Blogcritics Author: Louis Boram

Movie Review: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

Louis Boram — Tue, 6 Jan 2009 06:49:10 EST

Traveler's check...
Wobbly sounding dual theremins engaging upon initial liftoff, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) has just as much cosmic resonance -- the 21st century’s emotionless Keanu Reeves and global warming themes notwithstanding -- as it did at the Cold War’s outset some 50-plus years ago. Pleasingly, fighting a war of an altogether different...

Movie Review: Milk

Louis Boram — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:47:36 EST

Lactose intolerant...
Sean Penn’s inhabitation of the real life Harvey Milk is arguably 2008’s most mesmerizing acting performance and one of the two or three best of the accomplished and overrated grandstander’s career. To his credit, the method actor goes a long way toward perpetuating the “best-of-his-generation” moniker into perpetuity....

Movie Review: Fred Claus

Louis Boram — Tue, 9 Dec 2008 23:29:18 EST

Kris bliss...
In the tradition of traditional feel-good Christmas cheer movies comes that most untraditional (un)sentimental performer, Vince Vaughn. Mr. Vaughn -- he of crude humor and self-serving wisecracks -- is Fred Claus, living an unfulfilling life in his younger brother Nick’s (Paul Giamatti) celebrity shadow. To us, and children everywhere, the...

Movie Review: Transsiberian

Louis Boram — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:17:53 EST

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin...
Bespectacled—his stringy blond hair growing progressively thinner and less plentiful like a criminally neglected (Ch-ch-ch) Chia Pet—47-year-old Woody Harrelson is the locomotive-loving, God-fearing Roy. Lucky for him, he’s traveling by iron horse across a picturesque, snow-covered Russian Siberian landscape with his wife....

Movie Review: The Strangers

Louis Boram — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:20:33 EST

Knock-Knock. Who's there...?
“Because you were home”—that’s the pragmatic explanation a masked psychotic butcher, one of a trio of aspiring coed murderers, softly and matter-of-factly provides when frantically asked by the captured Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler), and her boyfriend James Hoyt (Scott Speedman), why the trifecta is terrorizing the...

Movie Review: The Visitor(2008)

Louis Boram — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:57:58 EDT

Strange bedfellows...
On the stuck-up heels of Smart People comes another aloof-trumps-affected characterization, an allegedly edifying higher-learning chapter from Sideways (2004) producer Michael London—released one week after People—called The Visitor (2008). Again, the scholarly and indifferent college professor protagonist is an aimless widower with a...

Cool Hand Luke: World-Changer, Boss

Louis Boram — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:14:23 EDT

Coolness personified...
Moviegoers coming of age after the likes of Jaws and Star Wars ushered in the glossily produced, widely opened, mass-merchandised movie blockbuster 30-plus years ago, may not be aware, or appreciate, what the last golden era—the 1970s—of American movies said about unwilling heroes and their nonconformance to a hypocritical society. To...

Movie Review: Smart People

Louis Boram — Mon, 6 Oct 2008 18:08:17 EDT

Small talk...
Dropkicking the suffix “ass” from what would otherwise be a more shrewdly titled movie, if not story, Smart People is too self-conscious and knowing to come across as anything other than smug. Being a single father widower (without further explanation, mom died “years ago”), wearing corduroy sport jackets, and driving a Saab...

DVD Review: Snow Angels

Louis Boram — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:56:32 EDT

Domestic clutter.
If—like the Beatles surreally imagined—happiness is a warm gun, writer-director David Gordon Green's (Undertow, 2004) misleadingly titled, adult-themed Snow Angels makes a case for an alternately depressant dose of reality. Starring Kate Beckinsale (Annie) and Sam Rockwell (Glenn), the fairish melodrama is a downer tale, based on...

Movie Review: Bram Stoker's Dracula's Guest

Louis Boram — Tue, 9 Sep 2008 17:57:15 EDT

Bloody stiff...
A literary and cinematic horror-rich character long sustaining on the plasmatic coagulate of tasty souls - Count Dracula - gets slapdash type B-movie treatment from guerrilla filmmaker, writer, director, and producer Michael Feifer. Results have one-stop-shopping Feifer doing his best to collect straight to DVD coin by conjuring author Bram...