This is Chris's Movie Reviews Page

Current Reviews:

**** Up (2009)
Up is a beautiful movie. It is funny, occasionally thrilling, visually stunning, fast-paced, and fun. And if you don't get a little teary-eyed during a couple of parts of the movie then you have no human heart.

***½ Drag Me to Hell (2009)
Drag Me to Hell is, thankfully, what you'd expect from the guy who directed the Evil Dead trilogy: It's a horror movie with liberal doses of slapstick comedy thrown in, like a big-budget Evil Dead movie. But unlike Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, this film also ratchets up the horror element; there are parts that are genuinely scary, which you can't really say about the Evil Dead sequels. Drag Me to Hell is funny and scary. It's just a whole metric tonne of fun.

***½ Gran Torino (2008)
Can you imagine what Dirty Harry would be like if he retired? Or the Man With No Name? Or any of the various military/police/cowboy/badass characters that Clint Eastwood has played for the past 40+ years? Could you imagine any of them actually being happy? How could they become anything but a grumpy old man? And that's what we see in Gran Torino: quite possibly the best grumpy old man movie ever.

***½ Star Trek (2009)
The 11th Star Trek movie definitively breaks the odd-number curse (the even-number blessing having already been broken up by Star Trek Nemesis). It's a rip-roaring, slam-bang spectacle of an adventure movie that manages to feel completely contemporary while still feeling very much like a Star Trek adventure.

***½ The Wrestler (2008)
The Wrestler is a wonderful, heart-breaking film that surprisingly raises one of the most important existential questions ever asked. Hard to believe that a movie about a man who puts on tights and gets paid to be beat up could be so profound?

**½ Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
Slumdog Millionaire has some good performances, some good direction, good music, and some very charming scenes (especially in the first half). But Best Picture? Really? For a movie so very deeply flawed?

**** Watchmen (2009)
I saw Watchmen twice before I wrote this review. Why? Because like many people my age, I read the comics on which the movie is based. So the first time I saw the film I automatically found myself comparing it to the source material. They changed that line, they cut out this part, they emphasized that a lot more, etc. The second time I saw it I already knew what it was, so I was able to enjoy it simply for itself and not as an adaptation. It is that 2nd viewing that I now review...

** Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)
This movie got hideously vilified when it was released into theaters, but really there isn't very much that is actively bad in it. It's only real problem was that it should never have been released into theaters to begin with.

***½ Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)
After I saw this film I went around telling everybody that they simply had to go see it. Usually the person to whom I was speaking would hem and haw a little bit. "Well, I never saw the first one."

"Don't worry," I'd reply, "you're not missing much; it wasn't all that good. But Hellboy II is great."

***½ WALL•E (2008)
Why have I been dreading, dreading, dreading writing this review so much that it is now well over six months since I've seen the film? I think maybe it's because WALL•E is really two different movies back-to-back. One of them is some of the most brilliant frames of film ever projected on a screen. The other is wildly uneven, strangely focused, and like a few other recent Pixar films, kind of morally ambiguous.