• Columbia

By Matt Brunson

This Friday will see the release of Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, with Nicolas Cage reprising his role from 2007's Ghost Rider. Since this sequel isn't being screened in advance for critics, we offer CL's original write-up on its predecessor, which was mauled by reviewers but nevertheless earned $115 million from stateside audiences (although its $110 million budget meant it barely broke even here, with the foreign market once again having to come to the rescue). If this review reminds you exactly how much you disliked the original (after all, it's hard to find anybody who champions it), then for God's sake, do us all a favor and stay away rather than convince the studio of the need for a third GR flick starring Cage.

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Is it possible that before making the big-screen version of Ghost Rider (*1/2 out of four), writer-director Mark Steven Johnson had never even read a Ghost Rider comic book? Yes, I know as well as anyone that faithfulness to the source material is a low priority when it comes to Hollywood, whether adapting Stan Lee or Lee Child. But Johnson, whose version of Daredevil wasn't quite as bad as the press made out, here botches what would have seemed to be a fairly manageable assignment.

The comics' original Johnny Blaze wasn't a joke-a-second character like Peter Parker or The Fantastic Four's Ben Grimm. He was more somber and serious, as one would expect from a biker who sold his soul to the devil (to save the life of a loved one) and then found himself living under a curse that transformed him into a flaming-skull creature whenever in the presence of evil. Of course, when you hire Nicolas Cage to star in your movie, it's safe to assume that camp was what was intended all along.

Cage, whose best film in recent years has been the hilarious Wicker Man re-edit on YouTube (check it out here; it has the power to brighten anyone's week), falls back on the eye-popping, head-rolling overacting that has turned him into this decade's Rod Steiger. Amazingly, though, he doesn't deliver the movie's worst performance; instead, he lands in the show position, right under Eva Mendes as the somnambular love interest and the mesmerizingly awful Wes Bentley as one of the least convincing — and therefore least threatening — villains of recent vintage.

On the plus side, the special effects are pretty cool, and it was inspired to cast Peter Fonda as Mephistopheles (Easy Rider, meet Ghost Rider). Otherwise, this is yet another comic book adaptation that goes up in flames before our very eyes.

• Universal
• Safe House

Chronicle

Pariah

Pina

Safe House

• CBS Films
• The Woman in Black

The Grey

The Woman in Black

• Relativity Media
• Haywire

Click on the title to be taken directly to the review.

Albert Nobbs

A Dangerous Method

Haywire

Man on a Ledge

The Oscar Nominations: Extremely Shameless & Incredibly Dumb

• MGM/UA
• Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success

By Matt Brunson

SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957)

DIRECTED BY Alexander Mackendrick

STARS Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis

Even a three-course meal consisting of lobster bisque, a medium-rare steak and crème brulee doesn't come close to matching the exquisite, juicy taste of the dialogue slung around in this riveting drama written by no less than Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman.

Practically everything clicks in this brutal exercise in which unscrupulous press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) will do just about anything to curry favor with powerful newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). So when Hunsecker's sister (Susan Harrison) falls for a clean-cut musician (Martin Milner), J.J. becomes jealous (perhaps not since Scarface's Tony Montana has a movie character displayed such an unhealthy attraction toward his own sibling) and orders Sidney to drive them apart through malicious gossip and outright lies.

The contributions of two industry titans, cinematographer James Wong Howe and composer Elmer Bernstein, are key to the film's success — the jazzy score works in tandem with the evocative NYC location shooting — and while Curtis generally leaves me cold, his performance as Falco is arguably his greatest. Yet the rapid-fire dialogue is this film's truly astonishing component, from the classic lines (both from J.J. to Sidney) "I'd hate to take a bite out of you; you're a cookie full of arsenic" and "Match me, Sidney" to lesser known but equally impressive snatches of cynicism (I've always been partial to J.J. opining that "Sidney lives in moral twilight"). The film's only significant debit is its ending, which feels rushed, incomplete and therefore not entirely satisfying.

(Sweet Smell of Success will be screened as part of the "Extra! Extra! Celebrating the Newspaper Picture" film series at 3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 28, at ImaginOn. Admission is free.)

• Fox Searchlight
• Shame

Click on the link to be taken directly to the review.

Contraband

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Shame

• First Run Features
• Phil Ochs (Los Angeles, 1968), as seen in Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune

By Mark Kemp

PHIL OCHS: THERE BUT FOR FORTUNE

***1/2

DIRECTED BY Kenneth Bowser

STARS Phil Ochs, Sean Penn, Christopher Hitchens, Joan Baez, Tom Hayden

In the liner notes to his 1965 album I Ain’t Marching Anymore, the late protest singer Phil Ochs addressed the emotional dichotomy of ego and responsibility, of his simultaneous desire for fame and his need to write and sing morally charged folk songs critical of a world gone mad.

“My vanity flutters as I hear again the cheers of audiences of thousands applauding …,” Ochs wrote, but then went on to say, “I realize that I can’t feel any nobility for what I write because I know my life could never be as moral as my songs.”

That psychic push and pull ruled Ochs’ fascinating and utterly complex life, a life that until now has never been fully explored onscreen. With Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune, filmmaker Ken Bowser rectifies this glaring omission in a documentary that covers it all, from the righteous, leftist, and very patriotic ballads and anthems Ochs sang at demonstrations and on college campuses, to the mental issues that hastened his alcoholism and ultimate suicide in 1976 at only 35 years old. The film premieres on PBS's American Masters at 10 p.m. Monday, Jan. 23, on WTVI in the Charlotte area.