Review: Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son

Reviews

Review: The Reader

Tiresome and callow

By PETER KEOUGH | January 9, 2009

2.5 Stars

VIDEO: The trailer for The Reader

It's Christmas, and our thoughts turn toward the Third Reich. Or so it would seem from the films being released for the holiday: two deal directly with the subject and The Spirit offers a tasteless Nazi sequence.

Of the three, this adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's bestseller ponders the deepest issues — e.g. (spoiler), how should a kid feel after he finds out that the older babe he slept with is a war criminal? Stephen Daldry complicates matters with a tiresome frame story set in the future as old Michael (Ralph Fiennes) looks back at his 15-year-old self (David Kross) getting it on with tram conductor Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), or reading to her, or putting up with her tantrums.

Who knew she'd turn out to be a she-devil of the SS and too dumb to defend herself at her trial? The film lingers more on Winslet's nudity than on the nature of guilt, and it offers no reason to care for the lumpen criminal or the callow lover.

Review: The Kindly Ones
Those put off by the soft-pedaling of the SS in the movie adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader might be wary of Jonathan Littell's memoir of fictional war criminal Maximilien Aue.
Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
For teenagers, everything seems like the end of the world: popularity, school, love, family, treacherous conspiracies, the war between good and evil wizards.
Oscar predictions: Liberal gilt
It's like a fairy tale for Hollywood liberals.
Review: The Hurt Locker
Now that the troops are pulling out and the war no longer haunts the headlines, maybe people will want to see a film about Iraq — especially since it's one of the best war movies ever made.
Review: Clash of the Titans
It takes a lot of movie magic to reduce some 3000 years of mythology to piffle. After watching this farrago produced by state-of-the-art 3-D and CGI, I’m all for the return of the oral tradition.
Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One
When a movie begins with the Warner Bros. logo crumbling in decay and ends with a defiled grave, you know you've experienced an evening of magic.
Review: Carnage
As befits someone with jail time hanging over his head, Roman Polanski does his best work in close quarters. From Knife in the Water , to Repulsion , to The Tenant and The Pianist , he's a master of claustrophobic close encounters, and as such has a good time adapting Yasmin Reza's play, God of Carnage .
Review: Harlan — In The Shadow Of 'Jud Süß'
The story of Veit Harlan, the director of the Third Reich’s most notorious anti-Semitic film, still provokes and fascinates.
Review: Paris 36
Director Christophe Barratier (Les Choristes) co-wrote this nostalgic paean to 1930s Paris and the stage musical.
Review: North Face
Nazi queen Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light (1932) was only one example of a peculiar, culturally specific German genre known as "mountain films."
Jewishfilm.2010
They aren’t the most auspicious of couplings: an Arab and Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied Tunis in 1942; a butcher and his apprentice in Haredi Jerusalem; the survivor of a terrorist bombing and a stranger who might be a guardian angel.
Less

Topics: Reviews , Culture and Lifestyle, Nazi Party, History, More

| More

Friends' Activity

Popular

Most Viewed

See more deals

view all

[ 02/16 ] Boston Conservatory Dance Division @ Boston Conservatory Theater

[ 02/16 ] Jim Gaffigan @ Wilbur Theatre

[ 02/16 ] "Raw Milk Debate" @ Harvard Law School

ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH

REVIEW: SAFE HOUSE | February 15, 2012
Daniel Espinosa's over-edited but engaging spy thriller delves into edgy territory untouched by any of the numerous movies it imitates: it has Brendan Gleeson do an American accent.

REVIEW: THE SECRET WORLD OF ARRIETTY | February 15, 2012
The most touching love story and best children's movie in a long time, Hiromasa Yonebayashi's adaptation of Mary Norton's book The Borrowers employs old-fashioned animation techniques to create a world that is familiar, uncanny, and luminous.

REVIEW: RAMPART | February 15, 2012
The rotten cop flick has become a mini-genre of sorts, a subset of noir, going back at least to Orson Welles's Touch of Evil .

REVIEW: THE OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS 2012: DOCUMENTARY | February 10, 2012
The films in this program contain some of the most powerful images to be seen on the screen this year.

REVIEW: JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND | February 07, 2012
I liked the tiny elephants and the Rock bouncing berries off his pecs, but Brad Peyton's sequel is as bad as the 2008 original.

See all articles by: PETER KEOUGH

Most Viewed

Most Emailed

ANARCHISTIC AND SELF-TRAINED, ARE STREET MEDICS THE FUTURE OF FIRST AID?
April 25, 2009: outside of the IMF/World Bank meeting in Washington, DC, police with batons are attacking a group of protesters.

THE OVERDUB TAMPERING COMMITTEE
Armed with an idea, a hastily written manifesto, a press release, and some software to disguise my computer's IP address, I was able to raise the question, "How do you know that what you're illegally downloading is the actual music it claims to be?" This is a story about how my pop-music infatuation led me to fabricating a web of lies I called the Overdub Tampering Committee.

MAY YOU AND PORTLANDIA BE VERY HAPPY TOGETHER!
Thanks to Portlandia I now know way too much about you guys and your grody inner lives. It's not the show itself — it doesn't have that power. It's your horrifying enthusiasm for the show that has granted me this mirror.

LOVE HURTS: EMO VALENTINE'S DAY CARDS
Sometimes it's hard to express how you feel to that special person. Well, womens' urban art collective Paint Pens in Purses has solved your problem with these lovely cards.

OUT: PREPARING FOR ONE H.E.L.L. OF A WEEKEND IN CAMBRIDGE
Next weekend at the Democracy Center in Harvard Square, Vermont DIY label Get Stoked! Records and bike safety group Helping Everyone Live Long (H.E.L.L.) will co-host a weekend with a stacked line-up of Northeast punk, hardcore, indie rock, pop-punk, and emo bands.