Mark Palermo

The best that can be said about Lakeview Terrace is that it’s never boring. This episode of Neil LaBute’s misanthropic hysteria moves from the fear of powerful women in his other movies to racial paranoia. Yes, racism is a subject of Lakeview Terrace, and LaBute aims to provoke by making his aggressor an educated black […]

Just as Diane Lane reunites with her Cotton Club love interest in Nights of Rodanthe comes the long-awaited DVD release of another movie from her youth. Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains barely opened in 1982, and was only seen on late-night cable afterwards. Lane, Laura Dern and Marin Kanter play the teen punk band […]

Burn After Reading is so in the moment that I didn’t realize I liked the film until it finished. The Coens’ follow-up to No Country For Old Men busts the hope of anyone wishing that the brothers are now completely serious. Their gift for comedy operates with the same quick wit as their dramatic features. […]

Something’s not right when a movie stars the esteemed thespians Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, and the only person who comes out of it with dignity is John Leguizamo. If I wanted to pretend I was an idiot, I’d say that Righteous Kill asks provocative questions about when police brutality is justified. Stock the […]

In Traitor, Don Cheadle plays Samir, a Somalia-born, American-raised Muslim man who—double trouble!—is also a bomb expert, and who is swept up, willingly or not, in a terrorist cell executing bombings across Europe and eventually the US. Cheadle is such a good actor that there is always more to Samir than meets the eye and, […]

It would have been better as a short, or at least at a brisk 90 minutes instead of two hours, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that Mirrors is the rare horror film that deserves to be seen in a theatre. After the Saw movies diminished the genre (they look worse than a CGI episode), […]

“Our neighbourhood is filled with crack, and the CIA won’t take it back,” Ice Cube raps on his new album Raw Footage. But where’s the link between the street tales of this self-proclaimed west coast war lord and his penchant for family movies like The Longshots? Today, Cube is probably much closer to being his […]

Cries of protest over meanness in Tropic Thunder need perspective. It’s a satire reflecting Hollywood vainglory—of course it’s offensive. That Ben Stiller put this into a major summer comedy is only bettered by how good a movie it is. Fake trailers kick things off by pedalling egotistic junk, with an accuracy for how many movies […]

The appeal of Pineapple Express is pretty basic: Two guys get stoned and have an adventure. For the sake of anyone seriously concerned about spending time and dime on a movie that might retread elements they’ve experienced with Cheech and Chong, Harold and Kumar, The Big Lebowski, How High, the Friday movies and Half Baked, […]

The narration in Vicki Cristina Barcelona isn’t unnecessary exposition, it’s just an effort to give Woody Allen’s latest a literary sophistication. Just how well does this hide that the movie hasn’t much worth saying? The beauty of Barcelona levels Allen’s hopelessness about female sexuality. New York girls Vicki (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) are […]

It shouldn’t matter that Swing Vote isn’t plausible. From a human standpoint, it’s a great idea for a movie. But its improbability leaves an unresolved weakness: The film has no idea how to make its setup feel credible. One must accept that Ernest “Bud” Johnson (Kevin Costner) is a not-too-bright, small town factory worker with […]

The X-Files: I Want to Believeand the unexplained word spacing in Step Brothers aren’t the worst movie titles this summer. Those would be Young People Fucking and American Teen. Only old people use the term “young people.” White People Fucking would have been more representative. And the delusion of encompassing a generation in the title […]