Culture Vulture

MOVIE REVIEW: HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART 2 [No spoilers] This weekend’s debut beat all previous records of a 3-day opening with $168.6M, surpassing even that of my previously reviewed Batman: Dark Knight. Even the midnight showing Friday morning picked up almost $44M. The Harry Potter books are quite popular and I’ve read [...]

MOVIE REVIEW: THE KING’S SPEECH A thing of grace and triumph. Here is a movie that’s already getting lots of Oscar buzz, and you know why? It deserves it. This is the best movie I’ve seen this year, or in a couple of years. It is not only deeply moving, but also beautiful to behold. [...]

MOVIE REVIEW: AVATAR I’ve seen some interviews with movie producers recently, mostly Pixar, saying that all the key producers are moving to 3D. I’ve taken these words with a pillar of salt, as just new ways to capture the eyeballs of price-sensitive consumers who are nervous about spending $10 a head to attend the cinema, [...]

MOVIE REVIEW: STAR TREK Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life-forms and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before. If you’ve already read my History of Star Trek article, this is the future [...]

Movie Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine When I read comic books in my youth, I always loved the “origin of” issues, which told me about he beginnings of my favorite super heroes. I was a big reader and collector of X-Men comics, of course, and have enjoyed the previous three movies to greater and lesser degrees. [...]

JAMES BOND – QUANTUM OF SOLACE The latest James Bond movie opened this weekend in the US, beginning on Friday. It is already #1 in Europe, having opened there a week earlier, and a huge hit in the UK, where it opened two weeks ago. The first weekend in the UK was a record at [...]

MOVIE REVIEW: MAMMA MIA! Official disclaimer: I have seen the stage musical version of Mamma Mia! six times. My wife and I first saw it in London, and as we walked out at the end of the exciting encore, we both turned to each other and said “I could see that again.” Two days later [...]

MOVIE REVIEW: BATMAN – THE DARK KNIGHT The second installment of the new Batman franchise, begun with Batman Begins, picks up our story not long after where we left off. But I’m not going to talk about the plot of The Dark Knight, other than to say it starts with a bang involving a powerful [...]

MOVIE REVIEW: WALL-E What a sweet movie, what a cute film. Who else but Pixar could make a movie that’s animation, science-fiction, comedy, spaceships, green — and romance…and make it all work? And the tributes to other movies of this genre! In the same way that Pixar’s The Incredibles paid tribute to early James Bond [...]

I have written a movie review of Iron Man at my other blog. Come by and visit the article here. Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood culture vulture www.billpetro.com