Movie review by Greg Carlson Comic journeys in which out-of-touch yuppies follow their bliss are many in number, and often trace their roots to Hy Averback’s 1968 “I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!,” a groovy Peter Sellers vehicle penned by Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker in which an uptight lawyer falls under the spell of […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson We are less than two months into the new year and “Chronicle” isn’t even the first movie to feature the gimmick suggesting that its entire story was compiled from found material shot by characters on personal camcorders and supplemented by news footage and security tapes. That dubious distinction belongs to […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Frustratingly coy and belligerently reductivist, Steven Soderbergh’s “Haywire” cooks up a story that plays to the strengths of mixed martial artist/American Gladiator Gina Carano. Parallel to the employment of Sasha Grey in “The Girlfriend Experience,” Soderbergh’s selection of Carano in the lead role laces his movie with a sense of […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Waterlogged with the worst clichés of the biopic, not even a committed act of Meryl Streep’s vaunted mimicry can buoy “The Iron Lady.” Skittering over the highlights of Margaret Thatcher’s political career without ever stopping to take intellectual stock of the historical details that undoubtedly required tremendous thought, concentration, and […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson The pre-eminent cinematic chronicler of his country’s history, Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman artfully revisits one of his guiding motifs in “Nostalgia for the Light,” one of the finest documentaries to make its way to United States viewers in 2011. Guzman’s oeuvre has been dominated by reflections on the 1973 Pinochet […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson The family of British playwright Andrea Dunbar is the subject of Clio Barnard’s exceptional cinematic study “The Arbor,” an engrossing piece of creative nonfiction that combines the objectively reported and the imaginatively rearranged with a level of confidence and skill seldom applied to after-the-fact restaging associated with docufiction and docudrama. […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Composed of vivid 16mm film footage culled from dozens of hours of material that had been lying dormant in Sveriges TV (Sweden’s Television, a national multi-channel public broadcasting station), “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975” functions like a time capsule, teleporting viewers into the midst of America’s urban social chaos in […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Bad movies set in Hawaii vastly outnumber good ones. Elvis, Gidget, Charlie Chan, Ma and Pa Kettle, and the Brady Bunch have used the idyllic location as a stunning backdrop. Adam Sandler went there for “50 First Dates” and returned recently for the putrid “Just Go with It.” For every […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Perpetual provocateur Lars von Trier shares one of his least overtly “disobedient” stories in years with “Melancholia,” a visionary end-of-the-world disaster drama laced with a puckish streak of black comedy. Unlike controversial lightning rod “Antichrist,” the majority of the bile directed to “Melancholia” came not as a result of what […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Eerie and unsettling, Sean Durkin’s feature film debut “Martha Marcy May Marlene” addresses the psychological aftermath of one young woman’s experience with a violent and sexually and emotionally abusive Charles Manson-like cult/commune. A carefully studied landscape of disorientation and mental transience, the movie sidesteps the sub-genre’s tendency to construct a […]