Mark Palermo

Every new Harry Potter movie is met with a response that it’s darker than the last. But how can something be dark if it doesn’t inspire emotion? Brit TV director David Yates helms Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix with an eye for deep shadows and baroque settings, but even the best-looking scenes […]

Michael Bay has haunted me since 1998. I was working at Sears, and a male colleague informed me I had no heart for not crying at the end of Armageddon. Though Bay’s the one whose heart should be in question, his often infuriating body of work displays unquestionable skill. His sun-drenched compositions, silhouetted men in […]

Die Hard has been the high-water mark for action-hero movies during the past 20 years: the best and the most influential. Bruce Willis’s John McClane has been a defining trademark, with other films capitalizing on its hero vs. terrorists dynamic by changing the settings. Speed was described as Die Hard on a bus, Under Siege […]

Nineteen ninety-nine—the last really great movie summer—had pop culture looking forward. The best movies (The Matrix, South Park, Eyes Wide Shut, The Iron Giant) were sometimes transcendent. Blockbusters like Deep Blue Sea and The Sixth Sense were fulfilling. And the fatally hyped The Phantom Menace and The Blair Witch Project were still worthwhile and unmissable. […]

I don’t think Eli Roth is untalented. The playful depravity of his faux Thanksgiving trailer made it one of the highlights of Grindhouse. But in Hostel Part II his game is off. The main thing that saves the first Hostel from the nadir of The New Sadism that Saw II occupies is its sense of […]

Seeing Knocked Up hyped as a sleeper hit had an obvious effect. The movie opened and made serious bank. All the alternative-fare talk was just a deceitful way of creating anticipation for a blockbuster. Were Judd Apatow’s comedy not another all-white Middle America take on a couple’s compatibility, this might mean something. Knocked Up is […]

“Could this be it?” I wondered as the boat was pulled into the void. My dissatisfaction with the first two Pirates movies was facing the unexpected outcome that this new movie was becoming enjoyable. Granted, the Pirates movies have had good things in them. The actors’ spirit carries through the whole series, and Dead Man’s […]

The second funniest joke in Shrek the Third could have served as a warning to the movie itself. The titular green ogre (voice of Mike Myers), his sidekick Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and Latin catthrob Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) have left the land of Far Far Away to find a replacement for the king. They […]

It was around the time of 2003’s 28 Days Later that zombies moved from their niche to be the dominant go-to movie monster—beating loyal standbys vampires, werewolves, mummies and child-murdering bogeymen. Not just in major films either—zombies stand alongside drug abuse and suicide as popular topics of amateur productions. One benefit is that zombies aren’t […]

For several years it seemed a given that the best comic-movie franchise going was Spider-Man. The colossal disappointment of Spider-Man 3 evens the field. It would be better suited as a Fantastic Four sequel. Using most of the same creative talent as Spider-Man 2, Sam Raimi (whose career now consists entirely of making these films) […]

“The Greater Good,” a political motto that’s made its way into the pop lexicon, is mindlessly repeated by the rural folk in Hot Fuzz. Edgar Wright follows up his living-dead comedy Shaun of the Dead with material about assimilation that could easily make another zombie movie. This time it’s a take on the bombastic US […]