Movie review by Greg Carlson In one of the best jokes in “Midnight in Paris,” time-traveling romantic Gil (Owen Wilson) suggests a future plot to budding filmmaker Luis Bunuel decades before “The Exterminating Angel.” Confused by the premise, Bunuel repeatedly claims he does not understand why the dinner guests can’t just leave. Speaking slyly to […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson A calculated effort to rejuvenate and rethink a once hot franchise for Marvel, 20th Century Fox, and their partners, “X-Men: First Class” embraces the Silver Age origins of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s misunderstood mutants via its smoothly designed period setting. Rewinding the clock to JFK’s 1962 Camelot nightmare, a […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson The logical extension of fast food fable “Super Size Me,” Morgan Spurlock’s “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” – or more precisely, “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” – affably, jokingly, and breezily follows the moviemaker/media personality on a manufactured meta-quest to create a “documentary” about product placement entirely […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Francois Ozon’s broad – miles-wide broad – “Potiche” showcases the considerable talents of the treasured Catherine Deneuve. The iconic actress, whose career stretches back to the 1950s, has appeared in more than 100 movies, and has been directed by auteurs like Roman Polanski, Luis Bunuel, Francois Truffaut, and Lars von […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson The most memorable scene in Xavier Beauvois’s “Of Gods and Men,” a symbolic “Last Supper” during which a group of doomed monks sips wine and listens to “Swan Lake” as tears well in their eyes, is representative of the polarizing qualities of the movie. The painfully earnest tableau, as protracted […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Arriving roughly one year after the similarly themed “Kick-Ass,” “Super” continues the practice of aggressively self-aware mash-ups attempting to both satirize some aspects of comic book culture and wallow in the shocking violence that happens when an average citizen elects to pull on a costume and mask. “Kick-Ass” creator Mark […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Both perverse and perversely funny, Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Dogtooth” provides the curious viewer with a singular and all but impossible-to-forget experience. With each of its meticulously composed frames, the movie announces an ambitious technical agenda, matched shot for shot by an imaginative story often read as a kind of cautionary tale […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson The oft-filmed “Jane Eyre,” which has been treated cinematically since at least 1910, tells a tale so compelling and romantic that very little time passes between productions. It has been only five years since Susanna White’s four-episode Masterpiece Theater edition, but filmmaker Cary Fukunaga, whose Mara Salvatrucha-focused feature debut “Sin […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Stiff, sober, and fastidious to the brink of suffocation, Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator” recounts the trial of accused Lincoln assassination abettor Mary Surratt, whose boarding house frequently entertained Confederate sympathizers. Presented as a grave and airless history lesson, far too much time is spent in the stifling makeshift courtroom where […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson To call “Hanna” superior to “Sucker Punch” is to damn it with faint praise, though both movies use young females as agents of death, and mean to thrill viewers at the sight of much onscreen mayhem and hand-to-hand combat. The otherwise innocent heroines who headline these features walk the tightrope […]