While not nearly as tedious and punishing as An Unexpected Journey, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is still a bloated mess, but at least it’s a fun mess.

In returning to his cinematic vision of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Peter Jackson has fallen into shadow and ruin.

Once upon a time, Peter Jackson knew how to do this. His 1994 film, Heavenly Creatures, was a large part of the reason he was given the keys to Middle Earth and allowed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars as a relative unknown on one of the most anticipated film projects of the last decade, The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He had already shown, in the jokey cult splatter flicks of his…

We, here at DCist, are football fans. We, the individual writing this paragraph, are not. We realize that the use of the editorial “we” can get a little confusing in situations like this. Bear with me. Er…us. At any rate, we used to have an avid interest in the sport, once upon a time, in our youth. When exactly it was that the game lost its luster to us is a bit of a mystery,…

If last week’s review of Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep was about a movie that tried to make real life look like a comic book, Christian Volckman’s first feature-length film, Renaissance, tries to make a comic book look like real life. The basis of the movie’s imagery is motion capture technology, by which the movements of an actor’s body are recorded by sensors attached to his clothing (used memorably by Peter Jackson in the…

FRIDAY: >> The Avalon Theatre is hosting Prism 2005: The New Cinema of Serbia and Montenegro through Sunday, and tonight at 7 p.m. is popular Serbian actor-director-producer Ljubisa Samardzic’s Skyhook. The film (pictured), a surprisingly life-affirming basketball flick set in the midst of NATO bombings in 1999, earned positive buzz at the 2000 Berlin Film Festival. >> We don’t know about you, but we’ve been kinda addicted to Peter Jackson’s Production Diary, the LOTR director’s…