items tagged with Solaris

ANALYZE THAT and EMPIRE

It’s enough to make a grown movie-critic weep: You rave about Solaris, a science-fiction work that’s psychologically rich, challenging, and incredibly unusual, and you read in the paper that the audience-tracking firm Cinemascore has ranked it the most universally loathed major release in 20 years. You check out the top-10 list from the National Board of Review, the first organization to hand out year-end kudos, and realize that only one of those 10 films has (as yet) made it to the Quad Cities, and that one only stayed for a week at Moline’s Nova 6 Cinemas. And you eagerly look forward to a December weekend of new releases – surely some of those terrific-looking titles will finally appear? – and your only options are Analyze That and Empire.

SOLARIS

In the interest of full journalistic disclosure, let me preface this review of Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris by admitting that, in the first 15 minutes, I briefly nodded off.