Movie review by Greg Carlson A somewhat less successful cinematic translation of Kazuo Ishiguro than “The Remains of the Day,” director Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go” duplicates some of the stateliness, formality, and quietude of James Ivory’s 1993 film. While the two Ishiguro stories share tonal similarities, the content of “Never Let Me Go” […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Only the naïve would argue that a single, feature documentary has the necessary platform and scale to effectively tackle an issue as complex and frustrating as the woefully underfunded American public education system, and Davis Guggenheim’s “Waiting for ‘Superman’” has been criticized for the narrowness of its vision, which appears […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Artist Sam Taylor-Wood, whose “Crying Men” project captured tearful shots of famous movie actors, makes her feature motion picture directorial debut with “Nowhere Boy,” a mostly straightforward biographical portrait of the young John Lennon. Many hardcore Beatles disciples might weep at the movie’s wildly speculative attitude, which focuses on the […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Based on a steady, nearly one film per year output, the term “minor Woody Allen movie” classifies a sizable number of titles in the legendary director’s canon. Although Allen currently holds the record for largest number of Academy Award nominations for screenwriting – fourteen if you are keeping track, and […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson The success of “Catfish,” a slippery curiosity described by its creators as a documentary, depends on Universal’s calculated marketing strategy, which begs critics and audience members to avoid spoilers. If you intend to see it and would like to do so without knowing its twists and turns, stop reading now. […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson “Cloverfield” director Matt Reeves respectably re-shoots Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 “Let the Right One In,” the sharp adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s debut novel about the relationship between a bullied boy and the petite vampire who moves in next door. Despite the filmmaker’s claims to the contrary, the Americanized version, re-titled […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin print the legend in “The Social Network,” a sleek and confident imagining of the creation of Facebook. Agile enough to withstand nearly as many readings as there are Facebook users, the film pivots around a cautionary tale of a bright entrepreneur who wagers his soul […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Gordon Gekko’s release from prison, thoroughly documented in the trailer of “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” takes place near the beginning of the film and provides the gag that also serves as the movie’s clearest link between past and present: the return of Gekko’s Motorola DynaTac 8000X, a bulky relic […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Ben Affleck returns to Boston in “The Town,” a generically titled reference to armed bank robbery academy Charlestown, the gentrified neighborhood that tough Irish mobsters once called home. Based on Chuck Hogan’s 2004 novel “Prince of Thieves,” “The Town” swings hard for Fenway’s Green Monster, and its pastiche of blue-collar […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Bleak, laconic and as chilling as its title, “Winter’s Bone” shares a rarely seen snapshot of American poverty and despair in rural Missouri. Based on Daniel Woodrell’s 2006 novel, director Debra Granik’s adaptation exchanges Woodrell’s poetry – which can feel simultaneously sinewy and rawboned – with a more lived-in realism […]