Movie review by Greg Carlson Todd Phillips, the writer-director whose perpetual fixation with all things (academics excepted) collegiate has served him from the documentary “Frat House” to the surprisingly funny “Road Trip,” takes another run at it with “Old School,” a mildly entertaining comedy with some unfortunately lengthy stretches in between the laughs. Based on […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Aglow with the recent surprise Academy Award nomination for its masterful director Pedro Almodovar, “Talk to Her” finds itself immediately in the front rank of the Spanish filmmaker’s impressive list of credits. With “Talk to Her,” Almodovar has topped his excellent “All About My Mother” (1999) and perhaps drawn even […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson At its best, Stephen Daldry’s screen version of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Hours” is a cinematic tour de force – a delicately handled meditation on those elusive, solitary Woolf-ian intelligences that resist even adequate treatment in the cinematic format. At its worst, the movie is an operatic muddle […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson With “The Pianist,” master filmmaker Roman Polanski delivers one of his most engaging and fully realized movies in ages. An uncompromising, unsentimental adaptation of concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoir of surviving the Holocaust, “The Pianist” affords Polanski an opportunity to explore some of what one imagines are the most painful […]