The older and more experienced I get, the more confidence I have in my own judgment. That's as it should be. When it comes to "family films," however, it feels as though each passing year allows me to drift further and further from any sort of critical consensus about what is desirable within the genre and what particular films meet the criteria for meriting praise.
Negative reviews or critically acclaimed movies are like exclamation points: one only gets an indeterminate but exhaustible number in life before people stop paying attention. Indifferent reviews are more like semi-colons: people begrudgingly admit you are correct but hate you anyway for being such a smarty-pants.
From column one select a famous name (historical or fictional). From column two select a mythical creature. From column three select a verb that is in the thesaurus as a synonym for "kill." Ready? Go. Winnie the Pooh: Mummy Exterminator. Ronald Reagan: Unicorn Euthanizer. Johnny Unitas: Mermaid Slayer. Jack and Jill: Mothra Extinguisher. Congratulations, you've just green lit the 2014 winter movie season.
The problem with Crossroad is not that it is Christian nor even that it is preachy. There is a market for this sort of film and those who approve of what the artists are attempting are historically more or less deaf to the cries of critics about how skillfully or artistically they are doing it.
The simple narrative and self-consciously "PG" script will no doubt prompt Lifetime movie comparisons from some (sarcastic) circles, but a strong cast and crew keep the film from succumbing to excessive bathos.
The North Carolina Film Critics Association (NCFCA) will announce its awards for the best films and performances of 2012 next week.
Film critics get asked what movie they hate the most almost as much as what movie they love the most. Such superlatives are more about defining your tastes than objectively separating the bad from the abysmal. The Life of David Gale has served as my go to answer for that question for the last few years, so revisiting it had its own trepidation. It couldn't possibly be that bad, could it? And if it wasn't, would I have to find a new whipping boy?
It was pretty apparent for me early on that 2012 was a banner year for documentaries.
I imagine that if I had told fans of Signs that ten years after its release the film's most successful alumnus would be Joaquin Phoenix--followed by Abigail Breslin--I would have been looked at as being as nutty as one of the film's characters wearing a tinfoil hat.
All of which might explained why Spike Lee’s latest film, Red Hook Summer, manages to seem fresh and provocative even as it’s undermined by some of the most uneven filmmaking I've seen all year.
