Mark Palermo

A scene early in Push got my hopes up. Nick (Chris Evans) and Cassie (Dakota Fanning, looking tough with Avril Lavigne hair) are being chased through a Hong Kong fish market. Their pursuers are able to scream at such a pitch that it makes ears bleed and windows shatter. As the chase continues, there are […]

The laugh-out-loud comic genius of Peter Sellers’ Pink Panther films isn’t represented in the series revamping. That’s why Steve Martin’s take on detective Jacques Clouseau has been so roundly dismissed. Except here’s the thing: The Pink Panther 2, like 2006’s The Pink Panther, is consciously a children’s film. At that, it’s not a particularly good […]

Taken is ridiculous, and sort of fascinating. It plays as a stereotypical extreme of conservative fears of foreign lands and immigration, before enacting death penalty justice. I’m not sure why the movie isn’t called Pimp Killer, which doesn’t dance around its exploitative nature and is a lot catchier. Liam Neeson is Bryan, a divorced security […]

The personality chasm between Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) and David Frost (Michael Sheen) is what tries to ground Ron Howard’s take of Peter Morgan’s stage play. Recounting Frost’s famous 1977 interview with the former US president, and its backstage struggle, Frost/Nixon boasts good performances and historical interest. But it misses out on the political tension […]

As some fantasy series progress, they get nerdier and more insular. Granted, Underworld was never cool, but now it’s reduced to Masterpiece Theatre vampires looking anguished and repressed werewolves giving Braveheart speeches. Though the prequel Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is goofy, I don’t think there’s an intended joke in the whole thing. Breaching inter-species […]

Without the 3D, My Bloody Valentine 3D would probably be released direct to video and forgotten. (You can watch it in theatres not equipped for the third dimension, which would be like playing records without speakers.) Like Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, it’s a film so lame they had to make it 3D. And unlike […]

Once more, with not much feeling, the biopic formula infects a celebrity’s life. Notorious reduces the career and death of Biggie Smalls. The year 1997 wasn’t so long ago that it’s forgotten, even if it isn’t often considered. But Notorious has no feel for the 1990s. This distinctive point in rap history (when east side/west […]

Clint Eastwood is still capable of making a good movie (most recently Letters from Iwo Jima ), but he’s also entered that canonical phase of old age, where everything he does is thought to hold some kind of wisdom. Gran Torino is just sloppy—not even its cliche build-up has poetry. This attempt at an Oscar-prestige […]