Mark Palermo

Nothing. That’s exactly what’s good about Saw IV, yet the latest yearly installment pulled in an expectedly big opening weekend. This could be an opportunity to pontificate declining viewer standards, and how the prospect of so many Saw fans is somewhat frightening (especially the ones on IMDb boards who trade ideas for torture traps.) But […]

30 Days of Night and Into the Wild seem to have nothing in common, except they’re both about survival in Alaska and they both suck. The vampire horror movie 30 Days of Night distills genre tradition with indulgence—a minimalist musical score, no sense of humour, until it’s no fun at all. It feels like a […]

The title The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford seems to say it all. That’s a simplification. A look at the emotion and instability leading to heroic action, it’s an emo-fying of the Western-genre tradition. That’s not all that brings this adaptation of Ron Hansen’s novel near masterpiece status: It’s one aspect […]

The material has promise, but the movie should be much better. That was my instant reaction to The Heartbreak Kid. The Farrelly Brothers’ semi-remake of the Neil Simon-scripted 1972 film attempts to get back to the shock-gag approach that made them famous. The problem is this is no longer who the Farrellys are as filmmakers. […]

Amanda Bynes is the most unexpected of recent kid-market female stars. Hannah Montana (Miley Cyrus) has attitude. Hilary Duff has flair. Mandy Moore brought maturity to the mix. But Bynes is a comedian. This allows her to stand against her contemporaries’ vanity. In Sydney White she continues She’s the Man‘s rejection of harmful gender roles. […]

The best movie I’ve seen this year on the topics of violence and morality didn’t come from David Cronenberg or Neil Jordan. It’s a New Brunswick-shot B-movie called Stuck from Stuart Gordon (The Re-Animator) about a nurse (Mena Suvari) who hits a homeless man (Stephen Rea) with her car and then leaves him in her […]

Inland Empire is like the last song you sometimes get on a concept album, the one that encompasses all the themes and motives of everything that came before it. Everything David Lynch has been obsessing over in his works—the fragility of identity, the struggle between good and evil in every soul, the purity and torment […]

Scarlett Johansson has appeared in a number of movies by major filmmakers, putting in work for the Coen brothers, Brian De Palma, Woody Allen, Sofia Coppola and Michael Bay. But it’s the more conventional dramatic-comedy The Nanny Diaries that may hold her most interesting performance. The shared writing and directing team of Shari Springer Berman […]

Superbad includes one detail I’ve never seen in a teen movie before: The sight of kids drinking, and gagging after every swig. It’s one of the small touches to display a smart attention to young life. If you believe the hype, this comedy by director Greg Mottola and writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg is […]

“Everybody else just grew up and got boring and sold out,” love interest (Isla Fisher) tells amateur stuntman Rod (Andy Samberg). In other words, they turned into the audience for Knocked Up. Hot Rod has been buried by the summer’s high-profile comedies, but it rises above Judd Apatow’s self-importance and The Simpsons‘ familiarity. That the […]

The question of what suffices for The Simpsons Movie is a balance of realism with sentiment. At its height, The Simpsons didn’t need special episodes to show its potential since it was regularly and reliably the greatest thing on TV. And it wasn’t only a pop touchstone: The Simpsons irreversibly affected a generation’s sense of […]

The Civil Rights movement is felt with young vitality in Hairspray. A movie version of a Broadway musical based on John Waters’ 1988 movie sounds uninspired. But the broad reach of Adam Shankman’s version brings Waters’ kitsch into a euphoric, populist gesture in the High School Musical era. It’s a great teen movie. For Baltimore […]