Movie review by Greg Carlson A measured memento mori coiled with the director’s signature refusal to indicate any absolute moral transparency, Michael Haneke’s “Amour” meticulously chronicles the physical decline of an octogenarian music teacher whose gradual slide into end-of-life helplessness is witnessed and attended to by her husband. Confining the action almost entirely to the […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson WARNING: The following review reveals key plot information. Read only if you have seen “Side Effects.” The politics of Big Pharma front a wicked, sleazy homage to psychosexual thrillers in Steven Soderbergh’s smartypants divertissement “Side Effects,” an enjoyable genre workout that gleefully mashes up Alfred Hitchcock and Joe Eszterhas without […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Jonathan Levine’s adaptation of Isaac Marion’s novel “Warm Bodies” endeavors to resurrect the durable zombie genre as a kinder, gentler post-apocalypse by injecting into the proceedings the seldom-used but not entirely novel device of romance. Pulse-crossed love hints at a sorta kinda “Romeo and Juliet” attraction between an undead flesh-eater […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Was there any doubt that “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” was going to be a terrible movie? Dumped in the January wilderness reserved for the weakest cinematic product, Scandinavian filmmaker Tommy Wirkola’s busy spin on the Brothers Grimm ejects most of the folktale’s ideas of interest. Surprisingly, Wirkola finds no […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson For those willing to accept the often blunt beauty-and-the-beast theme that has been a go-to story device far longer than the movies have been around, Jacques Audiard’s “Rust and Bone” can be as bracing as the ocean swim taken by Marion Cotillard’s Stephanie, a Cote d’Azur marine park killer whale […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Residing somewhere inside the cacophony of the debate over whether Kathryn Bigelow’s harrowing “Zero Dark Thirty” legitimately “endorses” torture is one of the most elementary functions of drama: the depiction of a thing does not necessarily indicate the dramatist’s affirmation of that thing. In the Theban trio, Sophocles sought to […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson A troubled, manipulative disaster spectacle with a problematic point-of-view, “The Impossible” imagines the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake through the eyes of a wealthy white family whose Christmas vacation is interrupted by a horrific natural catastrophe that would become – based on total lives lost – the worst tsunami in recorded […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson One of the questions nagging David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” as it divides critical opinion like so many of the filmmaker’s previous movies asks whether his adaptation of Matthew Quick’s 2008 novel wallows in the feel-good, romantic movie clichés Russell once (seemingly) rejected. Has Russell, following seven Oscar nominations […]