reilly is just about the last guy you’d think to cast as a vampire. He’s older, pockmarked, plays mostly goofy roles and is blessed with a mop of loose, curly hair. (And then there’s that slightly muppet-like voice.) It’s a pleasant surprise, then, to see him own the…	Ken Lowery	10/23/09	0
Where the Wild Things Are	With just ten sentences and a handful of beautiful artwork, Maurice Sendak made a timeless children’s tale in Where the Wild Things Are. Max, Mr. Sendak’s wolf costume-bedecked young hero, escapes a scolding mother to become king of a horde of monstrous-looking Wild Things until it’s time to go home…	Ken Lowery	10/16/09	2	10/26/09
The Invention of Lying	With The Invention of Lying, Ricky Gervais (creator and star of the original The Office and Extras) seems to be making a bid to be a soft-hearted Woody Allen. The opening titles cards are a familiar white-on-black text, and almost immediately Gervais begins his narration with a bit of snarky…	Ken Lowery	10/02/09	1	10/02/09
Zombieland	Well, this was inevitable. Between the time I wrote this and the time you read it, thirty zombie movies were produced in North America. Zombies are the poor horror filmmaker’s shortcut to social relevance and easy gore, and the genre now finds itself so overworked that any new zombie film…	Ken Lowery	10/02/09	0
Jennifer’s Body	Jennifer’s Body is the kind of teen horror movie that wants us to believe that bona fide blonde babe Amanda Seyfried (Mamma Mia, Mean Girls) is in fact a dumpy loser. Of course, as the movie’s written by the overbearingly hip Diablo Cody, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is…	Ken Lowery	09/18/09	1	09/18/09
Big Fan	Paul Aufiero has one love in his life, and that love is the New York Giants. It’s the kind of love recognizable to any fan (sports or otherwise), the kind of love that engenders a love of trivia and no sense of nuance. Paul sees everything and yet sees nothing.…	Ken Lowery	09/11/09	0
Cold Souls	“This isn’t an exact science,” says Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) to one of his clients. He’s referring to the thornier details of his company’s work, which is to remove souls from people who’d rather not deal with the emotions and the baggage their soul inevitably accumulates over a lifetime. Time…	Ken Lowery	08/20/09	1	08/21/09
Orphan	There’s something unusual about Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), or so the ad campaign for Orphan more or less says. She’s a charming young girl with a faint Slavic accent and a hypnotizing stare. Other kids don’t seem to get along with her, but that may be due to her apparent maturity;…	Ken Lowery	07/24/09	0
Bruno	Bruno is the kind of movie that has 90% of the audience howling with laughter while the other 10% hurriedly exits the theater. This is not speculation; I witnessed this happen several times during the screening, and could only wonder what, exactly, these people thought they were getting themselves into.…	Ken Lowery	07/10/09	0
Public Enemies	Michael Mann’s Public Enemies begs a comparison to Heat, his masterful crime film starring Robert De Niro as a bank robber and Al Pacino as the cop who’s pursuing him. In Public Enemies, those roles are occupied by Johnny Depp (as John Dillinger) and Christian Bale (as FBI agent Melvin…	Ken Lowery	07/01/09	0
Whatever Works	In many ways, Larry David is an ideal Woody Allen protagonist. He’s articulate in his rants, often funny, occasionally hilarious. What he lacks in Allen’s nebbishness he makes up for in pure aggression: there’s a hostility to David’s demeanor that’s more a challenge than a passive observation. It’s not that,…	Ken Lowery	06/26/09	0
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen	Michael Bay is not a director; he is a general. He marshals resources, lashes together vast armies of cast and crew, travels the world and blows ten kinds of hell out of every landmark he sees. He innovates in the state of his field’s technological art to wreak havoc and…	Ken Lowery	06/24/09	6	06/24/09
Away We Go	Director Sam Mendes has made a career documenting the decline and fall of marriages and families, most famously in his Academy Award-winning American Beauty and just recently with Revolutionary Road, starring his wife, Kate Winslet. Your mileage may vary on the profundity of these downbeat suburban dramas, but Mendes has…	Ken Lowery	06/12/09	0
Next Day Air	If you get the idea you’ve seen Next Day Air before, it’s because you have. There is not one scene, not one line of dialogue, not one character arc or joke or conceit that does not have an ancestor in a Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino film, and if you’ve…	Ken Lowery	05/08/09	0
Heidi MacDonald and Newfangled Technology, Round 2	You can’t swing a bought-out journalist these days without hitting a screed of free-floating rage directed at Twitter. I suppose it’s understandable: the newspaper business these days makes real estate speculation look positively stable by comparison, and there are a lot of career writers looking down the barrel of a…	Ken Lowery	04/30/09	4	04/30/09
Earth	Once upon a time, Disney was well known for its series of nature documentaries and television shows. (Sometimes for the worse: the 1958 Disney documentary White Wilderness famously featured a few dozen lemmings herded to their deaths to reinforce the myth of lemming mass suicide.) Though those documentaries and television…	Ken Lowery	04/24/09	1	04/28/09
Observe and Report	What a strange comedy. If you were to go by the TV ads for Observe and Report, you’d expect something fairly typical out of a movie about a mall cop played by Seth Rogen: stoner antics, absurd vulgarities and a core of indelible sweetness. These things are all present, yes,…	Ken Lowery	04/09/09	2	04/15/09
Sin Nombre	When considering Sin Nombre, writer-director Cary Fukunaga’s first feature-length film, I’m forced to consider that old dichotomy typical of festival-favorite films: do I gauge the film by its strength as a story, or by its value as an educational tool for festival audiences, namely middle-class white folk like myself? Because…	Ken Lowery	04/03/09	0
Knowing	Knowing is a frustrating film. It begins somewhere near the territory of The Number 23 and various “Bible Code”-style prophecies when astrophysicist John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) sees patterns and predictions of calamity in a list of numbers written by a schoolgirl fifty years previous. It then shifts abruptly into Signs…	Ken Lowery	03/20/09	4	03/20/09
Miss March	Here’s a culture shock: I’m 28 years old, and filmmakers are now making “road trip to have sex” movies about guys younger than me. When the young versions of straight-arrow Eugene and raging horndog Tucker (adults played by Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, two of the creators of The Whitest…	Ken Lowery	03/13/09	0
Last Chance Harvey	January is a grab bag of movie releases. As if hung over from December’s release of often depressing Oscar bait, movie studios tend to release lighter fare in the early months of the new year, mixing paint-by-numbers romantic comedies in with oddball movies of variable quality and the occasional award-worthy…	Ken Lowery	01/16/09	0
Valkyrie	For the past month, my friends and I have jokingly referred to Valkyrie as Tom Cruise Kills Hitler, which is more or less what its trailers sell you on. The fifteenth unsuccessful plot to kill Hitler was—by necessity—actually the careful work of a large network of conspirators determined to, as…	Ken Lowery	12/23/08	3	05/04/09
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button	At its heart, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a fairy tale, for what else could it be? Though the film is about a man born old who grows young, everyone around Benjamin (Brad Pitt)—including the man himself—cares not for why he is the way he is, but only…	Ken Lowery	12/23/08	0
Frost/Nixon	When President Richard Nixon resigned from office, he refused to give what many thought was their due: an admission of wrongdoing, and an apology for abusing his power. Nixon’s sins were numerous, and many news organizations were clamoring to get the first post-resignation Nixon interview. The atmosphere director Ron Howard…	Ken Lowery	12/12/08	0
Nobel Son	Nobel Son is aggressive in many ways: its humor is aggressive, its violence is aggressive, its sarcastic tone is aggressive, even its omnipresent score is aggressive. This approach can work if you handle it with a sharp world-weariness; if, as the great sage once said, you “act like you’ve been…	Ken Lowery	12/05/08	0
Twilight	What the hell happened to vampires? Once upon a time, vampires were little better than walking corpses slinking out of graveyards to kill, spreading plague wherever they went. The 19th century saw them revamped into more sophisticated killers and monsters, but even then they were still most assuredly killers and…	Ken Lowery	11/21/08	4	07/28/09
Quantum of Solace	The answer to your first question is: No, Quantum of Solace is not as good as Casino Royale. It’s less interested in material goods, doesn’t much care for exotic locales (much of the film is set in Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere), and its plot unfolds whip…	Ken Lowery	11/13/08	1	06/24/09
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People	Like Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin before it, the story engine operating at the core of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is that of a romantic comedy: fish out of water, meet-cute, adorable shared animosity, and then the protagonist ultimately gives up enticing but hollow pursuits to…	Ken Lowery	10/03/08	0
Appaloosa	Watching Appaloosa, it’s clear this is actor Ed Harris’s first stab at writing/directing: There’s simply too much that goes on that isn’t connected to anything else. As it so happens, I’ve been reading David Mamet’s Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business, a collection…	Ken Lowery	10/02/08	0
Eagle Eye	Jerry (Shia LeBouf) has a problem: He’s a loser in a dead-end job distanced from his rigid father and his ace Air Force twin brother. He bluffs his way through poker hands with coworkers and picks up pretty girls on the El Train (he lives in Chicago, as do most…	Ken Lowery	09/26/08	2	10/02/08
Miracle at St. Anna	Miracle at St. Anna is many things at the same time: an old-fashioned war movie, a meditation on racism in America in the 1940s, and a sober examination of what constitutes a miracle. This is not a “Christian movie,” per se, but it is nonetheless fascinated by demonstrations of faith…	Ken Lowery	09/25/08	0
Ghost Town	You may know someone like Bertram Pincus, dentist and sourpuss. If you’re like me, you may even be him from time to time. Bertram (Ricky Gervais) is scathing in his reflexive distaste for all things social, a man who prefers peace and quiet, and likes his job because his patients…	Ken Lowery	09/18/08	0
Righteous Kill	It’s weird and depressing to see Robert De Niro and Al Pacino inhabit roles like this: tired, plot-driven, unimaginative and clichéd. Weird because we know they’re both capable of better performances, even on their worst days; depressing because the lead characters in Righteous Kill—brokedown cops with shaky morals and failing…	Ken Lowery	09/12/08	1	09/19/08
Hamlet 2	Hamlet 2 is what happens when you mash up a genre spoof with one of those character-study comedies that derives its laughs from mercilessly filming ridiculous people who can’t help but make asses of themselves—think of it as a Christopher Guest movie informed less by Spinal Tap and more by…	Ken Lowery	08/21/08	0
Star Wars: The Clone Wars	Set between Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars follows Obi-Wan Kenobi (voiced by James Arnold Taylor) and Anakin Skywalker (Matt Lanter) as they try to keep the Republic together while Count Dooku’s (Christopher Lee)…	Ken Lowery	08/14/08	1	08/12/08
Hell Ride	Here’s something that hasn’t happened in a long time: I didn’t care about anyone in this movie. Not a single character. And if you don’t care about the people, it’s damn hard to care about what they’re up to. Nor was I entertained. Not every movie is going to be…	Ken Lowery	08/07/08	0
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor	There are only two things you need to know about The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. The first is that Stephen Sommers, writer-director of both The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, is neither writer nor director. (IMDB lists him with as the uncredited screenwriter, way back in 2001.) His…	Ken Lowery	07/31/08	0
Step Brothers	I have a confession, dear reader: There are some movie reviews where I, your faithful critic, only want to type out a few words and send the review off for print. It’s a simple truism that some movies simply aren’t worth several paragraphs of developed critique, and when writing about…	Ken Lowery	07/24/08	8	11/18/09
Batman: Faces	There’s an element of sadness to the Batman/Two-Face stories you typically don’t find in other “duel” Batman stories. That may be because Harvey Dent is so obviously a slave to his madnes—a once-good man trapped in a dualistic, chance-driven worldview that simply can’t be shaken. (The Joker simply is his…	Ken Lowery	07/18/08	0
The Dark Knight	The new Batman movie series, helmed by Christopher Nolan, deviates most strongly from previous incarnations of the Caped Crusader in how seriously it takes its subject matter. Every adaptation from the Adam West TV show to the popular animated TV show of the 90’s to Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher’s…	Ken Lowery	07/17/08	4	01/01/09
Wall-E	According to its early trailers, Wall*E was conceived at the same Pixar lunch that gave us Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and Monsters, Inc.—some of the best animated features ever produced. Wall*E, however, may be the best of the lot. It’s as sweet and heartfelt as previous Pixar films, and…	Ken Lowery	06/26/08	3	06/28/08
Kill All Parents!	Kill All Parents! has a nice, simple premise at its core: one mad scientist sees the terrible future and moves to prevent it by creating a whole host of superheroes. You can probably guess how. Heroes need tragedy to become who they are, he reasons, and all the better if…	Ken Lowery	06/20/08	0
The Promotion	Mainstream comedies tend to be pretty loud affairs, quick and eager to flash some genitals and make some scat jokes to secure the most precious of commodities in a theater setting: the contagious belly-laugh. I think we can successfully credit (or blame, depending on your tastes) the Brothers Farrelly for…	Ken Lowery	06/12/08	0
The Strangers	The Strangers claims to be based on a true story, a disputable fact that is ultimately irrelevant. (So irrelevant I have not bothered to expend the thirty seconds on Google necessary to verify.) If it’s true, it’s precisely true enough to 1) have some “this could happen to you” resonance,…	Ken Lowery	05/29/08	6	06/22/09
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull	Here’s the question that stuck with me, going into the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise: in an age of digital wonders, where a man in a metal suit dogfights with jet fighters and a kid in a race car slaps the laws of physics around with casual mastery,…	Ken Lowery	05/20/08	3	05/26/08
Welcome to Tranquility vol. 2	Enough with the zombies. Yeah, zombies. You know, the horror movie staple that now graces the cover of at least one comic every damn week. The gimmick Marvel Comics got ahold of and—in true Marvel fashion—figured that if it works one time, it should work a hundred more times over…	Ken Lowery	05/17/08	0
Speed Racer	I asked myself “are they really doing that?” no less than six times throughout Speed Racer, most of those within the first twenty minutes. (After that I found my groove.) Don’t get me wrong: It was a happy question, asked a little disbelievingly. You may think you’re ready for the…	Ken Lowery	05/08/08	0
Iron Man	You might have forgotten this under the onslaught of Serious Business superhero movies like Superman Returns, Batman Begins, the Spider-Man trilogy, Daredevil, et cetera, but superhero stories are supposed to be fun. A good time. Something that makes you say “wow” at least a few times. The term “escapism” has…	Ken Lowery	05/01/08	1	07/12/09
Helen Killer #1	Helen Keller. During her time deaf and dumb, she formed a new personality she called “Phantom.” This “Phantom” existed in “No-World,” and was a personality of increasing hostility. When Anne Summers comes into her life and teaches her to communicate with the world, Helen eschews “Phantom” for her own self…	Ken Lowery	04/25/08	0
Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay	The best gauge for a comedy is to see how much fun the cast appears to be having with it. That’s a subjective measure, to be sure, but if you see enough comedies you can get an idea if the people making it are into it. Ask yourself: Does it…	Ken Lowery	04/24/08	0