This guy directed Star Wars Rogue One!
Author: Elena Nola
Elena Nola is the imperial movie critic and the colder half of the Ladies of Ice and Fire.
Top 10 Science Fiction Movies of the Decade 2000-2009
All the end-of-year/decade lists going up right now inspired me to hit one up of my own. And all the hype about James Cameron’s Avatar, which is being trumpeted as some sort of monumental science fiction success, gave me just the topic: the actual best science fiction movies of the aughts.
Playin’ With Ice and Fire: A Game of Thoughts | Jon Snow Chapter 19
She’s new, I’m the re-reader. She’s the newbie, I’m the spoilery vet. Together She’s g-mashin’ George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones and getting here POV on. Today she moves on to Chapter 19, a Jon Snow POV chapter. You can also read my interview with George R. R. Martin if it pleases you
Playin’ With Ice and Fire: A Game of Thoughts | Catelyn Stark Chapter 18
She’s new, I’m the re-reader. She’s the newbie, I’m the spoilery vet. Together She’s g-mashin’ George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones and getting here POV on. Today she moves on to Chapter 18, a Catelyn Stark POV chapter. You can also read my interview with George R. R. Martin if it pleases you
Best Fantasy Movies of the Decade: 2000-2009
When I was asked to write a companion piece to my Best Science Fiction Movies of the Decade list, I thought it would be equally as easy. I was wrong. There were a lot of kind of good fantasy movies over the last 10 years, but not really a lot of great ones. I think… Continue reading Best Fantasy Movies of the Decade: 2000-2009
The Scott Pilgrim Girlfriend Test
So you’ve finally met a girl who seems cool. Outlook: positive…except that you can’t figure out how to suss out her level of nerdery without offending her or seeming even geekier than you are by running through every conceivable point of geekiness she might secretly have. Well, you’re in luck, because the graphic novel series… Continue reading The Scott Pilgrim Girlfriend Test
Johnny Depp’s THE RUM DIARY Is Like Two Movies in One – REVIEW
I walked away from watching The Rum Diary with feelings as dichotomous as the two halves of the film. The first half is what the film appears to be in the trailers, while the second is a fairly serious take on corruption and the censorship of news by those who control what is printed. Neither part… Continue reading Johnny Depp’s THE RUM DIARY Is Like Two Movies in One – REVIEW
THE THREE MUSKETEERS Is a Hot, Delicious Mess | review
I did not go into this newest version of The Three Musketeers with high expectations. In point of fact, I expected the film to be kind of bad. I find myself forced to confess a reluctant admiration for just how bad it turned out to be. What I expected was a historically inaccurate melodrama, with… Continue reading THE THREE MUSKETEERS Is a Hot, Delicious Mess | review
The Mortician | New Orleans Film Fest movie review
The Mortician is almost impossible to classify. I saw it described as “post-apocalyptic,” but it’s not really SF; a fair number of people in line with me for the screening thought it was horror because the main character is a mortician, but it’s not horror; technically I guess it’s a drama, but it’s not what… Continue reading The Mortician | New Orleans Film Fest movie review
96 MINUTES | movie review via New Orleans Film Festival
96 Minutes is a festival gem. With the films screening in competition, you never really walk in sure of what you’ll get; like Forest Gump’s box of chocolate, sometimes the film’s a truffle and other times it’s a coconut macaroon (and you hate coconut). I went into 96 Minutes almost blind—I read the blurb but… Continue reading 96 MINUTES | movie review via New Orleans Film Festival
The Thing Bears Only Passing Resemblance to John Carpenter’s THE THING
The Thing (2011) both exceeded my expectations and proved a massive disappointment, and while that statement may seem paradoxical it is nonetheless true.
‘Bellflower’ is Long on Art, Short on Ultra-violence
South by Southwest favorite Bellflower finally made it to New Orleans this week. The movie’s description placed it well inside my sweet zone for films, so I made a point to go to one of its two screenings. Overall I liked the film. It had some beautiful and creative filming, the acting was solid—rare in… Continue reading ‘Bellflower’ is Long on Art, Short on Ultra-violence
‘Get Low’ Should Have Been Better | review
Get Low is one of those movies that really should have been better than it is. The film has an interesting premise and the cast to pull that premise off, and yet somehow it simply falls flat. I would like to know the intent behind the film, because intention is the difference between a failure… Continue reading ‘Get Low’ Should Have Been Better | review
To Hell and Back for LO(ve) | review
Lo was a movie I went into with no expectations. The description said it was about a man who summons a demon to find his girlfriend, who has been dragged to hell. That was enough for me.
Ryan Gosling Steers DRIVE Past Good to Awesome
Drive just might be my favorite movie of 2011. Certainly it is my favorite movie of the year so far. I loved it. Hands down. It is one of those rare movies that I wouldn’t change a thing about, and I say that after going in with high hopes based on Valhalla Rising(director Refn’s previous… Continue reading Ryan Gosling Steers DRIVE Past Good to Awesome
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 | movie review
It’s…over? After 10 years, eight films, and 1179 minutes (not to mention the books!), the Harry Potter series has finally come to its end. To be honest, I feel a lingering disbelief, an unwillingness to recognize that after such a span—literally years of anticipation—the last credits have finally rolled.
Enuka Okuma – “Cookie” – Interview
Enuka Okuma is a young actress and now a director. She will be back on ABC June 16th for season 2 of the summer series Rookie Blue “as the tough talking rookie cop, Traci Nash, that has a secret past and a killer right hook.” She can also be seen on the big screen starting July 1,… Continue reading Enuka Okuma – “Cookie” – Interview
Have a Drink on Ali Liebert on Harper’s Island – Interview
I recently had the pleasure of putting some questions to Canadian actress Ali Liebert, who I (and my long-time Boomtron followers) know best as “Nikki the bartender” from Harper’s Island. We talk about what her current projects are–hint: she has a lot!–and what it’s like working with people who have household name recognition. Read on to… Continue reading Have a Drink on Ali Liebert on Harper’s Island – Interview
The Black Death Tries Avoiding the Plague Like Cliches
The Black Death is about what you think it is. Set near the beginning of the era of the bubonic plague, it follows a young monk out of his abbey while he serves as guide for a group of knights on an errand from their bishop: to find a remote village said to be free… Continue reading The Black Death Tries Avoiding the Plague Like Cliches
Tangled and the Death of the Disney Fairy Tale
Like Nietzsche with God, last fall Disney declared that the fairy tale was dead. In this case, that is, Disney would no longer be making animated features out of the old stories. As a child of the golden years of Disney fairy tales in the early 90’s, I found this news unutterably depressing. Forget that… Continue reading Tangled and the Death of the Disney Fairy Tale
I Saw the Devil: Feel Good Movie of the Year – review
“The count’s frozen face was petrified and ashen and the blood still poured down the parallel cuts. His eyes bulged wide, full of horror and pain. It was glorious. If you like that kind of thing.” –William Goldman, The Princess Bride If you like that kind of thing, then I Saw the Devil really might… Continue reading I Saw the Devil: Feel Good Movie of the Year – review
I Sell the Dead | movie review
I Sell the Dead is proof that not every IFC production is golden. It’s from a couple years ago now—2008, I think—and showed up on my Netflix recommendations page and sounded interesting enough to try. And that was the movie’s entire problem: it sounded interesting, but somehow wasn’t. It’s about a pair of grave robbers… Continue reading I Sell the Dead | movie review
Source Code | movie review
Mozart originally ended his opera Don Giovanni with Don Giovanni descending into Hell, his soul claimed by the devil, and later added a final ensemble to bring the performance away from the bleakness of that end, which was considered too dark. For me, the opera is stronger with the final ensemble omitted, because it allows… Continue reading Source Code | movie review
The Lincoln Lawyer – review
Matthew McConaughey is one of those actors that you just love even though they don’t really do that many good movies. He’s done a handful over the years, maybe three or four, and he’s a man who makes a lot of movies. Thus I’ve joked for years that, with the amount of roles he takes,… Continue reading The Lincoln Lawyer – review
Adjusting the Adjustment Bureau
When a movie could have been good, but wasn’t, it becomes an even worse movie experience than if there had been no expectation, no potential, for anything better. So it was with The Adjustment Bureau. This movie was like 30 Days of Night: it had everything going for it—unique premise, great cast, decent if not… Continue reading Adjusting the Adjustment Bureau
Animal Kingdom | movie review
Animal Kingdom is not a movie about the jungle but simply the law of the jungle: it’s kill or be killed, and only the strong survive. As the poster tagline claims, it is a crime story, about a crime family–the Cody’s–and what happens when their anchor, their leader, is killed. The main character is teenager… Continue reading Animal Kingdom | movie review
Blue Valentine | movie review
Blue Valentine screened here at the NO Film Fest the same week Welcome to the Rileys, Black Swan, and 127 Hours did. I did not end up seeing it due to a prior engagement the night it screened, and so I watched the controversy about its rating–should it be NC17 or R, and if the… Continue reading Blue Valentine | movie review
The King’s Speech | movie review
The King’s Speech is a problematic movie for me. On the one hand, it’s a really great underdog story, the acting jobs were fabulous, and it’s a movie about hope in a time of darkness…but on the other hand is the history buff I know pointing out that he was hardly the only heroic figure… Continue reading The King’s Speech | movie review
The Dilemma | movie review
I almost didn’t go see this movie for three reasons: it was getting panned by Rotten Tomatoes (somewhere in the 20 percent’s when I checked, which is just shy of worst movie of the year numbers); acting opposite my boy Vince Vaughn was not Jon Favreau as I had thought from a half-watched preview but… Continue reading The Dilemma | movie review
True Grit | movie review
True Grit is the latest movie from the Coen brothers, and their best since No Country for Old Men. It convinces me that they should stick to movies that are not comedic in structure but simply in tone; this is a revenge story layered with dark humor, but the characters and the situations are always,… Continue reading True Grit | movie review
Tron Legacy – Review
Tron Legacy is the sort of movie that, in my opinion, requires a disclosure of a reviewer’s perspective up front. So to that end, I feel compelled to admit that I have only seen Tron once, and that I saw it about three days ago with the specific end of watching the original before I… Continue reading Tron Legacy – Review
The Black Swan review from the New Orleans Film Festival
I could review The Black Swan with one word: amazing. The film is dark and shifting, conflating dreams and obsessions into a terrifying reality where nothing is certain. Natalie Portman stars as Nina, a ballerina dedicated to achieving perfection whose first starring role is threatened by a new member of the troupe, the restless and… Continue reading The Black Swan review from the New Orleans Film Festival
127 Hours | movie review from the New Orleans Film Festival
Danny Boyle’s latest movie is based on a true story (chronicled in the memoir Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston), and it would be a disservice to the story and the film for me not to be open about all of it. So if you are looking to watch this movie… Continue reading 127 Hours | movie review from the New Orleans Film Festival
Gareth Edwards’ Monsters Review
Monsters is, as the title suggests, a monster movie. Sort of. It’s also an impressive achievement for a first-time director, much less one who had a tiny budget and created all the effects himself on an Intel-powered computer. The basic premise is set up in about three sentences at the start of the film—that a… Continue reading Gareth Edwards’ Monsters Review
Never Let Me Go | movie review
Never Let Me Go is adapted from a book that I have not read. So if you are looking for a book to film comparison, sorry, I can’t give you that—all I can judge is the story as presented in the movie. And while I walked out of this film overwhelmed by emotion and feeling… Continue reading Never Let Me Go | movie review
The Art of the Steal – Review
Now this is what a documentary should be! After my disappointment with Restrepo a couple weeks ago, I was thrilled to realize, after popping in this DVD, that The Art of the Steal was reminding me why I love documentary films in the first place. It takes an important but relatively obscure conflict, lays out the… Continue reading The Art of the Steal – Review
A Glimpse of Winter Falling – Game of Thrones
Since I missed the in-production teaser when it aired during the Countdown to True Blood on Sunday, I had to watch it on HBO’s website. Which meant that I also read the introduction by the producers (thank goodness there were no obvious spoilers in there, even if they did reference things that haven’t quite happened… Continue reading A Glimpse of Winter Falling – Game of Thrones
Winter’s Bone | movie review
Winter’s Bone is about a rural Missouri teenager whose drug-manufacturing father left her between a rock and a hard place when he put their property up to post his bond and then failed to make his court date. Ree, the teenage daughter holding together the family for her “sick” (read: withdrawn and broken) mother and… Continue reading Winter’s Bone | movie review
Jodelle Ferland Interview | Mum on Cabin in the Woods
Joss Whedon is a man of many secrets, and one of them is the precise nature of the threats or coercions he clearly uses to keep the cast of his latest project, The Cabin in the Woods, absolutely mum. Is it hit squads? Does he have the real-life model for Serenity’s unnamed Operative on speed-dial? … Continue reading Jodelle Ferland Interview | Mum on Cabin in the Woods
Inception | movie review
Inception is probably the first movie of 2010 that movie lovers have been legitimately anticipating—that is, looking forward to since that very first preview back in February. Certainly I was. Sometimes that anticipation is a bad thing, as when your hopes are dashed against a mediocre production; sometimes it makes a movie even better, when… Continue reading Inception | movie review
Twilight: Eclipse | movie review
I thought Eclipse was the best of the three movies so far, though not by as large a margin over New Moon as New Moon was over Twilight. New director David Slade retained the same look established by the first installment and continued, for better or worse (in my opinion worse) by the second. The only… Continue reading Twilight: Eclipse | movie review
Twilight with Jodelle Ferland | Interview
Jodelle Ferland is the young actress playing Bree Tanner in Twilight: Eclipse. She’s got a resume a mile long already, even though she’s not even sixteen, and it includes working with heavyweights like Terry Gilliam and Jeff Bridges and on movies like Silent Hill and The Messengers , which pretty much everyone who likes horror… Continue reading Twilight with Jodelle Ferland | Interview
Kick-Ass | movie review
Kick-Ass lives up to its name. Best movie I’ve seen at the theater in months. I had pretty high hopes going in–all the bad reviews I saw were focused on how violent it was, which just made me more excited–and sometimes that kind of anticipation makes the actual movie experience a let-down. Not so in this… Continue reading Kick-Ass | movie review
Cassandra Sawtell on Harper’s Island and Gilliam| Interview
Actress Cassandra Sawtell, whom we hear at the empire know from Harper’s Island, has been nominated for Best Performance in a TV Series (Comedy or Drama) at the 2010 Young Artist Awards for her work on the show. Cassandra joins fellow nominees Valentina Barron, Ryan Newman, Miley Cyrus, and Miranda Cosgrove in the category. The 31st Annual Young Artist… Continue reading Cassandra Sawtell on Harper’s Island and Gilliam| Interview
Repo Men | Movie Review
Repo Men is a movie I wish someone could repo from my memory banks. It was the biggest waste of two hours of my life since Avatar (and possibly longer, since it’s not a film that has the cultural valence of James Cameron’s mega-hit), and I damn near walked out on it. Ultimately I’m glad I… Continue reading Repo Men | Movie Review
Robert Pattinson’s Remember Me | movie review
Um. Wow. I am really not sure how to approach this one. First of all, this movie was not what I expected. It looked from the previews like a love story, possibly happy and possibly bittersweet, but a fairly straightforward story about a boy who starts seeing the daughter of a policeman he had a… Continue reading Robert Pattinson’s Remember Me | movie review
Adam Bertocci Interview
Sunday morning I brought the internet gem that is Two Gentlemen of Lebowski to your attention. Now I’ve got the man of the hour himself here to explain what possibly prompted him to combine Shakespeare and the Dude, why he thinks he’s qualified to do it, and how he went about putting together the greatest mash-up of all… Continue reading Adam Bertocci Interview
Daybreakers | movie review
Daybreakers, AKA 2010’s first vampire movie, is a pretty solid movie-going experience. It delivers on its trailers, presenting an eerie future where almost all the humans on earth have been changed into vampires–and in having done so not just not solved but actually worsened all of the problems and injustices in the world. The blood supply is on the… Continue reading Daybreakers | movie review
The Princess and the Frog – movie review
Brad Pitt called The Curious Case of Benjamin Button “a love letter to New Orleans.” Well. If Button was a love letter, then Disney’s The Princess and the Frog was a Homeric poem in the grand lady’s honor, because it caught the culture and flavor of New Orleans and southern Louisiana far better than the… Continue reading The Princess and the Frog – movie review
Twilight New Moon | movie review
Going to a midnight movie is an experience that has to be included in the review of the film. First, who was there? Mostly female–about 1 in 10 people were male–and not as many shrieking junior high girls as I expected. The audience was mostly high school/early college kids and adult women. Didn’t see any… Continue reading Twilight New Moon | movie review
Elena’s World – Zombieland review
The best romantic comedy of the year! I make that claim with only about 5% facetiousness. Zombieland, despite its name and premise (a pair of unlikely allies making their way through an America overrun with zombies) is much closer to a romantic comedy formula than a zombie movie formula.
Elena’s World – My Thoughts on Shane Acker’s 9
Shane Acker’s 9 is a movie that has been much anticipated around BSCReview. We pretty thoroughly covered the media blitz for this movie, all of which I found intriguing and enticing: the date tie-in, “9/9/9: 9.” The taglines—“When our world ended, their world began,” and, “This isn’t your little brother’s animated movie.” The previews that… Continue reading Elena’s World – My Thoughts on Shane Acker’s 9
EVirtuality | TV (FOX) review
Virtuality is a new original program that Fox premiered last night. It was unclear to me whether it was a TV movie or the pilot for a new series that may or may not actually advance into further episodes. The brief description I saw that made me tune it was that it is about a group of astronauts in space… Continue reading EVirtuality | TV (FOX) review
Chris Dane Owens | Interview
I am delighted to bring you a BSC exclusive interview with Chris Dane Owens! Chris has recently created one of the most magical and fabulous fantasy videos of all time to accompany his new single, “Shine on Me,” from his forthcoming album, Blue Stone. He was kind enough to let me pick his brain via email… Continue reading Chris Dane Owens | Interview