CHICAGO - MOVIE REVIEWS: CLOVERFIELD

Cloverfield, the latest giant monster movie, is getting some surprisingly decent reviews from critics who usually love to lay in to disaster movies of any sort. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, for example, concedes that it "is actually pretty scary at times." Ebert complains mostly about the hand-held footage, which he says was shot in "Queasy-Cam." (It's supposed to represent home movie footage taken by the monster's victims.) Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times observes, "Cloverfield is adept at wringing maximum suspense and might have reached the heights of the Korean monster film The Host but for the limitations of the camcorder ploy. While it injects the film with a run-and-gun urgency, the device grows tiresome and ultimately leaves the film shortchanged." Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, however, suggests that even at 84 minutes, the movie may run too long: "The film is too dumb to offend anything except your intelligence," she writes, "and the monster does cut a satisfying swath through the cast, so your only complaint may be, What took it so long?"

18/01/2008