CHICAGO - MOVIE REVIEWS: GEORGE A. ROMERO'S DIARY OF THE DEAD

Zombies in tow, George A. Romero returns to the screen with Diary of the Dead, with a plot and hand-held-camera technique that several critics note are much like Cloverfield. The difference, says Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, is that Romero's film is "a lot cheaper-looking, generally smarter-sounding and a whole lot funnier." Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune also observes that while the shaky "syndrome kept Cloverfield on the run," Romero's film is "more provocatively handled ... and is funny and sad and rather sweet as zombie pictures go." But Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe & Mail isn't buying it. "Cloverfield is slick, immersive and gone in 88 minutes," he writes. "Romero's indie film is shambling, rough-edged and challenging in ways that go beyond audiences' tolerance for shaky cameras." Likewise Roger Moore writes in the Orlando Sentinel: "Where Cloverfield felt 'real,' with its amateur camera work and unedited, un-narrated narrative of a monster attack on New York, Diary is a slapdash, dully narrated, badly acted attempt at capturing that same look of 'found video.'" And Ty Burr sums up in the Boston Globe: "The movie plays like Cloverfield for grad students." Clearly critics are deeply divided over this latest Romero film, his fifth. While Peter Howell in the Toronto Star calls it "one of the best of the bunch," Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times describes it as Romero's "least successful vision of the zombie apocalypse."

15/02/2008