Mark Palermo

The social inferiority that can result from a mental superiority complex affects English prof Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) and his daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page). When Lawrence’s pothead adopted brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church) visits, it confirms what they’d suspected: Life is easier for the stupid. Smart People adds a jangly guitar score to the family […]

The Ruins is better acted and photographed, with more originality in its gross-outs, than recent torture porn standards. In this newfound effectiveness, it still doesn’t get over one major hurdle: It doesn’t have anything to say. The “fun” ordeal takes the usual look at human folly: People sometimes can’t think rationally when they’re being put […]

Stop-Loss and 21 follow youth experiencing life outside their peers’ social norms. Both get their outsider view half-right. These good-looking movies lose balance by vying for grit while maintaining the glamour of Vogue magazine spreads. 
 Stop-Loss is director Kimberly Peirce’s first film since receiving big attention for Boys Don’t Cry nine years ago. This […]

John Hughes wrote an early draft of Drillbit Taylor, and it’s easy to see where it fits into Hughes’ respect for youth and where it was taken away from him. The most fitting comparison with the story of three outcast high schoolers that hire a bodyguard named Drillbit (Owen Wilson) to fight the school bullies […]

Run Fatboy Run isn’t exactly an underdog that accomplishes big feats. That’s just what it’s about. What it has that recent heavily promoted comedies like Walk Hard and Semi-Pro do not is likeability. A movie where an out-of-shape single dad, Dennis, joins a marathon to compete for the affection of his ex-fiancee only sounds less […]

The moral dilemma and historical setting of The Counterfeiters gives it interest. The movie just lacks the dramatic edge to be gripping rather than compelling. It uses the usual recipe of an uncompromising Holocaust drama: It’s shot on grey days, giving everything a monochromatic dreariness. The sun never shines in Europe. But the formula of […]

The previous movie adaptations of Dr. Seuss, Ron Howard’s live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) and Bo Welch’s The Cat in the Hat (2003), did away with the wit of the celebrated books, leading to films that felt cluttered and creepy. Co-directed by Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino, Horton Hears a Who! doesn’t quite […]

The quarantine/virus action-pic Doomsday unfolds with no serious political message or intent. The anti-government stance of this oppressed civilization is now so familiar from myriad genre movies—Land of the Dead (2005), 28 Weeks Later (2007)— that writer and director Neil Marshall—The Descent (2005)—would rather just get down to business. For him, this means pillaging his […]

A movie can take the hormonal amplification of high school years to funny and strange extremes. Never Back Down instead does this by dehumanizing its characters and assuming all teenagers are mouth-breathing sheep. It’s completely offensive teen-sploitation garbage. The hook of being a mixed- martial-arts Karate Kid isn’t enough when the movie lacks what made […]

Nobody demands 10,000 B.C. be good, but that doesn’t excuse that it’s free of pleasure. You could cut director Roland Emmerich slack if Godzilla, Independence Day and The Patriot were at least fun. In 10,000 B.C., he continues making genre movies a drag. The storytelling is incomprehensible. The racism is so overt in a prehistoric […]

The Bank Job refreshes the well-worn formula followed in heist films. One forgets the joy of seeing the form done well. Director Roger Donaldson fashions a piece of genre fiction from a real-life break-in of a London bank’s safe-deposit room in 1971. Donaldson throws his silver-gleam lighting against faces worn by guilt and desperation—Jason Statham, […]

Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day is never very funny and for a while it looks disastrous. The film’s 1940s screwball antics seem not so much breathless as out of breath. The score by Paul Englishby takes no prisoners in underlining every gag. Eventually, the film develops authenticity. It still isn’t funny, but director Bharat […]