Mark Palermo

I Love You, Man isn’t a Judd Apatow production, but employs a lot of his alumni and yuppity romantic concerns. Its take on white cultural meanings of manhood gives up at about the same place as The 40 Year Old Virgin—preferring to cure differing social ethics than to deal with them. But for a while, […]

When Wes Craven made The Last House on the Left in 1972, he was a recently retired humanities professor who had barely seen any movies, much less directed one. Though the amateur quality and decadence of The Last House on the Left (renamed after original title Sex Crime of the Century failed to sell tickets) […]

An odd thing happens about 15 minutes into Miss March. The comedy, which until that point is desperate and met with uncomfortable audience silence, is suddenly funny. But it isn’t meant to last. Director/writer/star duo Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore (of MTV’s The Whitest Kids U Know) hit when the comedy is physical. But they […]

Most of what’s good about Zack Snyder’s Watchmen was already good about Alan Moore’s graphic novel. But give credit: For a generally faithful adaptation, Snyder commendably lets Watchmen feel like a movie. Comic book fans can be as bad as Harry Potter fans for flipping a lid whenever a film adaptation deviates from its source. […]

Don’t give me the “it’s escapism” defense. Escapism would be welcome. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is purgatory. It’s not really even a movie. It’s barely up to the standards of the narrative scenes between levels of a video game. The success of the Street Fighter games already spawned one movie (a rather unequal […]

Don’t give me the “it’s escapism” defense. Escapism would be welcome. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is purgatory. It’s not really even a movie. It’s barely up to the standards of the narrative scenes between levels of a video game. The success of the Street Fighter games already spawned one movie (a rather unequal […]

There’s trouble in a comedy when the preppy bad guy who is going out with the girl the good guy likes is no more intolerable than the good guy who complains how intolerable he is. I don’t care if the bad guy is mocked for listening to Chumbawumba and Lou Bega, Fired Up! has no […]

Give Confessions of a Shopaholic points for being upfront. The flack that “women’s movies” take for promoting consumerism—marry rich, fight for your dream wedding and shop your blues away—is here made front and centre. The adaptation of Sophie Kinsella’s popular novel is sound because it’s willing to look at material excess as its subject. It’s […]

It’s the tact of movies like The International that they take work to follow. It’s meant as an engrossing technique, allowing viewers to feel like insiders for keeping track of covert malpractice operations, and differentiating between a multiplicity of referenced people whose names all start with Cs, Ss, and Ws. When director Tom Tykwer wants […]