Movie review by Greg Carlson Writer-director Jeff Nichols follows his arresting and much admired “Take Shelter” with “Mud,” a Southern Gothic-tinted, Arkansas bildungsroman indebted to hallmarks including “Tom Sawyer,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Night of the Hunter.” “Mud” is nowhere near as good as those titles, but the movie’s unhurried pace and detailed […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” receives its fourth theatrical feature adaptation (for whatever reason, the forgotten 2005 “G” is not included on that list) along with the Baz Luhrmann treatment, an expectedly anachronistic bricolage that marginally improves on the somnolence of the 1974 version directed by Jack Clayton. Mostly […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson WARNING: The following review reveals key plot information. Read only if you have seen “Trance.” The recently released “Oblivion” made the error of using Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” as an artificial stand-in for desired psychological depth that failed to materialize. In Danny Boyle’s “Trance,” a similar tactic is employed via […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson WARNING: The following review reveals key plot information. Read only if you have seen “Oblivion.” Director Joseph Kosinski, working from his own currently unpublished graphic novel, borrows from so many science fiction texts that genre fans might well pass the unsustainable running time of “Oblivion” tallying the allusions. From any […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson WARNING: The following review reveals key plot information. Read only if you have seen “The Place Beyond the Pines.” Derek Cianfrance trades the time-jumping, one-on-one marital discord of “Blue Valentine” for the more determined triptych of “The Place Beyond the Pines,” an expectedly moody and atmospheric examination of paternal failure […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson The mixed reviews that have followed the near inevitable accounts of film festival boos and cheers for Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder” report that the prestige filmmaker has paddled even deeper into the sea of idiosyncratic cinematic storytelling marked by the obscurity and inscrutability of deliberately withheld information and violations […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Any film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” would have a tough time living up to the unrealistic expectations ascribed to the cult book, and Walter Salles’ decent effort at least stays between the ditches. Neither an embarrassing letdown nor a transcendent prize, the movie – much like Salles’ […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Following a small avalanche of conspiracy theories that explore, among other things, Native American genocide, the bureaucracy of the Holocaust, the myth of the Minotaur, and a faked Apollo 11 moon landing, one of the interview subjects in the delightful “Room 237” addresses what is perhaps documentarian Rodney Ascher’s central […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Hard to believe that Harmony Korine, the puckish provocateur who counts among his influences Cassavetes, Herzog, Lynch, Malick, and von Trier, is already forty years of age. At the time not much older than the members of the doom generation culture he depicted when his screenplay for Larry Clark’s “Kids” […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Fleet, confident, and cognizant of its genre obligations, “The Call” is a surprisingly effective white-knuckle kidnapping thriller. Showcasing Halle Berry in what seems like her first decent role in ages, director Brad Anderson’s nerve-rattling exercise in split-second decision making owes its most significant debts to Alfred Hitchcock, who might have […]