Movie Reviews and News

ICurse of the Golden FlowerI half succeeds in its visual display, which sustains the audience for the first 20 minutes. The high production value provides a glimmer of hope that Zhang would pull off the much anticipated Chrysanthemum Festival climax, but Zhang remains consistently mislead in his direction and the climax fizzles with the pop of a bottle rocket, rather than the boom of a cannon.

Its safe to assume that Alba and her no-nudity clause will be back as Nancy, a shame since she was the only blemish on the otherwise fantastic first movie. Im not sure what Rodriguez was thinking with that casting, but his decision may prove to be the lead weight which drags an otherwise fantastic, burgeoning franchise right down.

Character dialogue is spoken as if Luc Besson had some sort of minimum word count requirement while writing it, and so whipped out a dictionary to pad every sentence with as many extraneous and irrelevant words as possible. Except when they got on set and tried to film it, someone realized that there was way too much dialogue and rather than paring it down to something that sounded a little more realistic, they simply instructed all the actors to speak their lines really really fast.

Like any number of Chinese films that make the festival rounds, “Dam Street” offers a portrait of alienation in a post-Mao world as believable as it is grim, grim, grim.

Azazel Jacobs’s unexpectedly beguiling romantic comedy, “The GoodTimesKid,” finds poetry in wordless scenes of observation.