Movie review by Greg Carlson Young writer-director Rian Johnson’s “Brick” is one of the year’s must-see movies for cinephiles, a love-it-or-hate-it homage to classic film noir, complete with fussy dialogue sprinkled with period allusions and plot points virtually lifted from Hammett and Chandler. The source of the movie’s considerable attention – it won a special […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Terry Zwigoff has cultivated a decent career as a filmmaker profiling the disaffected and trolling the margins for the offbeat and the outcast. The same could be said about the graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, whose stories of desperation and depression resonate with a bittersweet nostalgia for better (or at least […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson A pleasant, amiable assemblage of many of the best things about Garrison Keillor’s long-running radio series, “A Prairie Home Companion” is almost certain to do better than average business in Upper Midwestern markets. Under the direction of the legendary Robert Altman, the movie version of the show glides back and […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Despite two solid performances, “Hard Candy” is a thoroughly unlikable, nearly unwatchable exercise in unpleasantness. Presented initially as a thoughtful examination of online luring, the film rapidly disintegrates into a sensationalized cat-and-mouse shocker no different from dozens of equally empty-headed revenge scenarios. Positing a grisly “what if?” fantasy that turns […]