Matt Semansky

Nothing is quite what it first appears to be with Silent House, which starts off feeling like yet another bump-in-the-night haunted house story before veering off into unexpected territory. Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen) gets trapped in the darkened house that her father (Adam Trese) and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens) are renovating and becomes increasingly terrified by […]

One can’t count a paucity of ideas among the numerous flaws in John Carter, an adaptation of an Edgar Rice Burroughs story. The action-adventure flick brims over with alien creatures, plotlines that feature space travel, romance and war and thematic nods to environmental destruction, politics and the Bible. This J.C. (get it?) is a former […]

To evaluate Act of Valor in the usual cinematic context is to misunderstand certain rules of engagement, for this is less a movie than a brand advertisement for a US military that’s lately suffered a few dents to its reputational armour. Directors Scott Waugh and Mike McCoy use a standard-issue terrorism story, populated by a […]

Whereas the first Ghost Rider was a gloomy, inert slog weighed down by the demands of establishing the lead character’s backstory, the follow-up refuses to tether itself to any kind of narrative or logic. The story, such as it is, places Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage) in Eastern Europe, where he and his flaming-skeleton alter ego […]

Early on in this tepid romantic drama, Channing Tatum’s college-quarterback voice elucidates the theory that major moments in life can shape one’s identity. No shit. The Vow isn’t deep enough to drown an ant, but it aims to submerge audiences in their own tears with its story of an artist (Rachel McAdams) who can’t remember […]

Chronicle unfurls from the perspective of cameras wielded in jittery fashion by its characters, an increasingly tiresome conceit that adds nothing to a film whose true ancestor is Carrie, not The Blair Witch Project. Three teenaged guys get zapped into unconsciousness by a mysterious entity and wake up with the ability to move objects with […]

Befitting its namesake, Joe Carnahan’s grim survival movie lands in that vast, murky area between brilliant and terrible, its moments of transcendence balanced by glaring weaknesses. Liam Neeson plays a lovesick alpha male among a group of men who live through a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness only to face the elements and a […]

The last time Steven Soderbergh coloured outside the lines with his casting of a female lead was in The Girlfriend Experience, when he unleashed the vacant stare of petite porn star Sasha Grey. Mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano is an entirely different specimen and produces much better results as the star of Haywire, playing […]

This Mark Wahlberg vehicle is the celluloid version of a fast food burger, utterly unremarkable and yet comforting in its familiarity. Wahlberg plays a reformed smuggler who’s forced to get back into shady boat business after his brother-in-law (Caleb Landry Jones) botches a run and is threatened by a vicious crime boss (Giovanni Ribisi). The […]

Chaste romances, churchy speechifying, gospel-ized pop songs and surprising weirdness abound Joyful Noise, a movie wherein Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton grapple over the direction of their competitive choir group as well as their respective families. Writer-director Todd Graff loads the film with subplots, like the forbidden love between Latifah’s daughter and Parton’s grandson, that […]