Review: Cloverfield

Short Review: Not as bad as you'd've thought.

Long Review: An amazingly gripping 84 minutes. Yes, it's all from the perspective of a handheld video camera, and yes, there are a couple of Blair Witch moments, but on the whole, director Matt Reeves manages to keep the nausea-cam to a minimum and has the timing to pare down some of the downtime so the whole thing keeps moving. Suffice it to say that the only thing that really stretched my willing suspension of disbelief to the breaking point was the idea that everyone who showed up for the party that starts the movie was either a model or model material; apart from that, it was consistent within its own twist on reality.

Also, as Warren Ellis pointed out, it's nice to know that we've reached enough of a healing point that we can handle watching New York get trashed in a movie, even if there were still some uneasy parallels to the Towers collapsing.

Caveats: plenty of jumping moments, lots of blood, plenty of critter violence, and the occasional character idiocy, but not too much of any of these. A thumb-up, at least once.