The Cabin in the Woods may be final word in teen slasher movies
Just a few weeks back, while reviewing The Hunger Games, Your Humble Correspondent swore up and down that I detest gore and always give slasher movies a wide berth. Well, I guess that…
Angling for answers in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
There’s a hallowed Hollywood tradition that times of financial hardship are supposed to be Golden Ages for romantic comedy films. The Great Depression was the heyday of the classic screwball comedy, to cite…
Jeff Who Lives at Home is a slacker with a big heart
Despite the fact that the phenomenon of “boomerang kids” in their 20s coming back home to live with their parents after college has become ever-more-normal during the current recession, it’s still considered a…
Hunger Games succeeds, despite watered down anti-violence message
Who woulda thunk it? If, in spite of the departure of the inimitable Syd M last summer, you’re still reading the film reviews in Alm@nac, then you know by now that I’m a…
Rosendale to screen Gregory Bateson biopic and host Q&A with director Nora Bateson
The Ecology of Mind, a film by Nora Bateson, celebrates a person whose teaching and work in various academic and not-so-academic disciplines helped form the notion of a holistic Earth and the environment…
Swashbuckling Martian spectacle John Carter will amply reward Star Wars fans
Disney’s newest blockbuster release, John Carter, had a relatively lousy opening weekend, based largely on a lot of advance grumblings in the entertainment media about the movie’s bungled advertising campaign. Ignore that, though,…
Iranian gem, A Separation, ponders universal human quandaries
Seeing the Iranian film A Separation brought to mind something that my photojournalist friend Lorna Tychostup said nine years ago when she was getting ready to visit Iraq, just a month before the…
Cross-cultural borrowings in The Secret World of Arrietty
The movie-review-aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes recently released its list of the 50-or-so best animated films of all time. All of the Top Ten were either Disney or Pixar products, and reader response split…
Big Miracle’s radical notion of compromise
Maybe it’s just a sign of the aging of the Baby Boom generation, but it seems like everybody nowadays is supposed to be making a Bucket List and checking things off it. Books…
From Gryffindor to Eelmarsh House with Dan Radcliffe
Poor Dan Radcliffe. Though it’s difficult to muster up much pity for a kid who had made enough money by the time he reached puberty that he would never have to work again…
