Mark Palermo

Michael Mann’s stylish film version of his trend-setting ’80s TV drama Miami Vice is a weird take on a cop thriller. Mann’s non-conformist approach to tough guy mystique is more defiant than inspired—interesting for what it isn’t, rather than what it is. By resisting cliche, Mann makes exactly the movie that his detractors frequently accuse […]

Clerks was about the person Kevin Smith was, and its sequel is about who he could have been. Picking up on the 20-somethings of 1994’s Clerks 12 years later, Smith views dissatisfaction in life as something that’s socially imposed. The fear of growing up is for many a fear of losing one’s identity. It’s conversely […]

Monster House is a throwback to a mostly deceased subgenre: the scary movie for kids. Spooky stuff in the new Pirates of the Caribbean is just part of its corporate mindset. That film aims to pacify everyone, but kids can embrace Monster House as their own. Even in its opening stages, the characters display a […]

“Two hours and 20 minutes is a wearying time to spend on a movie that’s really about nothing,” I wrote of 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Not wanting to offend me the same way twice, Gore Verbinski’s follow-up to the Disneyland ride adaptation is just as innocuous, but runs […]

There’s a great moment in Superman Returns, a variation of an effect that opens Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, that’s an unintended summary of the present blockbuster season. The Man of Steel looks down on Earth from outer space, and is inundated by a cacophony of the planet’s sound waves. So many movies emit so much loud […]

Most movies that don’t identify themselves as remakes are still retreads. What counts is when old material is revamped, made fresh again. Superman Returns and Click acknowledge their predecessors and that viewers are probably familiar with them. Superman is pitched alternately as the first of a new series and a throwback and extension of the […]

The shared outlook of Nacho Libre and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is that foreigners are indeed very foreign. The white-centric stance of both movies is unsophisticated, but not uninteresting. By moving away from US soil, these films aim for exoticism, not understanding. Only Nacho Libre, with its good-natured storybook tones, really gets […]

The imaginative disappointment of this summer’s blockbusters finds movies less interested in awakening viewers than in rewarding their laziness. In times like this, a movie’s stylistic flair can go a long way against its inert narrative. Unlike The Break Up, X-Men 3 and The Da Vinci Code, Pixar’s Cars lights the screen with images worth […]

Robert Altman does something tricky in A Prairie Home Companion: He makes a movie about death that’s fully alive in the present. The big ensemble affair doesn’t seem like a departure, except that the 81-year-old director is now visibly preoccupied with the end of things. The real, live-theatre radio show A Prairie Home Companion is […]

Cutting-edge special effects highlight X-Men: The Last Stand, but they never build excitement because the movie has no style. Director Brett Ratner’s lack of visual imagination can’t rise to the potential of distinctive comic book adaptations by Alex Proyas, Warren Beatty, Sam Raimi, Tim Burton and Guillermo Del Toro. Ratner doesn’t place himself alongside Bryan […]

Nothing is more vital in film reviewing than the necessity of standing up for the integrity of a good movie other critics are trashing. Early reports of critics hissing at The Da Vinci Code at the Cannes Film Festival set off alarms of highbrow distaste for American blockbusters. (The Dan Brown novel is just too […]

As kids, the first mystique of movies was that they’re something bigger than we are. It’s mandatory to believe in the thrill of giant spectacle to get anything out of Poseidon. At most basic levels of character and drama, it’s a subpar work of fiction. There’s no reason to see it on DVD or in […]