Mark Palermo

“Fear thy neighbour,” is the basis for Borat! and Babel, yet neither is as politically courageous as their admirers insist. Both films seek escapism by reflecting the absurd norms of human interaction. Borat!: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan gets away with a lot because it’s consistently very funny. Sacha […]

Personal cinema is in desperate shape. Amid the faceless, streamlined norms of moviemaking, films that carry legitimate human experience must be encouraged. But this counter-equation has resulted in a sheltered narcissism. The screen puts up with self-promoting artists. This deluded faith that one’s egotism will help others has resulted in everything from Tarnation to Super […]

What might be described as Showbiz Syndrome is the core of the year’s most intricate screenplay. Christopher Nolan finally meets his hype with The Prestige’s genre fantasy about the agony of success. Nolan (co-writing with his brother Jonathan, and based upon a Christopher Priest novel) knows this doesn’t entail the usual portrait of fame as […]

In many screenplays, a movie’s entire progression becomes evident after its first third. Some don’t even need that much time. If Man of the Year and The Marine barely register on the pop climate it’s because they aren’t actually new movies. These autumn regurgitations foresake surprise (and interest)—begging the question of why their makers think […]

The Departed is a gripping adult thriller. Remaking the acclaimed Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs, Scorsese returns to his tough guy films, delivering his straightest genre work since Cape Fear. The conventions could be a letdown, were The Departed not such an expert entertainment. The feel of a world spiralling apart is the palpable doom […]

It’s hard to notice amid Trailer Park Boys’ prominence, but Mike Clattenburg’s series never took the easy route. At the end of the 1990s, trailer trash culture had reached a gross trend in hipster fashion, movies and magazines—spoiled white kids condescending to lifestyles they’d never come in contact with. Trailer Park Boys’ success came despite […]

The glib consensus is that The Black Dahlia is a bad movie when it’s really just an easy one to dislike. It brings complexity to genre (not just in the thick plot details—the film’s true weakness). True 1940s noir style is met by director Brian De Palma’s obsessions with guilt surrounding violence and sex. The […]

It takes a combination of audacity and stupidity to want to remake The Wicker Man. Robin Hardy’s 1973 thriller is note-perfect, largely because nothing quite approaches its unsettling tone. The Wicker Man almost looks like something PBS broadcast in the middle of the afternoon when you were a kid, but its happy Scottish fields are […]

It should have been great. OutKast’s library lends itself to the upbeat rhythm of movie musicals, with the film’s Prohibition-era setting taking the stylization of contemporary music videos and director Bryan Barber’s deep shade photography. “MTV style” has become a favourite putdown among conservative movie critics, but I would love to be able to watch […]

“Really? That’s so cool!” a girl sitting behind me exclaimed when I joked to my friend that the only thing I like better than planes is snakes. The brilliance of Snakes on a Plane’s title (garnering it far more interest than mid-level action films of its ilk ever get) is how unpretentiously it lays out […]

There’s an expectancy that any reasonable movie about 9/11 must represent political complexities. But Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center sidesteps global conflict and the director’s own reputation for a return to September 11’s initial helplessness. The day isn’t approached as a dramatic end in itself by Stone, it becomes a basis for his treatise on […]

The nature-survival film gets rehauled as straight horror in The Descent, a UK item that’s well-versed in scare tactics. The documentary quality of the shot setups and observational tone recalls Wolf Creek, but The Descent’s primal terror—clautrophobics might have a rough time with it—hits harder, with more innovation and skill. The location of the horror […]