Morgan P Salvo

The previews for Woman in Black are of the green-tinted night camera variety, showing “candid” audiences' reactions of fright. This is the same technique employed by the Paranormal Activity franchise to sell tickets. To me it's the film equivalent of restaurants showing faded pictures of their food in the window – never a good sign. It's a shame the marketing research team resorted to this kind of advertising because in actuality this is an old school Victorian gothic ghost story that qualifies as decent horror.
This atmospheric retro-chiller, set in an isolated Yorkshire village, is a production of England’s revived Hammer label and features a post-Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe in his first grown up role. The foundation for the story is screenwriter Jane Goldman's adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 novel, which also gave birth to a radio series, TV movie and long-running West End stage play. While the highly unoriginal title needs some sprucing up, in the context of this movie it suffices.

I have a few problems with this movie. First off, when you call something haywire, the audience really shouldn't wait the entire movie to find out that nobody goes haywire. I mean if a director called a movie “Boycott” or “Slaughter,” we would expect to see one of those things happen onscreen. That's not the case with Haywire, director Steven Soderbergh's latest foray into action/espionage.
I'm a fan of Soderbergh. I liked Ocean's 11(12 and 13) and I like that he has the guts to make a major epic like Che, as well as low-budget art movies such as The Girlfriend Experience, Bubble and the overlooked Kafka. He always seems to challenge genre stereotypes and puts his intellectual stamp on his subjects, but not here. Sure, there's a snazzy jazz soundtrack and exotic locales, but no real shocks. Haywire is a mediocre flick that feels contrived and cliché. The best thing about the movie is the camera work, which stuns.

It's common knowledge that our modern movie-going experience has been inundated with remakes from every genre under the sun, so I was leery that Contraband, starring Mark Wahlberg, is the updated version of Lucio Fulci's Italian gangster splatter-fest of the same name. Well, there might be some miniscule similarities, but the Italian maestro's film is left unscathed. As it turns out, this film is actually director Baltasar Kormákur’s remake of his own 2008 film, Reykjavik-Rotterdam.

“Cerebral.” That's the first word that comes to mind in describing Tinker Tailor Solider Spy. And that was the last word echoing in my brain as I left the theater. The problem with cerebral art on film as opposed to in print is that it's harder to convey the feeling of something going on in someone's head when nothing is happening onscreen. A book can go into detail about what someone is feeling and/or thinking, but long takes of peoples’ expressions does not make mind readers out of an audience. With little dialogue, this is a movie that benefits those who have read the book.
Based on John LeCarré's classic 1974 novel, the film version leaves something to be desired. The actors are all superlative, especially Gary Oldman (getting his due by finally carrying a movie with this much weight), but when very little transpires onscreen, it's very hard to decipher what the hell is motivating any of these spies. I know they're supposed to be secretive, but this is overkill. With a very simple plot that's not built out of your basic twisty-turny super espionage, it's all about the inner workings of spies' brains. Luckily, I was fortunate to see most of the BBC miniseries staring Alec Guinness that delved a little deeper over time to tell the story in a relaxed, coherent manner and gave me a chance to soak in all the characters a little better. The 2011 version crams a lot of mental chess and secretive inner turmoil into the space of two hours, and the result is like watching paint dry.

The genius in opening a movie like The Darkest Hour on Christmas Day is that it gives somebody like me a chance to see something a little creepier, rather than all the family friendly, Spielberg-saturated, over-produced, holiday schlock.
It's clear within seconds that The Darkest Hour is a movie that's going to cut corners… practically all of them. A quick set-up with the two main characters as nightclub Web entrepreneurs (Emile Hirsch, Max Minghella) includes male bonding, trickery, deceit and scoring chicks in a hot Moscow nightclub. Then there's an electrical storm, aliens invade and we have a compilation of every cliché stolen from every end of the world, science fiction, apocalyptic, doom-and-destruction movie ever made. That's right, Darkest Hour gets no points for originality, but I had no idea how truly “suck-you-into-the-void-of-another-dimension-bad” this movie could be. The good news is that after a while it gets pretty darn laughable.

Editor's note: Seeing as how we let film columnist Morgan P. Salvo run wild with the 10 worst movies of the year in the special section of the paper, we figured we'd find out what performances he actually liked this year.
1. Rutger Hauer: Hobo with a Shotgun
The title says it all. Brains splatter, guts burst open and Hauer stays right on top of his character's dedication to vengeance in true vigilante style.
2. Michael Shannon: Take Shelter
The guy who specializes in tormented souls delivers the goods here in subdued brilliance.

OK, I have to admit that on my drive to the theater I was semi-excited about my impending Mission Impossible IMAX experience, looking forward to hyper-realistic stunts and fistfights. Once inside, I was told by a blank screen to prepare for “the full IMAX immersion.” I sat back ready for the eye candy.
Well, it's clear enough and plenty loud (one guy in the audience actually yelled for it to be turned down a notch), but once the crystalline dust settled and my eyes focused, I seriously didn't notice any difference from a regular movie theater experience. But then glaring at me square in the face was this entity called Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

Director David Gordon Green has come a long way since Undertow and Snow Angels. I guess the comedy bug hit him with Pineapple Express and his time working with Danny McBride on Eastbound and Down has produced some of the most vile, offensive, hedonistic and, thus, funniest television I have ever seen.

I have to cut Martin Scorsese some slack for his foray into family entertainment. I saw him on The Daily Show the other night and he confessed a couple of reasons as to why he made Hugo. One was because his wife hounded him to make “something that everyone can see” and then his 12-year-old daughter requested it be made in 3-D. Secondly, he wanted to make a love letter to the birth of filmmaking honoring Georges Melies (1902's A Trip to the Moon), the inventor of fantasy and science fiction in cinema, based on Brian Selznick’s 2007 novel The Invention Of Hugo Cabret. So while we get a kids’ fantasy ripe with mystery, we also get a cinematic history lesson. It's a tricky balancing act and Scorsese handles it with panache, delivering a magically imaginative mini-masterpiece that uses 3-D not as a gimmick but rather for wondrous enhancement.
I saw Melies' infamous Trip to the Moon when I was in film school. Ingenious and way ahead of his time, Melies took experimental film to the limits. It's no wonder that Scorsese is fascinated with this brilliant reclusive filmmaker and who better than Scorsese to use wild camera shots and mesmerizing 3-D to tell the story of the man who invented special effects.

There's a lot to be said about Michael Shannon. He is a great actor carving out a niche for himself playing highly troubled individuals. Take Shelter starts with Shannon standing out in motor-oil-thick rain as he blankly stares into space. Right away we know there's trouble brewing. Moving beyond Christopher Walken's “hey I get it, I'm psychotic” manic territory, Shannon, epitome of a tortured soul, lets everything get under his skin.
There are a lot of normal-looking scenes in Take Shelter, but Michael Shannon does not play normal. As a guy named Curtis living with his wife (the excellent Jessica Chastain) in a small, unspecified Ohio town, Curtis is under pressure with a mortgage, a mother in an assisted-living home and a deaf six-year-old daughter. But none of that thwarts his obsession to build a backyard storm shelter to survive the devastating apocalypse he perceives is looming. Storms really are brewing out yonder, but the real storm is in Curtis' brain. He's plagued by nightmares as his mind begins to slide into madness and his devastating downward spiral takes his friends and family along with him. Shelter is an amazing, artistic, somewhat slow moving film that gives us a chance to see a rare hybrid of honesty and suspense.