By Rex Reed 10/23/12 7:51pm

movies

Tosar in Sleep Tight.

Sleep Tight, Don’t Let The Doorman Bite: This Everyday Joe Will Have You Reaching for the Dead-Bolt

Sleep Tight is a creepy—but highly effective and superbly made—horror movie from Spain in which the monster is spine-tinglingly human. The logo in the ads reads “Someone Is Watching Over You,” and they’re not just whistling Vaya Con Dios. Set in an otherwise upscale apartment building in Barcelona, everything looks inviting. It’s the doorman you want to beware of.

The keeper of the keys—who goes bump in the night, in more ways than one—is César (Luis Tosar). As the super as well as the concierge, he’s privy to the needs, secrets and problems of every tenant in the building—and victim to all their complaints. He feeds their dogs. He changes their locks. He fixes their plumbing. It’s time to get even. Read More

By Rex Reed 6/26/12 4:44pm

theater

Hall and Hendrix in 7th Monarch.

7th Monarch Is Lost in Space: Wonky Psycho Thriller Fails To Launch

What a mess. 7th Monarch is the title of a confusing new play by Jim Henry, a writer from Chicago who got lucky, at the Acorn on West 42nd Street’s Theatre Row, a show that manages to seduce the audience into thinking something of import is going to happen at any minute. When two hours pass and it becomes obvious that nothing has happened yet, and nothing ever will, you wonder who to turn to in order to complain about it, but by that time the box office is closed and even the ushers are scratching their heads.

This is what I know. Read More

By Rex Reed 2/29/12 9:24am

movies

Seyfried's amateur performance kidnapped an hour and a half of movie-goers' time.

Gone: Would-Be Starlet Screams Bloody Murder in Thrilless Thriller

Amanda Seyfried is not well. So much potential and Star-of-Tomorrow hype has failed to pay off. Her career looks anemic. Her screen presence has turned her pallid—and me, too. It’s hard to believe, but she walked out of her leading role as the most sensible Mormon in the hit HBO series Big Love after 45 episodes to play Meryl Streep’s gooey daughter in the nauseating Mama Mia and then fall in love with a werewolf in the idiotic Red Riding Hood. Now she gets star billing in a latent snooze called Gone, which will be exactly that before you can even find out where it’s playing. Beware of movies that are not screened in advance for the critics. The reasons are usually manifest. Now that I’ve seen Gone, I know why.

Gifted and sincere as she always is, there’s not much Ms. Seyfried can do with this tripe. Read More

By Rex Reed 2/14/12 7:56pm

movies

Washington looks back menacingly at this bad decision.

Safe House Experiences Blowback

Movies about covert CIA operatives make their own clichés, and in a violent and pointless waste of time and money called Safe House, they come in twos, like double vision. This movie wouldn’t be worth the effort even if it were about something, which it isn’t. Correction: It’s about how Denzel Washington is not above trashing his reputation when the salary works, even if the movie doesn’t. Read More

By Rex Reed 1/17/12 7:39pm

movies

Carano. (Claudette Barius/Five Continents Imports, LLC)

Haywire? Relax Steven, It’s Worse Than You Think

Just what we need — another violent comic-book fantasy about another covert government operative (a catch-phrase that describes just about everybody in escapist-action franchise movies from incoherent Tom Cruise Mission Impossible flicks to Jason Bourne cinematic Xeroxes with Matt Damon). This one is called Haywire. The only difference is that this time the battering ram doing all the kickboxing, slicing and killing is a woman, more or less played, since she cannot act, by kung fu expert, karate specialist, martial arts star and Angelina Jolie wannabe Gina Carano. She’s a female boxer who was defeated in 2009 by Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos in the Strikeforce Women’s Championship, whatever that is. The men she beats the crap out of are an all-star bevy of camera-ready hunks baring their pecs in faceless roles to sell tickets. They are wasting their time, but, boy, do we need them. It is doubtful that the box-office flame exuded by Ms. Carano on her own could draw moths.

Haywire makes no sense whatsoever, which should come as no surprise. It’s the latest brainless exercise in self-indulgence from Steven Soderbergh, whose films rarely make any sense anyway. Read More

By Rex Reed 12/14/11 9:39am

movies

Mara and Craig.

Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is Quite the Swedish Dish

In the blood-soaked hands of the hair-raising, always surprising director David Fincher, the creepy remake of Sweden’s grisly thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is dreary and confusing but technically superb—a darkly photographed and superbly acted film. It is not my cup of bitter tea laced with arsenic, but I admire its tenacity in keeping the viewer dazzled, while the toxic effect of its violence, sometimes unwatchable, left me charged. I hated the 2009 Swedish film version, my dashed attempt to read the book (the first volume in the crime trilogy by the late, overrated Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson) put me to sleep faster than a double-dose of Dalmane, and I still don’t understand why it has been recycled in an estimated $100 million remake as unnecessary as it is unoriginal. It is also impossibly long-winded. When it ended, after just under a whopping three hours, I ended up impressed, in spite of my reservations. If I had found it even half as incomprehensible as it is, I might have liked it twice as much.

Oh, my god, that plot. Read More

By Rex Reed 10/11/11 7:30pm

movies

Kidman and Gigandet.

Trespass is Another Red Chief Ransom

How many ways can a film go wrong? Too many to list, and Trespass finds them all. This pointless, unintentionally campy home-invasion thriller, directed by Joel Schumacher, is as bad as it gets, and as one dumb red herring follows another, it just gets sillier and sillier. By the end, the audience at the screening I attended was roaring with laughter. Read More