Perhaps funded and distributed on the promise of Christina Ricci in her skivvies and less, After.Life is weirdly compelling for such a marginal movie. Its premise is a little coy, toying with the expectations of audiences that have had their fill, lately, of stories with characters caught in some strange limbo between living and dying where they work out the psychological issues that hectored them in the real world.

When Django, the title character and hero of director Sergio Corbucci's seminal spaghetti western, first appears on screen, he's slogging on foot through mud, dragging a coffin behind him. The image is evocative and challenging. In classic American films, western heroes had generally been dignified cowboy types saddled up on strong horses. They were lawmen or simple ranchers with a code of honor. They rode into town in a cloud of dust and plainspoken righteousness backed up by a sharp eye and a six-shooter, and they stood for the endurance of traditional values on a wild frontier.

Django thinks those guys were pussies.

Read the full review at FilmFreakCentral.

My review of The White Ribbon is online at www.filmfreakcentral.net:

The White Ribbon is executed at an incredibly high level of craft and with an off-putting degree of self-confidence. While it is, at times, a movie of preternatural beauty, Haneke is confident that he's shining a light into the dark corners of recent human history, and he comes on like a preacher reading from the Book of Revelation.

This 1971 Shaw Brothers martial-arts flick is definitely full of action — energetic camerawork, gallons of stage blood, and a widescreen frame full of gracefully choreographed movement on the part of dozens of performers wielding an impressive variety of weapons all contribute to the film's sense of urgent forward motion.

I review Clash of the TItans (the golden oldie, not the screwy newie) on Blu-ray Disc at FilmFreakCentral.net:

Clash of the Titans saw Ray Harryhausen's special-effects efforts reach a technical apex, with his glowering, snake-haired Medusa and smoothly articulated Pegasus winning deserved plaudits. But the old-fashioned filmmaking style felt dated at the time—consider that this po-faced sword-and-sandals adventure arrived in theaters on the same day as Raiders of the Lost Ark and you'll get an idea of the magnitude of this unfailingly earnest film's crisis in tone—and it proved to be Harryhausen's swan song.

My review of Broken Embraces is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

The box describes Broken Embraces as an "acclaimed tale of sex, secrets and cinema," which makes me go, "Uh-oh." Pedro Almodóvar reliably delivers heady blends of glamour, melodrama, and emotional turmoil, but such stuff still runs hot and cold from movie to movie. So although I liked his Bad Education, a film that was all about "sex, secrets and cinema," the prospect of Almodóvar returning to the tortured-filmmaker well filled me with trepidation.

My review of It Might Get Loud is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

The Edge represents something especially modern in rock-and-roll: the idea of the guitarist as pure technician. A great riff for him isn't so much a combination of notes as a combination of noises -- harmonics, distortion, wah-wah modulation, an echoed din chiming out into infinity like church bells in the Grand Canyon. The guitar itself is just an input device; the pealing tones and rhythms are created elsewhere.

My review of Moon is online at FilmFreakCentral:

Paying homage to the science-fiction films of his youth, where space-base bulkheads and otherworldly landscapes were more likely to be styrofoam than CG, story writer and director Duncan Jones's debut feature, Moon, is a surprisingly effective—even moving—story of isolation and alienation on the lunar surface.

Evil-but-gullible emo band's attempted "virgin sacrifice" turns promiscuous teenager into demon-possessed cannibal. It's up to her nerdy best friend to keep the sexiest high-schooler in Devil's Kettle from eating her way through senior class.

That's a fairly straightforward synopsis of Jennifer's Body, screenwriter Diablo Cody's much-hyped follow-up to Juno, directed by Karyn Kusama and just out on DVD and Blu-ray Disc. It sounds like a terrific idea for a comic horror movie, turning adolescent sexual insecurity into the stuff of nightmares, and it is pretty smart conceptually. Cast as the titular Jennifer, a sarcastic, wisecracking bombshell of a flag girl, Megan Fox acquits herself beyond the Maxim-girl status bestowed on her by the Transformers movies, turning in a fairly competent performance that progresses credibly from her character's more human presence in the film's opening scenes to the colder succubus she becomes. And Amanda Seyfried, all gasps and big eyes, makes a terrific mostly passive protagonist for the yarn, taking Jennifer's transformation in from a not-so-safe distance.

It doesn't do much, but what it does? Does it well. Made on a minimal budget, with a single high-definition video camera, a handful of actors, and some very careful sound design (by ace mixer Mark Binder, brought onto the project by Paramount after subsidiary DreamWorks picked it up for release), Paranormal Activity purports to document a few weeks in the nighttime life of Katie Featherston, a young woman whose world is being haunted by a demon. Shot entirely vérité style, either on a tripod or handheld by Katie's boyfriend, Micah, the movie shows the couple coping with weird noises in their house, consulting a psychic, considering the pros and cons of ouija boards, etc., as the frequency and intensity of sleep-disrupting otherwordly activity increases.

More of an exercise in narrative gamesmanship than an actual thriller, A Perfect Getaway pretty much douses its first half's methodical build-up of suspense with its second half's bucket of contrivance. That's not to say it isn't a lot of fun -- it is, with a sly sense of humor and sharp dialogue that makes clever, reflexive reference to the characters' presence in a comic whodunit. ("He's really hard to kill," declares one, doting lovingly on her boyfriend, who may or may not be half of a couples serial-killing team.)

My review of The Sopranos: The Complete First Season on Blu-ray Disc is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

In later seasons, The Sopranos would too often threaten to disappear up creator David Chase's asshole as he ruminated, sometimes vigorously, sometimes ponderously, on the mysteries of American family life. But the first season has none of that leisure, expertly modulating stretches of comedy and drama en route to those crucial moments that leave you gasping.

The new Blu-ray Disc (BD) version of Up — released on the same day as the BD of director Pete Docter's debut effort, Monsters, Inc. — is a revelation in at least one regard: it demonstrates that 2D is better.

Not sure why it took me so long to get around to this, given my long-standing admiration for Polanski's wonderfully lurid Rosemary's Baby. Based on Repulsion's reputation as a dark psychological thriller, I wasn't expecting it to work so efficiently as a straight-up horror movie — perhaps that classification is another case of conventional wisdom classing up an especially well-respected film by lifting it out of the genre ghetto.

Over the course of the two years that it sat on the shelf following a planned-but-aborted fall 2007 theatrical release, the Halloween-themed anthology film Trick 'R Treat was embraced by genre fans who caught it at festivals and other special screenings starting that December. I think I can see what captured their sick little hearts — in an era when the state-of-the-art in popular horror films is split between the practiced cruelty and borderline hostility of neo-gore exercises like the Saw and Hostel franchises and the incidental soullessness of Friday the 13th and Last House on the Left remakes, this film, in its straightforward, low-concept fright-mongering, feels downright fresh. In fact, except for a couple of gratuitous tit shots, Trick 'R Treat is earnest, uncynical, and nearly wholesome. What it's not — and it pains me to say this — is very much good.

My review of Stop Making Sense on Blu-ray Disc is online at Filmfreakcentral.net:

It's not simply that the on-stage enthusiasm is infectious, but that something special is coming up: the room is about to be blitzed by one of the world's greatest live bands in polyrhythmic rock-and-roll mode.

They say all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. But if you've got a girl and a killer robot, then you're really onto something. One of the joys of low-budget horror movies is that the stakes are low enough that filmmakers can get away with a lot of crazy shit, and there's crazy shit aplenty in Hardware, the post-apocalyptic SF/horror feature debut of South African director Richard Stanley. The film takes its visual and thematic cues from Alien and Blade Runner, with a few ideas from The Terminator and Demon Seed thrown into the mix. But when you boil it down, Hardware is just a gritty, crudely fashioned cyberpunk monster movie. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, boy do you need to see this.

My review of Obsessed is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

When Hollywood types assimilate exploitation tropes and tactics, they start concocting films like Obsessed, in which Skinny White Bitch Ali Larter runs seriously afoul of Virtuous Black Woman Beyoncé Knowles by throwing herself at Good Husband Idris Elba. In fact, Obsessed is less a movie than it is a marketing plan, calculated to snare audiences entranced by its whiff of sex, celebrity, and dysfunctional race relations.

I'm a little late to the Play Time party, having sampled and abandoned Jacques Tati on Criterion laserdisc way back when, finding his work to require, I guess, more patience than I had back in my college years. But Play Time is new on Blu-ray, transferred from a recent HD remaster of Tati's 70mm comedy of modern manners that has it looking better than it ever will outside of a movie theater, and it's clearly a singular achievement. In an essay accompanying the disc, Jonathan Rosenbaum outright disses the whole idea of watching Play Time on TV, arguing that because public space is the film's very subject, it's also the most appropriate setting for its exhibition. (The film was probably never going to be a tremendous popular success, but Tati limited its commercial prospects by insisting that its initial engagements in France take place only in 70mm.) I missed that boat — there was a restored 70mm print playing in New York a few years back — but this Blu-ray Disc and a decent screen will at least allow a viewer to imagine what it must look like on a proper screen, and in that it's highly recommended.

My review of Starman on Blu-ray Disc is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

Strange as it may sound, back in the early 1980s this gentle yet seriously weird fantasy about a woman who drives a socially-challenged clone of her dead husband across the U.S. (so he can rendezvous with his spaceship) was actually considered a safe commercial bet for the embattled director John Carpenter. Starman ... wasn't merely an opportunity for Carpenter to helm a fundamentally good-natured, optimistic science-fiction film--it was possibly a chance to rehabilitate his career.

So you think you might be interested in Dollhouse, the Joss Whedon-created series about human drones programmed with disposable serial personalities by a shady underground organization dedicated to fulfilling the most precious needs and desires of the very rich. The first thing you need to know is that it's gonna take a while.

I've totally reviewed Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience for Film Freak Central.

In their cutesy, aw-shucks hijinks offstage, these kids may ape The Beatles, who represented the beginning of the modern rock era, but it's quite possible that the Jonas Brothers represent the tail-end of rock culture. Delivered into the homes of America via cable-TV, they are a group of squeaky-clean, enthusiastically unthreatening, market-focused popsters, their surname so synonymous with state-of-the-art fun that the name above the title is Walt Disney's.

My review of The Deep on Blu-ray Disc is online at FilmFreakCentral.net.

Even today, after years of documentary camerawork in HD have made stunning nature photography seem almost de rigueur, there's a startling beauty to some of these images, like the vivid two-shot seen underneath the opening credits in which an improbably expressive spiky fish looks quite pleased to share screen space with co-star Jacqueline Bisset.

My review of Passengers is online at filmfreakcentral.net:

Even if you haven't read the jacket promo copy, you'll suspect Passengers is up to some kind of supernatural wish-fulfillment from its first few minutes, as a slumbering Anne Hathaway is awakened on a rainy night by a phone call from a colleague who tells her something terrible has happened requiring her presence at a nearby hospital. It's not just that Hathaway plays Dr. Claire Summers, a therapist charged with helping a group of plane-crash survivors cope with their near-death experiences and the accompanying trauma—it's that the chilly, insistently otherworldly production design strongly implies something strange (but comforting, very comforting) is going on, too.

My review of True Blood: The Complete First Season is online at FilmFreakCentral.net.

There's something refreshing about True Blood, a show that approaches the idea of loving the undead with healthy helpings of humour, viscera, eroticism, and subtext. The tongue-in-cheek storytelling and routinely bloody tableaux aren't especially remarkable, but True Blood is pretty packed with sex, even by HBO's standards. Over the course of True Blood's first 12 episodes, we learn that Bon Temps, Louisiana, and environs are home to not just a handsome Civil War vampire but also a plucky telepathic waitress and a shapechanging bartender, as well as assorted "fangbangers" (humans with a thing for screwing vampires) and addicts in thrall to V juice, the street term underscoring the intoxicating, potency-enhancing effects vampires' blood has on humans.

My review of I've Love You So Long is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

Even in stillness and silence, Kristin Scott Thomas manages to exude a great sadness; and sadness is what I've Loved You So Long is all about .... But if there's a lot to look at along the way, the film holds few genuine surprises.

My review of Blue Streak on Blu-ray Disc is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

This is a rags-to-riches story where the riches are the power and privilege conferred on a working-class black man by the presence of a badge.

Released in 1984, this widescreen actionfest/drug-addiction drama was the final film of only three directed by longtime action choreographer Tang Chia — and one of the last films ever released by the legendary Shaw Brothers movie studio, which in its heyday made dozens of movies every year but by this time was struggling to keep up with the popular trends ushered in by Bruce Lee and expanded upon by Jackie Chan and friends.

My review of Star Wars: The Clone Wars is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

Anyone over the age of 12 will quickly detect the distinctly secondhand elements comprised by Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a journey into George Lucas' ever-dorkier galaxy far, far away that panders relentlessly to the tween demographic so prized by the Lucasfilm empire. This is clearly a Star Wars movie, borrowing design elements, stylistic tropes, and even specific camera angles and editorial strategies from the live-action films. But the kid-friendly strategies sink it—even the Knights of the Old Republic videogame is a more rewarding endeavour.

There's a tension in Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure between the subject matter--the torture and humiliation of inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad during the U.S. occupation of Iraq--and what Morris is really up to. Anyone who's read his excellent "Zoom" blog for The New York Times, including his brilliant, three-part consideration of the pedigree of two different photographs taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War, knows that the director is concerned lately with the methodical, emotionless investigation of the circumstances surrounding a picture's taking. He wants to know what a photo conceals in addition to what it reveals--what's happening outside its spatial frame? Its temporal boundaries?

I wanted to look at the new Blu-ray Disc release of Story of O (out this week from the Canadian company Somerville House) for two reasons. First, I'm interested in what happens to obscure and cult films as they make their way to the new high-definition formats, and this French sexploitation drama from the mid-1970s certainly qualifies. Second, I know that while Story of O has some kind of literary pedigree (a sort of de Sade pastiche written under the pen name Pauline Réage, the novel broke significant ground for erotic fiction as well as bondage fetishists), the film version in particular has long been a pervy grail of softcore cinema -- knowledgable viewers of a certain sexual inclination find this mix of epic skin flick, softcore potboiler, and S&M psychodrama to be in a class of its own.

My review of Zombie Strippers is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

It's so dreadful, in fact, that I may be underrating it in at least one respect: Zombie Strippers! actually gives the early-1980s sci-fi porn flick Café Flesh a run for its money as the most joyless, nigh despairing movie about sexual arousal in film history.

My review of Can't Hardly Wait on Blu-ray Disc is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

Can't Hardly Wait deals in a shameless, sunny-eyed idealism that prizes sincerity and explicitly privileges the notion of true love; the spirit of Wim Wenders even touches the film as, in one spectacularly sweet vignette, a bikini-clad angel (Jenna Elfman, in a terrific uncredited cameo) touches down outside a neon-lit diner to dispense some hard-won advice to the broken-hearted protagonist. In short, we're a long way yet from the crass, porn-inflected attitudes of Superbad

My review of Starship Troopers 3: Marauder on Blu-ray Disc is online at FilmFreakCentral.net

Over the course of Starship Troopers 3, the human government's position on religion evolves from wary tolerance (because the more pious citizens tend to oppose the war) to outright enthusiasm, once the military manages to conflate aggression and holiness in the public mind. "God's back," declares a government mouthpiece at film's end, "and He's a citizen, too!"

First, the obvious. Made of Honor is what's generally known as a "chick flick." I'm not totally comfortable deploying that term, especially in its usual derogatory, casually-sexist usage--but in a purely descriptive and possibly cynical sense, that's what we have here. It's a love story, featuring a conventionally handsome leading man (Patrick Dempsey) playing opposite a conventionally pretty woman (Michelle Monaghan) whose character is engaged to marry the conventionally wrong guy (blond Scot Kevin McKidd). It's directed by a man (Paul Weiland), although to its credit there is a woman prominently involved (co-writer Deborah Kaplan), and it's designed from the bottom up to appeal to undemanding female filmgoers.

My review of The Counterfeiters [on Blu-ray Disc] is online over at Filmfreakcentral.net.

This year's winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) is defined in equal terms by what it is and what it isn't. It is a Holocaust survivor's yarn told with a certain playfulness and no lack of moral consideration, but it is not really a concentration-camp movie; mostly, it feels like a prison caper yarn that happens to take place in Sachsenhausen. The film's weight comes from the things we know about but cannot see within the frame: those haunting images of emaciated Jews, the walking-dead stares of the prisoners consigned to the gas chambers and crematoria, the tragedy of systematic genocide.

My review of Felon on Blu-ray Disc is online at filmfreakcentral.net:

If Jeffrey Lebowski had made a few wrong turns in life--if, let's say, he had brutally murdered some very bad men, as well as their families--he may have turned out not entirely unlike John Smith, the hulkingly mellow convict played by a moustachioed, goateed Val Kilmer in Felon. Judging from the wide berth the rest of the inmates give him, Smith is known as the silent-but-deadly type. Kilmer plays him from behind a whole bunch of prison tattoos with a steely glare, but also with a kind of openness that doesn't immediately compute. Although he's tagged as a sociopath, he's really just the opposite. He believes in justice, and he longs for the death sentence he feels his crimes deserve.