Movie review by Greg Carlson “The Tree of Life,” Terrence Malick’s nearly four-decades gestating cinematic poem, bears much fruit for admirers of the director’s (by turns) meditative, solemn, inscrutable, and prismatic approach to the craft of moviemaking as religious devotion. A two-hour and twenty minute skyscraper of thoughts, dreams, visions, and questions with no answers, […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Spanish director Jose Luis Guerin’s “In the City of Sylvia” encourages, even demands, the close attention of its viewers. With its meticulous framing, unhurried long takes, patient rhythm, and absence of dialogue, the movie rewards only those who concentrate on the talented filmmaker’s painstaking attention to detail. Photographed from the […]

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 […]