The films of M. Night Shyamalan are difficult creatures to critique, if only because their sums are so often greater than the value of their individual parts. The Sixth Sense, for all its taught suspense and truly original “twist” ending, kicked off a career as much about expectation as executi...
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(NOTE: Generally, as a rule, I try to make a pointed effort not to insert myself directly into the reviews that I write here on the site. I’m fortunate enough to publish a column, Cynamatic, that provides my daily dose of narcissistic grandstanding, and having addressed the issue of Fahrenhe...
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From the outside-in, there must be a great freedom in the work that Spiderman does, slinging endlessly upward from rooftop-to-rooftop, graceful in that pendulum arc – soaring, like any great thing unbound by gravity, through the streets of some towering metropolis, to the aid of those very much un...
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There’s a moment in the first Harry Potter novel where Harry, through the foggy surface of a magical mirror, first comes into contact with the faces of his long-dead parents. It’s an unexpected moment, and touching, full of sincerity and loss, and constitutes the placement of a great burden upon...
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The concept of Neverland is a classic idea - a place where youth is never quite misspent, simply because it can never, for every minute or millennium that passes, run out. It's a classic tale of the soul's stubbornness to grow old, to wither and age and one day d...

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Adaptation is a difficult process. It’s a translation, of sorts – a reinterpretation of idea into form – and in film is almost always a losing prospect. There are simply too many minds, too many eyes, spying for a place in the ultimate vision, and as a single idea passes from writer, to scre...
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The experience of being a critic is an interesting thing, oftentimes exciting and oftentimes odd, but never without its lessons. As a twenty-something critic of this modern cinematic generation, watching Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers leaves me feeling shamefully dated. Being seated in the...
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King Lear on ice. Such is The Sea. A bleak and atmospheric family drama set against the backdrop of a modernizing Iceland, The Sea, at its heart, is a small story about a big family. Here, filmmaker Baltasar Kormakur tells the tale of Thordur, the patriarch o...

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