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  • Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay
    Year: 
    2008
    Director: 
    Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossburg
    Cast: 
    John Cho, Kal Penn, Rob Corddry, and Neil Patrick Harris
    Rating: 
    C+
    Reviewed by: 
    David Holmes

    Amid all the fart jokes, tired racial observations, topless women, and bottomless men are some brilliantly-staged sequences that really get to the heart of America's supposed "War on Terror" - it's just a pity that in this outing Harold and Kumar falls into many of the same sterotypical traps it tries so hard to rally against.

  • Forgetting Sarah Marshall
    Year: 
    2008
    Director: 
    Nicholas Stoller
    Cast: 
    Jason Segel, Kristin Bell, Mila Kunis, and Russell Brand
    Rating: 
    B+
    Reviewed by: 
    David Holmes

    Within the first five minutes of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Jason Segel is seen fully and frontally nude, sobbing like a giant hormonal polar bear who’s lost just her cub. Yep, we're in Apatow territory, David Holmes explores...

  • [Rec]
    Year: 
    2008
    Director: 
    Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza
    Cast: 
    Manuela Velasco, Javier Botet, Ferran Terraza, Claudia Font
    Rating: 
    B+
    Reviewed by: 
    Paolo Cabrelli
    This Spanish zombie flick offers nothing new - it's the same old scream, bite and infect narrative - but is constructed with such vitality and pace that it soon becomes a rare and mesmerising slaughterfest. Unlike many of the recent first-person perspective films, [Rec] offers an authentic panic and terror to the unfolding events. For a short, sharp shock to the system, don't look any further than this scintillating movie...
  • In Bruges
    Year: 
    2008
    Director: 
    Martin McDonagh
    Cast: 
    Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and Ralph Fiennes
    Rating: 
    B+
    Reviewed by: 
    David Holmes

    Playwright turned director Martin McDonagh makes his debut with this dark, murderous comedy. Despite being pitched to the masses as a knockabaout gagfest, every outburst of laughter and jubilation serves only to distract the characters from the sense that death (either their own or an adversary's) could be around every corner.

  • Teeth
    Year: 
    2008
    Director: 
    Mitchell Lichtenstein
    Cast: 
    Hale Appleman, John Hensley, Ashley Springer, Lenny von Dohlen, Jess Wexler
    Rating: 
    B
    Reviewed by: 
    Ethan Robinson

    Our reviewer has been excited by Teeth for quite a while now. It’s just such a great concept — reclaiming the vagina dentata! So much possibility! So much expectation. So much pressure to love the damn thing. Ethan Robinson is prepared to be dazzled...

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  • Scenery Bum: Mitchum and the Movies
    Writer: 
    Laavanyan Ratnapalan

    The heavy-lidded, lusty lipped drawl of Robert Mitchum is one of cinema's indelible memories. A non-conforminst, a natural performer and one of the finest and most engrossing screen actors to croon a line of dialogue, Laavanyan Ratnapalan looks back at a career of transient genius and a man of escapable charms. 

  • 'U2 3D' Not the First IMAX Art Film: An Interview with Elka Krajewska
    Writer: 
    Nancy Keefe Rhodes

    Nancy Keefe Rhodes interviews the New York City based film maker about her rule-breaking new film Plany Mela, screened at the 4th Syracuse International Film Festival. The experimental form, mixed with live performance, shows that there's an interesting future for the giant screen.

  • Dead Time: Embalming Romero's Classic
    Writer: 
    Laavanyan Ratnapalan

    For a work that has been lauded for its subversion of life in 1960s America, the technical aspects of its production affirm the merits of the society that it is held to subvert. A less flexible country and period would most likely not have permitted the creation of Night of the Living Dead. Laavanyan Ratnapalan reads Romero's classic in context.

  • Stop Making Sense Vs The Last Waltz
    Writer: 
    David Holmes

    When the coke-dust settles and the bodies are swept from the battlefield, will Jonathon Demme’s exhilarating take on the Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues tour reign victorious? Or is it no match for the cultural zeitgeist of Martin Scorsese’s elegiac chronicle of The Band’s final performance? Only one way to find out…

  • Vanishing Point: 70s Directors Today
    Writer: 
    Paolo Cabrelli
    The Last Picture Show There are a good many filmmakers from the 70s who were unable to drag themselves out of the decade intact, some unable to reach beyond a single success, some inexplicably out of luck or ideas, and many exploring the outskirts of the industry for the last three decades in a state of bemusement. The 70s may have been home to some of the most lucid, lurid and vociferous figures in the history of film but it was also a rickety platform for some of the most unsustainably enigmatic.
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