Mark Palermo

There’s growing attention on the teenage noir Brick. The low-budget debut (shot for only $500,000) of writer and director Rian Johnson has been anticipated as the next big thing since its 2005 Sundance premiere. It’s easy to foresee impressionable filmgoers holding it up as definitive, but Johnson doesn’t deliver much beyond the initial novelty. @body […]

It takes strong vision to find new ways of shooting a concert movie, but Jonathan Demme does it in his outstanding documentary Neil Young: Heart of Gold. Filmed in a Nashville auditorium over two nights, Demme doesn’t give us any crowd shots. The usual scope and spectacle of filmed concerts is done away with for […]

The Scary Movie franchise provides the same service American fast food chains do for tourists in foreign countries—it’s not especially rewarding, but the menu is easy to interpret, and you get what you’re accustomed to. Only prior experience with this series makes it satisfactory that Scary Movie 4 is just reasonably OK. A full half […]

It may seem unlikely that Lucky Number Slevin and The Benchwarmers have entirely different filmmaking philosophies; they’re both, after all, failed comedies. The distinction lies between the extremities of their attitudes. One is deathly in love with itself. The other just doesn’t give a fuck. Slevin displays one of the worst influences of Tarantino- inspired […]

End-of-the-world peril is conveyed through slapstick in Ice Age: The Meltdown. Its balancing of world wary poignancy and breathless mayhem surpasses the 2002 original. Rather than play for lazy sequel dollars, the crew at Blue Sky animation aim their fuzzy animal adventure for something greater —finding the heart and relentlessness to pull off a winning […]

Despite prevalent claims that Inside Man is a departure for Spike Lee, it’s really more of a reformatting. The tested bank caper genre is used as a front for the director’s social concerns. As New York City detective Keith Frazier, Denzel Washington leads a prestigious cast of Jodie Foster, Clive Owen, Christopher Plummer, Chiwetel Ejiofor […]

Those who bought George Clooney’s Oscar speech statement that Hollywood is ahead of the curve by showing the world what issues it faces ought to love V For Vendetta. It addresses the freedoms of “the little people” with a ruse of sophistication that only the socially empowered can provide—enforcing obvious sentiment in simple-minded terms. It’s […]

When Animals Attack Matthew McConaughey has been released under the title Failure to Launch. Remembering that half the equation of a romantic comedy is humour, the filmmakers fill the downtime between story points with Trip (McConaughey) being bitten by a dolphin, a chipmunk and a lizard. So audiences don’t call out this repetition, the device […]

Nothing is inherently gay about 16 Blocks or The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, but that shouldn’t make either confusing. Both movies are about the bonds of adult male friendship and the facade of machismo. In 16 Blocks, Bruce Willis is the typical cranky hero that defined his past action hits, except this time he […]

Michel Gondry’s Dave Chappelle’s Block Party forgoes the star worship and suspenseful developments of music documentaries. It brings the concert film down to earth — a feat so unassuming it’s at first difficult to identify the root of its charm. Expanding on Gondry’s innovative concepts for framing the subjects of his music videos, here, the […]