Brew Views Will Ferrell’s charm (always a precarious thing) depends wholly on his innocence. If you ever get the feeling he knows better, Ferrell’s pushiness becomes insufferable, since every vehicle h   More

Brew Views Hans Gruber is Santa Claus. This should be obvious even to those disadvantaged souls who didn’t grow up with Die Hard on TV as the family yule log. Consider: Both have murky European origins, bo   More

Brew Views  There are two movies inside The Help, and you may as well know about both before your folks drag you to see them this Thanksgiving. One is a slightly self-congratulating tear-jerker about a whit   More

Brew Views Contagion was hailed as Stephen Soderbergh’s return to Traffic form, which is all well and good until you remember that Traffic is the worst film Soderbergh has made. Contagion is better, mostly bec   More

Brew Views There’s a secularist party going on this weekend at Portland Humanist Film Festival, which includes a costume-contest screening
   More

Brew Views Since Hollywood is forever bent on remaking its thrillers with more gore and less brains—the hee-haw replica of Straw Dogs is merely the latest example—we might as well get in on the ground floor.   More

Brew Views Twin girls hacked to pieces. Torrents of blood spilling from an elevator. Shelley Duvall. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is full of creepy imagery. But it’s the film’s family dynamic that’s the   More

Brew Views Horror is driven by imitation, and there was no better rip-off artist than Lucio Fulci. The Italian schlock-shock maestro built a career nibbling from other, better movies. But perennial favorite Zo   More

Brew Views Shaun of the Dead has infected so many imitators in seven years that the mention of Edgar Wright’s genre-bender almost summons a reflexive twinge of dislike. I’m actually pretty bored by the zo   More

Brew Views The knee-jerk response to Sarah Palin: You Betcha! is that the Barracuda from Wasilla has gotten a documentary she richly deserves, though it might be just as true that wanting to make a Sarah Pali   More