Holly Grigg-Spall

It's soul crushing to see great comedians on cruise control. Can we reconcile Steve Martin in The Jerk with Steve Martin in Cheaper By The Dozen? Or Richard Pryor's transition from Stir Crazy to Another You. Or Gene Wilder doing the same? How about the Eddie Murphy of Beverly Hills Cop becoming the Eddie Murphy of The Adventures of Pluto Nash?
So it seems with Tina Fey in Date Night. The best ever “Weekend Update” anchor on Saturday Night Live, Fey rose to scripting excellence with Mean Girls before arriving at the genius that is 30 Rock. Yet the disappointing Date Night finds Tina Fey on autopilot. She leaves the writing to Josh Klausner of Shrek the Third (and-only-Shrek the Third) fame and the directing to the sub-mediocre Shawn Levy (Cheaper By The Dozen again).

I went to see this movie with my mother-in-law. Her main complaint was that she had to watch her favorite actor, Greg Kinnear, die.
“If it wasn't Greg Kinnear who died, it wouldn't be so sad,” she explained.
I have to agree – there are many other less-talented actors who I wouldn't have minded watching succumb to cancer on a windswept Georgia beach in the specially formulated Nicholas Sparks copyrighted “death montage,” in which Kinnear leans heavily on his 16-year-old daughter as he climbs the stairs to his house, a dark-eye-circled Kinnear sitting in a deckchair with a plaid blanket over his knees… and so on.

Since writer-director Noah Baumbach came out with The Squid and the Whale five years ago, imitators have have tried to emulate his style. Yet each copy was lighter and smudgier than the last until we finally got handed the hateful Smart People. Not his fault, of course, but it's been annoying nonetheless. With Greenberg, Baumbach picked Ben Stiller, an actor best known lately for the Night at the Museum franchise, to play Roger Greenberg, his self-absorbed slacker protagonist. It's reasonable enough then to be suspicious of how this pairing might pan out given the familiarity we all have with Baumbach's formula.

Funny Games director Michael Haneke's loudly lauded black-and-white drama, The White Ribbon, isn't a film to be enjoyed. It's not exactly a film to be endured, but it is closer to that end of the entertainment spectrum. Bob Dylan once said to a Time magazine reporter who asked if the audience at the concert was entertained by his performance, “Who wants to go get whipped? And if you don't want to go get whipped, then aren't you really being entertained?”
In Funny Games, Haneke questioned the use of violence in films for entertainment, but here he theorizes on the origins of the violence committed by the Nazis. With Funny Games, the director was vocal about how he expected his audience to react – he wanted them to walk out once the child gets shot by the intruders. I read this in an interview after seeing the film, of which I did walk out. I didn't want to be entertained, and he didn't want to entertain me.

How to describe Remember Me? It's this decade's Cruel Intentions. There's the snappy, self-conscious dialogue and the ambitious plotting and the self-important ending. And, oh, what a self-important ending there is. However, it's not as crass as other reviewers will have you believe and certainly not as tasteless as they are righteously suggesting. It's actually darn creatively executed, and if only it had finished just two or three brief scenes earlier it would be just fine, and interesting.
Robert Pattinson plays Tyler, a New-York-bohemian-apartment-dwelling, chain-smoking, wittily verbose, terribly well-read, 21-year-old Strand bookstore employee who scribbles endlessly in dirty notebooks and rides a bike. Emilie de Ravin plays Ally, the daughter of the cop who arrests Tyler during a drunken brawl, and who Tyler decides to date on a dare. She has a patchy personality, mostly hanging on two points: That she likes to eat her dessert before her main course in restaurants, and that she witnessed the murder of her mother on a subway platform. Tyler has a mean, distant dad played by Pierce Brosnan, a very likeably precocious little sister and a brother who committed suicide. The pair are brought closer when Ally's father flips out and hits her, and yet closer by the mutual mess that ensues.

Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland is a film so half-assed, so slap-dash, so unbearably boring that I can't even care enough to fully concentrate on writing this review. I am distracting myself with the Oscars – and finding even the interpretative dance sequence to the soundtrack of The Hurt Locker miles more entertaining than the tepid trash Burton is peddling as an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's fascinating classic.
The self-consciously wacky director takes a tale brimming with images, historical and cultural references, poems, songs and extraordinary invention, reduces it to a handful of glib catchphrases, then repeats these ad nauseam – while constantly informing us of what has happened, what will happen and what is happening in the style of one of those reality TV shows desperately low on interesting content. Think of all the bits you love from the book, or the Disney cartoon even; well you won't find them here – Burton instead sees fit to strike out the original story and replace it with a CliffsNotes sequel.

After attending the first weekend of the Archaeology Film Fest Series, having not considered archaeology much since metal detectors were all the rage in 1990s England, I second a statement that I found on the website of the Archaeological Legacy Institute: Archaeology is humanity's rearview mirror – enabling a much better understanding of our place and time in the world. The films chosen by the local Archaeological Society are mind-expanding and inspirational. They transport you not only to other lands but outside of yourself, providing endlessly nourishing visuals, information and insight.

Sometimes you see a movie, and two thirds of the way through you know that no matter how it ends, this is going to be one you'll be raving about for years to come. The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans has Nicolas Cage playing the part of the injured, dirty, hopped-up cop Terence McDonagh like the Humphrey Bogart of In A Lonely Place and The Maltese Falcon. Inspired by Abel Ferrara's 1992 Bad Lieutenant, this film gives us a bad cop in Cage who's not half as bad as the world he works in. His every corrupt moment – from confiscating drugs from drunken couples for his own use, to threatening old ladies – is reflective of the police force, the government and the whole system.

John and Savannah are lovers kept apart by the contrivances of writer Nicholas Sparks' cruel, cruel world. Oh, they try so hard to be together, but the obstacles of logic and common sense keep getting in the way. Like a capricious God, The Notebook author doth smite them for such hubris in the face of their higher purpose – to act as ciphers for middle-aged women's need for a good cry.
In one scene Savannah cries in the arms of her beloved, “I had no choice!” she sobs, quite rightly, as Sparks sacrifices her mercilessly in the pursuit of effective tear-scrounging narrative. In Sparks' world, John must endlessly extend his U.S. army duties, and Savannah, rather than stoically wait this out, must marry the neighbor with terminal cancer and an autistic son. So unable to bear the hurt of her love's continued absence, she sees tending to a dying man preferable. That's how much Sparks wants us to know that she loves John. In fact, her self-flagellation is the only way we really know Savannah does love John, because the 10-minute montage of soft-focus mooning, tickling and kissing that details the two-week affair before their separation just doesn't sell it very well.

Now here's something strange: Extraordinary Measures is essentially a bad television movie played out on a big screen – a banal exercise in paint-by-numbers drama – and then, unbeknownst to itself, it's also a powerful cinematic critique of the American medical industrial complex.
From the director of What Happens In Vegas, this is an idiot savant of a movie. Utterly oblivious to the recent political battles over health care reform, Extraordinary Measures has blundered onto the scene, and by the dullness of its narrative, far exceeds the comparatively mild attempts of Sicko and John Q in exposing the American health care system's dark side.