Mark Palermo

The low-key Canadiana of How She Move offers a pleasant surprise. Removed from the dance spectacles of You Got Served and Stomp the Yard, its naturalistic grit shakes conventions: It’s a great looking hip-hop movie. Director Ian Iqbal Rashid strays from the bright colours of those urban teen films, capturing his heroine’s pop dreams in […]

That Rambo, the fourth in the confusingly titled series, has more gore than the first three combined should just be par for its B-junk function. Except that writer/director/superstar Sylvester Stallone invites cheering at the way civilians are graphically disembodied. It’s about the only time the new Rambo tries to be fun. Placing his one-man army […]

“I feel dizzy,” a character says, midway through Cloverfield. Join the club. The cliche of calling a bad movie unwatchable literally applies to director Matt Reeves’s digital proof that some movies are nothing but hype. Cloverfield is physically unwatchable. Its deliberately amateur, palsied photography can’t hold up to a theatrical-size presentation. Besides disinterest, the only […]

“Farewell, good uncle,” the king’s nephew says to the king’s son. This would be inconsequential, except it reveals that the writer of In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale doesn’t know the difference between an uncle and a cousin. The latest from Uwe Boll, the director of video-game movie abominations House of […]

Combining the hijinks of the Friday series with the spiritual bent of Tyler Perry’s work seems like an obvious move. For producer/star Ice Cube, it’s also a dishonest one. Cube previously played a Christian in Three Kings, but because First Sunday supports Christian ideals (like in Perry films, the story is occasionally interrupted by a […]

The many faces of Bob Dylan are the subject of I’m Not There, the latest pseudo-intellectual exercise from Todd Haynes. Dylan’s various personas are inhabited by Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin and Ben Winshaw, with Haynes distinguishing the segments by shooting in different styles and film stocks. Only a […]

Great horror movies must be happening somewhere else. That’s the thinking that led to numerous American remakes of Japanese ghost stories over the past few years. Only the remakes of The Ring and The Grudge found audiences. Now, with the release of One Missed Call, J-horror just feels like yesterday’s trend. One Missed Call remakes […]

The Orphanage ends so well that it redeems the movie, which is pretty even in its success-to-failure ratio. The Spanish/Mexican production continues the vein of horror-versus-children resources of its producer Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone. The Orphanage holds childhood values close without being smart about children. By not letting viewers side […]

The bourgeois appeal of the American “indie film” (e.g. Little Miss Sunshine) didn’t bode well for the insular prospect of Juno. But it’s a sharper movie than its trailer indicates—capable of real sincerity, especially when it doesn’t push for it. Sixteen-year-old Juno (Ellen Page) responds to her father’s putdown that he never thought she’d be […]

A second-tier Tim Burton movie is still pretty close to the A-game. Giving Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 horror stage musical a big-screen treatment, Burton lands his grimmest material yet. The sheer fatalism in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street verges on shallowness, but Burton gives Sondheim’s tragedy a sly makeover, using an Expressionistic look […]