The scrappy salvage tug Arctic Warrior sets out to plunder the legendarily missing and newly discovered luxury liner, Antonia Graza, and all bloody hell breaks loose for Captain Sean Murphy (Gabriel Byrne, 100 percent sodium chloride), robust team leader Maureen Epps (Julianna Margulies) and their crew, guided by a completely…
This exceedingly graphic Holocaust drama concerns the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, a special squad of Jewish prisoners who, in exchange for better food and a few extra months of life, escorted their fellow Jews into the gas chambers, then cremated their corpses. It was a pact made with the devil. Actor Tim…
CHARACTERS Russell Simmons: He is 45, wears a white baseball cap, a T-shirt with the words “40 Acres and a Bentley” on the back and a sweat suit manufactured by the $300 million clothing company, Phat Farm, he started a decade ago. Russell, teeth as white and big as freshly…
Paul Thomas Anderson, the would-be Altman without the madman-genius baggage getting in the way, has forever ruined Adam Sandler. No longer will Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, Little Nicky, the Waterboy, Big Daddy–or whatever moronic icon he seems to be playing this week–again be allowed to grace the big screen by…
Death is too often taken literally, and this unfortunate perspective is sustained by much cinema, despite the medium’s dubious kiss of immortality. There’s easy drama in tragedy and grisly ends, but not commonly do moviemakers successfully deliver symbolic death, the subtly grim yet vital bridge between lively verses. Happily, director…
Give Tom Tykwer considerable credit for knowing he couldn’t possibly outdo Run Lola Run, his frenetic breakthrough that made critics cheer and took MTV pacing to a whole new level, blending animation with live action, still photos and alternate realities in a way that made sense and raised the viewer’s…
Much like a psychic, a cinema critic must look through a movie and see the other side. In the case of the new thriller The Ring–a remake of the 1998 Japanese hit, Ringu–the formative forces swim into focus without effort. There’s a Dreamworks boardroom, some executives exclaiming that Shrek can’t…
Honestly, I’ve never been much into schmaltzy movies about the old neighborhood. The whole scene seems pretty hellish; all that cutesy talk about this good old street or that once-hoppin’ nightclub. Therefore, when it’s announced there’s a movie called Welcome to Collinwood about a bunch of Hollywood actors playing shticky…
It’s a family affair when widowed, repressed Lilia (Hiyam Abbas) and her spunky daughter Salma (Hend El Fahem) just can’t get enough of a suave drummer, Chokri (Maher Kamoun). This bold and lyrical first feature from Raja Amari expands the pat notion that middle-aged women just wanna have fun into…
More inspired by than adapted from Leo Tolstoy’s story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Bernard Rose’s film is set in the very fast lane of a modern Hollywood that would have chilled the great Russian author to the bone. Ivan is a high-powered agent who snags a major actor as…
Part watered-down Neil LaBute, part Seinfeld episode (especially the one in which George’s fiancee licks the poison glue and dies) and part Waking Life, Just a Kiss follows a group of youngish couples (Ron Eldard, Kyra Sedgwick, Marisa Tomei, Patrick Breen and Taye Diggs, among others) in New York as…
Usually a master of creating aliens that go bump in the night, director David Twohy (Pitch Black) herein takes a turn toward ghosts and haunted houses, only this particular supernaturally afflicted domicile happens to be an American World War II submarine whose crew comes to the rescue of three survivors…
Think of the Sycamore family as the Munsters. The clan at the center of the effervescent production of You Can’t Take It With You now onstage at the WaterTower Theatre is a kooky bunch of lovable misfits occupying a spooky old two-story in Morningside Heights. With its stuffed animal heads…
Tony Hawk, since turning pro at 14, has made it seem possible to turn a passion into a career. Hawk is an icon, an innovator, an animated action star, a living legend adding another achievement to his résumé: a stunt circus. Employing other professional athletes such as Bucky Lasek (a…
With all the recent images of angry protesters and long bank lines, one would never know that the bustling boulevards of cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, Argentina, play host to bookstores and cafes that have served as havens for artists and intellectuals since the 1920s. Decades ago, a generation of transplanted Spanish…
Roger Avary’s screenplay for The Rules of Attraction is a remarkable work of literature: the disassembly and reconstruction of an impenetrable book by Bret Easton Ellis; a simplification and amplification of the 1987 novel’s attack on the bored, beautiful and wealthy; a streamlined and mainlined version of a story originally…
Good Lord, there hasn’t been this much blond hair on screen since the Von Trapp children sang and danced their way across the Alps in The Sound of Music. The fact that these latest golden locks belong to the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Wright Penn and Renée Zellweger suggests…
In the past few years–more or less since the failure of his embarrassing Joan of Arc epic The Messenger–former wunderkind director Luc Besson has become a fantastically prolific writer/producer. (The IMDB claims he has nine projects lined up for next year.) His latest, The Transporter–a swift if sometimes ridiculous action…
Dallas gained a lot more than it lost the day civil rights lawyer Frank P. Hernandez shut down his practice and drove to New York City to talk his way into New York University’s film school. He never established himself as a filmmaker, yet the experience helped inspire the area’s…
When real magic happens on a stage, as it does in Quad C Theatre’s current production of A Clockwork Orange, an audience may undergo something akin to alchemy. We sit down as our normal, numbed-out selves, a little work-weary, or logy from the bowl of teriyaki grabbed before curtain time…
There are worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than viewing Pamela Joseph’s Sideshow of the Absurd, on view at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary. The State Fair midway is less entertaining and a lot pricier. The MAC is closer than Six Flags. It beats the History Channel, and the DMA,…
No one denies that a man’s head was smashed in, most likely with a camera tripod, on June 29, 1978, in an Arizona hotel room. No one denies that this same man was a porno freak, a maker and watcher and star of homemade sex films. No one denies he…
