by Richard von Busack
MY GRANDMOTHER had a unique expression for someone taking the out-of-the-way path: “You’re going by way of Robin Hood’s barn.” Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood—overlong, hideously expensive, graceless to the extreme—follows just that …

by Richard von Busack
OSS 117: Lost in Rio: Double-one-seven est de retour.
There are Bond geeks and then there are Bond geeks, but the makers of OSS 117: Lost in Rio (opening Friday) deserve an honorary …

The Good, The Bad and the Weird: the good, the bad and the overlong.
by Richard von Busack
There’s loads of undifferentiated action in Ji-Woon Kim’s The Good, The Bad and the Weird—a Sergio Leone pastiche with …

by Richard von Busack
Iron Man 2: Heavy metal, rocket men, and weirdly elegant screwball comedy.
Elating, if politically confusing, Iron Man 2 serves up the pleasures of a gorgeous and energetic superhero film. It’s buffered with …

by Richard von Busack
Look at Oceans Disneynature as some recompense for that snorkeling trip to Molokini you won’t be making this year, thanks to the boys at Goldman Sachs. The lack of narrative thrust and …

by Richard von Busack
Many movie are called The Little Film That Could—Raymond De Felitta’s film deserves the name; the tale has tallness as well as heart. It concerns a tangle of confusion hitting the Rizzos, …

by Richard von Busack
In the Meandros Valley in Turkey in 1920, a strange artifact is discovered:an ancient board game dedicated to the great god Pan. The game is refurbished, but sfter it kills its discoverers, …

by Richard von Busack
In the Meandros Valley in Turkey in 1920, a strange artifact is discovered:an ancient board game dedicated to the great god Pan. The game is refurbished, but sfter it kills its discoverers, …

By Richard von Busack
There are two schools of thought about comic books. One is that they serve our hunger for folk-tale simplicity. The friction of passing time magnetizes these stories, making them attract elements of …

by Richard von Busack
It would be hard to make a movie in San Francisco’s Mission District that wasn’t good to look at, but director Peter Bratt aims at something holier than that. La Mission is …