John J. Bennett

Reviews ARGO. Ben Affleck spent most of his thirties getting kicked around by trolls and bottom-feeders who dragged his personal life and professional accomplishments through the mud. I’ve never understood why so many people saw fit to pile on the guy; he’s always seemed likeable enough to me. So it’s been satisfying to watch him […]

DREDD 3D. Remakes — or reboots, as they’re euphemistically called these days — tend to be pretty depressing. From either lack of imagination or cost-cutting in the creative department, Hollywood usually rushes out a hack version of a recent foreign hit (Vanilla Sky, The Ring). Or someone might ill-advisedly take a crack at improving a […]

  Reviews THE COLD LIGHT OF DAY. It seems we are slipping down to the nadir of the cinematic calendar. Late winter/early spring is usually regarded as the doldrums: The studios unload the worst movies of the year between awards season and summer blockbuster time. But now, either due to lack of imagination or quality […]

Reviews LAWLESS. From a distance, Lawless looks like about nine-tenths of a great movie. Director John Hillcoat (The Proposition, The Road) specializes in methodical, nuanced meditations on men of violence. Here again he constructs a reality that demands severe action of its inhabitants. That reality, backwoods Tennessee circa 1930, is drawn from a novel by […]

Reviews HIT AND RUN. If I had to pick a favorite sub-genre, it would probably be car chase movies. I’ll acknowledge that most of them are guilty pleasures, but I can live with that. You like what you like, and I really like Hit and Run. It has plenty of what I like to see […]

Reviews THE EXPENDABLES 2. This latest installment in Stallone’s geezers-with-guns franchise is unabashedly overblown, irresponsible macho horseshit — and I kind of love it. I may be the bull’s-eye of the target audience for these movies. I cut my teeth on the crass, ultraviolent Hollywood action movies of the ’80s and ’90s, so I don’t […]

Reviews YOUR SISTER’S SISTER. I was introduced to the work of writer/director Lynn Shelton via Humpday (2009). In that film, Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard play heterosexual old friends with a mildly antagonistic relationship. Over the course of a drunken evening, they goad each other into making an ultra-indie gay porno for the local amateur […]

  STEP UP REVOLUTION. As a long-form dance video, this is good stuff: breakneck choreography, clever cinematography, beautiful people in various states of undress — it nails all the steps. As a proper movie? Not so much. This is my first experience with the Step Up franchise, and I got basically what I was expecting. […]

Reviews THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. Writer/director/self-avowed comic book super-geek James Gunn (Slither, Super) recently spoke with great fervor about the themes and undercurrents of the Batman mythology. In particular he referenced Batman’s “unquenchable thirst [for] vengeance because somebody killed his parents, and he’s got this bottomless pit inside himself [because] he can never do that.” […]

Reviews MAGIC MIKE. For better or worse, most of the audience didn’t know or care that this is a Steven Soderbergh movie. They came to see Channing Tatum get naked and were very excited when he did so. Fortunately they didn’t have to wait long, so they got most of the giggling and screaming out […]

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD. Having seen the trailer for this something like a hundred times in the last few months, I was poised to dislike the movie. Either in spite of or due to this reactionary tendency, I found myself almost immediately disarmed. This feeling of mild but thorough approbation […]