| Title |
Rating |
|
| 18/05 |
| Dracula (2009) |
|
Interestingly odd attempt to update and relocate Dracula to present-day Hollywood ... has promise despite a low-budget but eventually flounders amid a wholly non-linear story and an entirely confused ending |
| 18/05 |
| A Trip to the Moon (1902) |
½
|
Often misidentified as the first science-fiction film, Georges Melies’s short is a classic comedic whimsy involving comedic exploits on the Lunar surface ... Hardly serious as SF but an undeniably iconic work made with enormous sophistication for the day |
| 17/05 |
| Battleship (2012) |
|
Adaptation of the boardgame that emerges at best as wannabe Michael Bay – imagine Pearl Harbor mashed up with a Transformers film ... Ends up as only a bone-headed glorification of American militarism |
| 16/05 |
| The Extraordinary Voyage (2011) |
|
French documentary made for the recent 150th celebration of Georges Melies’s birthday ... Interesting if never uncovering anything new and disappointingly places far too much focus on A Trip to the Moon and its recent restoration than Melies’s other work |
| 15/05 |
| The Dead (2010) |
½
|
Another zombie film that stands out from shuffling horde by dint of the fact that it takes place in Africa and is a survival horror work that takes itself seriously rather than tongue-in-cheek ... low key but achieves some often haunted effect |
| 14/05 |
| Tarzan of the Apes (1918) |
|
The very first Tarzan film, the silent version starring Elmo Lincoln ... although limited by the technology of the time, this is the most faithful to Edgar Rice Burroughs novel of all the film versions and was made before all the cliches set in |
| 13/05 |
| The Cabin in the Woods (2012) |
½
|
Effort from The Avengers’ Joss Whedon that is less a horror film than a meta-horror film that is constantly deconstructing the genre and subverting its cliches ... a rare genre entry with less visceral impact than it has brains to spare |
| 12/05 |
| The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012) |
|
Amiable effort from England’s Aardman Animations that doesn’t quite scale the heights of their other films but still wheels around with an entertainingly nonsensical charm that is far more enjoyable than most Hollywood competition |
| 11/05 |
| The Raven (2012) |
|
Has the great idea of pitting Edgar Allan Poe against a serial killer imitating his stories but instead produces a desultory murder mystery that has done only the most cursory reading about Poe and is astonishingly ill-informed about the historical period |
| 10/05 |
| Dark Shadows (2012) |
|
Tim Burton’s decade plus slide into mediocrity continues with this comedic update of the cult Gothic soap opera tv series, which is now played at a level of Addams Family cartoonish unseriousness amid overly obvious jokes poked at the 1970s setting |
| 09/05 |
| Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope (2011) |
½
|
Documentary-maker Morgan Spurlock visits the San Diego Comic-Con and follows several attendees but comes away finding surprisingly little to say about the nature of the phenomenon or the fans |
| 08/05 |
| The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec (2010) |
|
Luc Besson adapts a French comic-book – sort of a female version of Tintin – with uneven but generally amiable regard ... emerges to fall somewhere between a mix of Indiana Jones adventure and the quirkness of an Amelie |
| 07/05 |
| Justice League: Doom (2012) |
|
A relative disappointment among the mostly excellent Bruce Timm animated DC superhero films ... offers up far too diagrammatic and dramatically underdeveloped a pitting of each Justice League member with a matching super-villain only to seeming kill them off |
| 05/05 |
| Lockout (2012) |
|
Luc Besson written action-prison film that blatantly borrows from Escape From New York and emerges as an entertaining comic-book of a movie, even if its depth exists no further than Guy Pearce tossing off flip one-liners |
| 04/05 |
| The Avengers (2012) |
|
The culmination of one of the most ambitious cinematic exercises ever conducted, with Marvel weaving storylines through several films to finally emerge here with flawless regard ... indeed, the characters get worked out with better depth here than in almost all of their previous films |
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—Terrible