CLTV

By Matt Brunson

Director Joe Wright is the British chap behind Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, so maybe placing him in charge of the decidedly American concoction The Soloist was an attempt to show that he's able to bust some Ang Lee moves by leaping over diverse genres in a single bound. Maybe he can -- I've never been in favor of placing anyone in an artistic straitjacket that limits their choice of material -- but in this instance, the overwhelmed Wright can't do much to bring any sense of style or substance to yet another film that comes off as little more than a liberal screed.

By no means is The Soloist a painful watch, and it has its merits scattered about, like so many chocolate sprinkles adorning a scoop of ice cream. But for a movie that's about compassion and understanding, it makes for a shockingly indifferent experience, filled with too many calculated homilies to allow for much more than superficial connections. It may be based on a true story, but it feels synthetic all the way.

Read the rest of Matt's review here.

Watch the trailer here:

By Matt Brunson

I confess that I've never read any of the novels written by Bret Easton Ellis, but if the movies based on his output are in any way indicative of the quality of his books, then I imagine that Hell for me would consist of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin taking turns reading out loud from his works for all eternity.

1987's ragged Less Than Zero remains the best of his adaptations simply by virtue of compelling work by Robert Downey Jr. and James Spader, while 2000's torturous American Psycho at least manages to make a couple of salient points about misguided machismo. 2002's The Rules of Attraction, on the other hand, is completely unwatchable, a designation it now shares with this latest atrocity. The problem isn't that Ellis enjoys focusing all his attention on vacuous, detestable people. After all, cinema is full of great Feel-Bad Bummers about life's losers -- it's hard, for example, to imagine a better representative of this field than Todd Solondz's Happiness, which made my 10 Best list for 1998. No, the problem with Ellis is that he makes his characters boring and their actions pointless, both unpardonable sins in any medium.

Read the rest of Matt's review here.

Watch the trailer here:

By Matt Brunson

Battle for Terra is a new animated effort in which alien forces invade a planet, and it turns out that the invaders are, in fact, us -- that is to say, astronauts from the planet Earth. It sounds rather novel until one recalls that The Twilight Zone tackled this notion in one third the amount of time as this ambitious but ultimately disappointing feature.

Assembling the sort of all-star cast that nobody ever thinks to unite in live-action movies -- at least not since the "disaster flick" went out with the 1970s -- Battle for Terra finds James Garner, Dennis Quaid, Danny Glover, Mark Hamill and many others lending their vocal chords to this sci-fi saga in which the peaceful Terrians find their planet under attack from a spaceship that harbors the only survivors of our long-destroyed Earth. Young Mala (Evan Rachel Wood), a Terrian with a rebellious streak, watches helplessly as her father (Quaid) gets abducted by the marauders; she eventually saves a human soldier named Jim (Luke Wilson), and together they work to rescue Mala's dad. But Jim finds himself conflicted every step of the way, as he tries to help this alien creature while simultaneously remaining loyal to his commanding officer (Brian Cox), a typical U.S. warhawk who seeks to kill every last Terrian man, woman and child.

Read the rest of Matt's review here.

Watch the trailer here:

By Matt Brunson

Winner of two awards at this year's Sundance Film Festival (Best Director and Best Cinematography), Sin Nombre marks an impressive feature-film debut for Cary Joji Fukunaga, albeit more as a director than a writer.

Certainly, Fukunaga's screenplay is strong enough, showing how two lost souls intersect as they journey northward atop a train toward what they hope will be better lives. Casper (Edgar Flores) is a Mexican teenager who's a member of the violent Mara Salvatrucha gang. More conscientious than others of his ilk, he turns his back on the gang and soon becomes their hunted prey, with (shades of The Warriors) other gang factions offering to help in his capture and execution. Meanwhile, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) is a Honduran teen who's immigrating with her father (Gerardo Taracena) and uncle (Guillermo Villegas) as they plot to eventually cross the Mexico-U.S. border and make it up to the dad's new home in New Jersey. Circumstances lead to the two youths meeting and developing a mutually respectful relationship that, when all is said and done, complicates their respective flights from their past lives.

Read the rest of Matt's review here.

Watch the trailer here:

By Matt Brunson

For the better part of a decade, the Disney Channel has been manufacturing squeaky-clean mannequins in the same methodical way that, say, Keebler produces Fudge Shoppe Deluxe Grahams. Like most of these youngsters, Zac Efron, the reigning Ken to Miley Cyrus' Barbie, may not be around for the long haul (for every child actor who successfully makes the transition to adult movie star, like Jodie Foster and Elizabeth Taylor, there are many more that fail), but he's presently making his case for career longevity by headlining the comedy 17 Again. He's appealing within the confines of his limited range, but like the film itself, a severe case of blandness puts a lid on any breakout potential.

The first half-hour of the film is simply atrocious, lazily cobbling together pieces from Back to the Future, Big and all those forgettable '80s body-switch comedies in an effort to jump-start its tale. Efron plays Mike O'Donnell, a high school basketball star who, two decades later, has transformed into a depressed doormat whose teenage children Maggie and Alex (Michelle Trachtenberg and Sterling Knight) hate him and whose wife Scarlett (Leslie Mann) is divorcing him. (The middle-aged Mike/Zac is played by a suitably pudgy Matthew Perry.) In the blink of an eye, Mike is suddenly 17 again, retaining his adult mindset but trolling the halls of his school looking like one of the gang. Armed with this opportunity, Mike hopes to set things right, first by helping out his two children (Maggie's romantically involved with the school bully while Alex is the perpetual target of said thug) and then by convincing Scarlett to give him (or, rather, his older self) a second chance.

Read the rest of Matt's review here.

Watch the trailer here:

By Matt Brunson

The documentary Earth, a feature-length spin-off of the BBC series Planet Earth, has been playing Europe since the summer of 2007, yet it's only being released in the United States on April 22, 2009 (Earth Day). Hmm, perhaps its British creators deemed it pointless to release such a pro-environment film in a country then ruled by a heinous Republican administration bent on the destruction of our natural resources?

At any rate, the picture is finally being released stateside by Walt Disney Studios under its new Disneynature label, a welcome throwback to the days when Walt himself would personally supervise such Earth-friendly fare as The Living Desert and The Vanishing Prairie. And while it's hard to urge moviegoers to spend money on something they can basically catch on the Discovery Channel (and other like-minded stations) for free, there's no denying that the magnificence of the images on display is even more impressive when presented in a larger-than-life format.

Read the rest of Matt's review here (you won't want to miss the end).

Watch the trailer here: