Mark Palermo

As the titular Penelope, Christina Ricci sports a Miss Piggy snout, an approachable fairy tale-deformity. But fairy tale conventions also blight this movie’s integrity. A shut-in, for fear of terrifying others and traumatizing herself, Penelope knows her appearance is just a curse that can be reversed if she manages to find true love. That same […]

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 […]

One good thing that could have come out of a long Writers Guild strike is the broadcast cancellation of the Oscars. Studio productions are so dependent on award consideration that it would have been a chance for Hollywood to rethink its strategies. Celebrating the joy of making and watching movies, without the goal of prestige, […]

The challenge of finding a new slant for the hitman-genre is partly remedied because In Bruges is set in a city many North Americans have never heard of. Bruges, the medieval Belgian city, is where assassins Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) hide out—and rethink their professions—following a flubbed job. Playwright Martin McDonagh uses […]

Jumper works as a travelogue, but it doesn’t work as a movie. David Rice (Hayden Christensen) leaps from The Sphinx to Big Ben to the Coliseum, but his only goal is to escape arch rivals the Paladins (led by Samuel L. Jackson as Roland). It’s a concept without a story. Director Doug Liman sinks lower […]

The poster image of Charlie Bartlett in repose, arms folded behind his head, invites comparison to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But the teen movie Charlie Bartlett would rather be Pump Up the Volume. The idea of a high school kid finding out he can be adored by his peers by being nice to everyone is […]

Abigail Breslin may have gotten an Oscar nom for Little Miss Sunshine (2006), but that didn’t save her from being cast in the most cloying child role in ages in Definitely, Maybe. As the daughter of political consultant Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds), she just wants to know the truth of how Dad met Mom.
 Poor […]

The title Fool’s Gold gives away the sham of this new Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey romance. Playing divorced treasure hunters, there’s never a moment where they’re asked to face the compatibility issues their eccentricities create. Thus, the movie forsakes its prime opportunity to be interesting. We’re meant to love them simply because they’re idiots. […]

The lack of vanity Martin Lawrence brings to Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins is unlikely to get much notice, yet it deserves comment. Rather than 
assuming the headlining spot implied by his title role, Lawrence unassumingly fits into the comic dynamic of an ensemble cast.
 Hitting the big time as a Hollywood talk show host, Roscoe […]

Jessica Alba discovers in The Eye that her new corneas are showing her the evil that killed their previous owner. This follows her role in Awake, a film about a man who remains conscious through his heart operation. Alba’s unspoken hope that distributors could throw the amputated-hand-horror Idle Hands on the pile and release the […]

I anticipated seeing Strange Wilderness largely because I’d heard so little about it. A comedy this under the radar had a chance at real countercultural bite. 
 Alas, the latest from Adam Sandler’s production company Happy Madison doesn’t even rise to the lowbrow charms of most stoner comedies. Rather than being lovable idiots, the characters […]

Were it not for the Western trifecta of No Country For Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James and There Will Be Blood, 2007 would clearly be the worst movie year so far this decade. There Will Be Blood really is great—its originality cemented by the immediate difficulty of reconciling just what it is and […]