Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Movie Review

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is one hundred percent Oscar bait and shamelessly so. It co-stars two Oscar-winning actors as the parents of a precocious child who sets out on a journey of discovery after the death of his father. There’s an international screen legend (once Oscar nominated) cast an elderly man who doesn’t speak. It’s penned by Eric Roth, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Forrest Gump, and directed by Stephen Daldry, the only person ever nominated for the Best Director Oscar for each of his first three feature films. To top it all off it’s a post 9/11 drama that centers on the breakdown of a family after a tragic loss on that day.

The Wolfman Movie Review

This review is based on the extended cut version.

Can anyone remember the last time Anthony Hopkins made a film that didn’t look like a complete sellout? In the last decade or so he’s probably made one film that’s worth watching – The World’s Fastest Indian. You should seriously give it a look because The Wolfman is anything but worthy of two of hours of your time.

The Wolfman is director Joe Johnston’s attempt at bringing back that old Hollywood monster movie feeling. He’s trying to invoke nostalgia from the appearance of the Universal logo, which is a retooling of the one used in 1941, when Lon Chaney, Jr. donned the wolf makeup and chased Claude Rains around the backlot. It has an opening scene that suggests we might be in for a wonderfully campy ride, with a bombastic and ridiculous musical score, fast cuts of wolf’s claws, growling and snarling on the soundtrack and just enough dripping blood from the victim to be scary without tipping the balance toward gruesome.

Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island Movie Review

It’s hard to avoid seeing the parallels between Shutter Island and Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio’s two films from this year. Both deal heavily with illusion versus reality and the way we perceive the world. They both deal with madness, the former more than the latter. In both films the driving force behind DiCaprio’s characters’ actions is the tragic loss of his wife. And the soundtracks of both films are characterized by the droning sound of low horns in the orchestra, which in this film is a reminder of a ship’s foghorn. Although the two films have similarities in their subject matter, they could hardly be more different in terms of tone and directorial approach.