What's presumably intended as a populist red-state revenge fantasy about the dangers of sexy foreigners instead unfolds as an aggro-trash video game where the player is a middle-aged man who fetishizes sexual paranoia and doesn't feel completely alive unless his daughter is staring down the barrel of a loaded cock. The bodies pile up and the villains only get swarthier as the porno-conspiracy snakes its way up Euro society. Fortunately it's over quickly and you hardly feel a thing. (That's what she said.) Grade: C-
Dreamy presentation, convincing physics, consummate touch gameplay.
Artist: Thieves Like Us. Album: Play Music.
Artist: Sick Puppies. Album: Street Fighter (War) – Single.
Director Ken Kwapis is really into staging scenes where two actors basically run lines in front of the exposed brick wall from a generic early-Nineties comedy club. Grade: D+
Artist: Rebecca Schiffman. Album: To Be Good For a Day.
This German-engineered thriller somehow manages to be deliberate and detailed without once making a lick of sense. Clive Owen shoulders the burden of a plodding plot while an underutilized Naomi Watts executes a flawless impression of a saucer of milk. Oh, but there's a gunfight in the Guggenheim that's notable primarily because it makes you wonder who at the venerable museum thought it would be a good idea to let the filmmakers stage a massacre in that iconic space. Grade: C
Angsty and inert when it should be exploitative and busy, this dull gloss on hyperkinesis is almost avant-garde in its refusal to be entertaining. Grade: F
The intrinsic claustrophobia of stop-motion animation lends itself to this tale of a little girl who flees entrapment in an ordinary life only to risk imprisonment in a far more fantastic one. The movie is essentially one hundred minutes of great texture and atmosphere—which, while compelling enough, ultimately aren't a substitute for good storytelling. Grade: B
Artist: The Sleepy Jackson. Album: Lovers.
Artist: Ben Wise. Album: Beside the Dial.
Artist: The Virgins. Album: The Virgins.
Artist: Dawn Landes. Album: Straight Lines.