Movie review by Greg Carlson Was there any doubt that “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” was going to be a terrible movie? Dumped in the January wilderness reserved for the weakest cinematic product, Scandinavian filmmaker Tommy Wirkola’s busy spin on the Brothers Grimm ejects most of the folktale’s ideas of interest. Surprisingly, Wirkola finds no […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson For those willing to accept the often blunt beauty-and-the-beast theme that has been a go-to story device far longer than the movies have been around, Jacques Audiard’s “Rust and Bone” can be as bracing as the ocean swim taken by Marion Cotillard’s Stephanie, a Cote d’Azur marine park killer whale […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson Residing somewhere inside the cacophony of the debate over whether Kathryn Bigelow’s harrowing “Zero Dark Thirty” legitimately “endorses” torture is one of the most elementary functions of drama: the depiction of a thing does not necessarily indicate the dramatist’s affirmation of that thing. In the Theban trio, Sophocles sought to […]

Movie review by Greg Carlson A troubled, manipulative disaster spectacle with a problematic point-of-view, “The Impossible” imagines the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake through the eyes of a wealthy white family whose Christmas vacation is interrupted by a horrific natural catastrophe that would become – based on total lives lost – the worst tsunami in recorded […]