By Brandon Nowalk More movies should be 64 minutes long. Turkey Bowl packs ten individual characters and a knotty, universal story into that running time with a fleet pace and a light touch that belies its bittersweet impact. You barely have time to register your investment until the credits roll and you’re faced with the [...]

By Brandon Nowalk The music of Fishbone is almost indescribable, a melting pot of influences from punk to funk to new wave that’s like avant-garde ska, played on saxophone, theremin, trombone, and more by a team of black musicians rhythmically flailing all over the stage like hyperactive children learning to rave. But the story of [...]

By Brandon Nowalk Rango is about a chameleon searching for identity, but it’s Rango the film that’s not quite sure what it wants to be. Of course, I’d be heartless not to forgive it its little growing pains, the first film from a new player on the animation front, and a formidable one at that. [...]

By Brandon Nowalk Nobody in Battle Los Angeles seems to realize how hilarious the movie is. The opening newscast reveals how much of the world has already been devastated by alien attack, intoning, “We cannot lose Los Angeles.” Because that would be the last straw. Later Aaron Eckhart tells his men, “We are not losing [...]

By Brandon Nowalk I’d like to say I lost a bet, but actually, I ended up at Justin Bieber: Never Say Never with swirly hair and a purple hoodie because I had an opening and this concert film slash biography doc is somehow the best reviewed wide release of the year. Next to Just Go [...]

By Brandon Nowalk As car commercials go, Unknown is in a class of its own. It’s not every day you see a Jaguar ad demonstrate the versatility of the automobile as a weapon, and while the seventeenth car chase wore me out, the eighteenth was the perfect pick-me-up. Throw in the nocturnal action noir vibe [...]

By Brandon Nowalk Last year Neil Marshall (director of The Descent) released Centurion, a Roman sword-and-sandals adventure set in northern Britain with an elite and motley crew of legionnaires venturing into savage lands on a recovery mission in a beautiful and visceral drama, a song of the soldier. Kevin MacDonald’s The Eagle is strikingly similar [...]

By Brandon Nowalk Hit man movies occupy a unique position on the cinema map. They’re movies about men—sometimes women, but let’s face  it, mostly men—who kill for money, which necessitates a moral accounting that isn’t immediately apparent. Cop movies have the law on their side—the righteousness of those laws is another question—and gangster flicks, as [...]

By Brandon Nowalk Opening just in time for Valentine’s Day, Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine is what they call counterprogramming. Rest assured this film has no interest in celebrating love or reveling in infatuation or even soaking up the little joys of romance. No, this is the story of two blissful lovers finding out six years [...]

By Brandon Nowalk Before we brace ourselves for the wintry wasteland of cinema, strewn with the carcasses of Nicolas Cage or Gwyneth Paltrow’s latest fiasco—review coming next week, so mark your calendars!—let’s remember that there is such a thing as a good movie by celebrating the best of 2010. Typically, the best films of the [...]