Twitter Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
‘Dragon Tattoo’ has a damaged, sharp heroine; compelling depravity; a fair mystery; and no fat. But it’s oddly amorphous and fixated on rape
Foreign-Language Films
Twitter Review: [Rec]
Unlike most monster movies, ‘[Rec]’ builds horror along with chaos. Near the end, it tells when it should hint, but it’s invisibly skillful.
Twitter Review: Dead Snow
Movie-loving ‘Dead Snow’ deals engagingly with undying evil and pointless greed, but the Nazi-zombie trifle is mostly large with intestines.
Best Left Unsolved
While I still don’t really understand the Twitter phenomenon, I’ve loved using the 140-character limit for extreme forced concision. The aim is always to pack these ridiculously short reviews with enough meaning that I don’t feel guilty about never writing more about a particular movie or television show. I would never say that 140 characters is sufficient to discuss much of anything – let alone a feature film – but it’s a great if arbitrary writing exercise: How much can you say within Twitter’s confines? For the most part, I’ve been happy with the results. But with Tell No One, I feel that I need to explain myself.
Twitter Review: Tell No One
Teasing with odd, existential potential, the tight French thriller ‘Tell No One’ sadly picks a worn, logical path. A lovely ending, though.
Twitter Review: A Tale of Two Sisters
‘A Tale of 2 Sisters’ undermines reality to the extent that it’s hard to care. Creepy and full of potent symbolism, I’m baffled not scared.
Twitter Review: Let the Right One in
‘Let the Right One in’ – Tonally coy, it expands on Romero’s ‘Martin,’ crosses it with Poe’s ‘William Wilson,’ and haunts retrospectively.
Twitter Review: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
‘Diving Bell & the Butterfly’ – Aggressive direction overcompensates for decidedly uncinematic material, but it doesn’t matter. Still lovely
Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things
The Orphanage has one indelible image, and that’s plenty. It also has a sly current of grief and healing that hits home mostly on reflection, after cold recognitions and resonances sink in.
The Eyes of Anna
Writer/director Michael Haneke’s 1997 film Funny Games feels like a response to something that hadn’t happened yet. Sure, we’d had Natural Born Killers and other ultra-violent movies, but the fetishism of agony hadn’t yet become a crass trend.
