By Matt Brunson

Chance encounters and other extraordinary circumstances of this nature are tricky beasts when it comes to their employment in motion pictures. We swallow them when we want to swallow them — i.e. when the film in question has us completely in its grasp — but spit them out without even bothering to chew when we find them too artificial, when they’re employed merely for the sake of convenience by a filmmaker who lazily needs to connect Plot Point A to Plot Point B.

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By Matt Brunson

If there’s one fault to be found with the Coen Brothers’ superb Oscar winner No Country for Old Men, it’s that there simply aren’t enough scenes featuring Kelly Macdonald, the wee Scottish lass who’s previously appeared in such diverse works as Trainspotting, Gosford Park and Finding Neverland. Her No Country role as Josh Brolin’s sympathetic wife is small but pivotal; to catch her in a part that’s both large and pivotal, check out The Merry Gentleman, a low-simmer drama that marks Michael Keaton’s directorial debut.

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To paraphrase Sen. Lloyd Bentsen’s smackdown of Sen. Dan Quayle during the 1988 Vice Presidential Debate: “Bruno, I screened Borat; I knew Borat; Borat was a review of mine. Bruno, you’re no Borat.”

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By Matt Brunson

In terms of sustained quality, I daresay that the Harry Potter franchise trumps all other series featuring more than three entries. That other “Harry,” Dirty Harry, falls just short, and even the entertaining James Bond canon has been subject to a few missteps over the decades. But Potter and friends have been delighting movie audiences since first taking their bows in 2001, and the individual works have been so consistently fine that it’s no wonder more than one title has been tossed around as the best of the bunch (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban seems to be the slight favorite among buffs, although forced to choose, I’d have to go with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire). And now here’s the sixth installment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, to add more fuel to the fiery debate.

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By Matt Brunson

Combining a jock’s air of entitlement with a slacker’s sense of detachment has allowed Steve Zahn to carve out a lengthy (if not exactly stellar) career in all manner of indie fare. Not charismatic enough to hold his own in major-studio efforts, Zahn can usually be found in supporting roles in small-scale efforts, sniffing around the edges while the top-billed stars soak up all the acclaim.

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By Matt Brunson

The documentary Food, Inc. is the perfect bookend movie, adaptable to many double-feature bills. When paired with Super-Size Me, it serves as the “before” shot, showing how those hamburgers came into being (so to speak), and how they’re made so tasty — and unhealthy. When paired with The Corporation (still the scariest movie I have ever seen), it functions as a particular case study of the evils detailed in that earlier picture, which was all about how these United States of America have been reconfigured to operate as nothing more than the personal (and profitable) playgrounds of a few select conglomerates and their insidious overlords. Heck, it can even be paired with Howard Hawks’ classic Red River, in which Wild West cowboy Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) delivers an impassioned speech about the personal satisfaction of herding cattle and feeding the populace (”… Good beef for hungry people. Beef to make them strong; make them grow …”). Poor Thomas would (pardon the pun) have a cow if he could see the mechanical means by which animals are slaughtered today.

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It’s a fact that several of Woody Allen’s movies have found him paired on-screen with women decades his junior (Mira Sorvino, Tiffani Thiessen, Mariel Hemingway, etc.). But with Whatever Works, it appears the 73-year-old filmmaker finally drew the line and elected to pair 21-year-old Evan Rachel Wood with someone closer to her own age.

So he sent in 62-year-old Larry David to pinch-hit.

For Matt Brunson’s full review, click here.

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Moviegoers hoping that Public Enemies would have been the film to save the summer season from its own worst impulses will be disappointed to learn that the Michael Mann production, while hardly part of the problem, is certainly no solution. A classy motion picture whose individual moments are greater than the whole, this period gangster saga may be filled with exciting gun battles yet can’t deliver the firepower in ways that matter the most: empathy, originality, and a willingness to burrow beneath the legend.

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By Matt Brunson

To both my horror and delight — horror because of my general disdain for the Michael Bay oeuvre, delight because of my desire to enjoy every picture I see (contrary to popular belief, film critics don’t enter a theater wanting to hate the movie; what sort of dreary, masochistic career would that make?) — I somewhat dug 2007’s Transformers, writing in my original review that “even folks who wouldn’t know a Transformer from a Teletubby can expect to have a good time” and praising the film for being “decidedly more character-driven than expected” and “balancing action with emotion.” For this, I credited the presence of executive producer Steven Spielberg, who was described in the press notes as being a “hands-on producer” during the making of a film that, in its best moments, recalled the mirth of Spielberg’s own 1980s output. Well, Spielberg must have been on an extended vacation and far away from the set during the making of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a perfectly dreadful sequel that’s the filmic equivalent of a 150-minute waterboarding session.

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by Matt Brunson

Making a weepie for mass audiences can’t be that hard: Just place a person in a tragic situation and steer clear of the resultant flood. But making a weepie that doesn’t feel manipulative, exploitive or sloppily sentimental is another matter altogether. With My Sister’s Keeper, an adaptation of Jodi Picoult’s novel, director-cowriter Nick Cassavetes largely succeeds in respecting both his subject matter and his audience.

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