You want a history lesson? Take a class. You want clanging swords, sneering villains, storybook romance and bloody vengeance? Here’s a brawny, old-school epic to make the CGI tumult of 300, Alexander and Troy look like sissy-boy slap parties. Mongol, alias Genghis Khan: The Early Years, may compress, elide and…
A topsy-turvy Escherland exists where Dario Argento’s The Mother of Tears is considered a twisted classic, and it is a magical place. Up is down, sour is sweet, sewer rat tastes like pumpkin pie, and Hitchcock never made a more ripping yarn than Jamaica Inn. A once-great director’s near-worst work…
To my 10-year-old daughter, the term “American Girl” means “that store my meanie of a mom—unlike all the other, higher-quality moms—won’t let me go near.” Why should I? She hates dolls, and I—creeped out by row upon row of homogenized mannequins with staring, Stepford Wife eyes and designer threads—get nauseated…
In recent days, Universal’s been running a TV spot for The Incredible Hulk that gives away what should come as no surprise to any fanboy worth his action figure collection: the appearance of Robert Downey Jr. as, natch, Tony Stark. From the delighted, deafening squeals of at least one sneak-preview…
The screenwriter Steven Conrad writes movies about success and self-fulfillment in America—how we define it, the price we pay for it and what it looks like depending on where you’re standing. In Conrad’s The Weather Man, the central figure was a vain TV news personality who had everything that money…
The Happening What a bunch of nonsense—effective nonsense, chilling nonsense, occasionally wrenching nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless. This is what happens when M. Night Shyamalan tries to play both John Carpenter (bloody) and Stanley Kubrick (cold-blooded) while writing and directing what the literalist will either dismiss or embrace as the horror-film…
The Foot Fist Way has been trying to break into theaters since clawing its way down film-fest row, beginning at Sundance in ’06. It took Will Ferrell and his comedy life partner Adam McKay to get distributors interested. Notes the trailer: The men behind Anchorman’s desk and Talladega Nights’ wheel…
Behold Adam Sandler, in a passable Israeli accent and outsize codpiece, as Zohan the Mossad super-heavy: catching barbecued fish in his butt crack on a Tel Aviv beach, repelling bullets with his nostril, sculpting hand grenades into toy poodles for delighted Palestinian children while making mincemeat of an Arab terrorist…
Oh, please—spoiler alert? Fine, I won’t tell you whether Carrie Bradshaw ties the knot with Mr. Big, even though you’ve already seen that gown winging its way around the Web. Given the Sex and the City vibe, some fans might be more interested in whether the frock—which looks as though…
Halfway through Surfwise, a mesmerizingly ambivalent documentary about an itinerant family of Jewish surfer-dude health nuts, we meet the 84-year-old patriarch, “Doc” Paskowitz, at Los Angeles’s Museum of Tolerance, showing director Doug Pray a blown-up photo of a Nazi preparing to shoot a Jewish mother and child at close range…
It’s been 20 years since Errol Morris made The Thin Blue Line—a found “noir” that served to free an innocent man convicted of murder. Gathering evidence and dramatizing testimony, Morris’ movie circled around a single, unrepresentable event—the death of a cop on a lonely stretch of Texas highway. The Thin…
A man in a Michael Jackson outfit—red shirt, black jeans, white face mask—rides hunched over the tiny frame of a clown bike. Jutting out to his side, attached by a wire, is a stuffed monkey puppet with angel wings. The background is a nondescript go-cart track lined with brightly colored…
CANNES, France—No need for dreaming here. Each Cannes Film Festival generates its own metaphors for a 10-day regimen of visions in the dark. It’s impossible to forget, let alone transcend, one’s unnatural situation here. The opening film of Cannes’s 2008 edition clobbered participants with a cautionary allegory. Regardez: The civilized…
Here’s your hat, Indy, but, really, what’s your hurry? Because 19 years after the Last Crusade that clearly wasn’t, and 15 years after the old man joined Young Indiana Jones on the small screen to recount his glory days blowing horns with Sidney Bechet, it’s almost unfathomable that this hoary…
Things never happen the same way twice.” Thus boometh Aslan the lion (Liam Neeson), alias the Son of God, popping his computer-generated shaggy head briefly into The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian to pep-talk a bunch of discouraged Brits into fighting the good fight again. As in life, so in…
Before the Rains Directed by Santosh Sivan. Written by Cathy Rabin and Dan Verete. Starring Linus Roache, Nandita Das and Jennifer Ehle. Opens Friday. British plantation owner and colonialist extraordinaire Henry Moores (Linus Roache) fancies himself the cowboy of Kerala, cavorting around the jungle with his Indian mistress, Sajani (Nandita…
Converting a fondly remembered cartoon series—one of the first Japanese animes syndicated on American TV—into a prospective franchise, the Matrix masters, Larry and Andy Wachowski, have taken another step toward the total cyborganization of the cinema. Even more than most summer-season f/x fests, Speed Racer is a live action/animation hybrid…
David Mamet’s Redbelt is a tricky bar brawl—call it the Roundhouse of Games. The writer-director has scarcely abandoned his sense of the movies as an innately duplicitous medium, one best suited to stories that play out as conspiratorial chess matches. But, with his 10th feature—an entertaining tale of high-stakes martial…
No adult has ever been able to codify what separates a good movie from a classic. In kid terms, though—those favored by Son of Rambow, a chipper tribute to the cinema as both supplier and repository of dreams—a good movie merely sends you bounding home from the theater. A great…
Chalk it up to personal preference, but I’ve always been fonder of those comic-book heroes who emerge by intent rather than happenstance. I mean the ones, like Batman’s Bruce Wayne, whose transformation from average Joe into masked crusader is an act of will instead of the unintended result of a…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A lonely dwarf, a wisecracking Cuban-American and a grieving mother walk into each other’s lives, laugh together, cry together, grow, change and heal each other’s emotional wounds. Cue Sundance prizes, Miramax pickup, torrent of glowing reviews and a surprisingly robust indie box-office…
In Made of Honor, Patrick Dempsey plays a conveniently rich and willfully single serial “fornicator” slowly but surely domesticated by his unspoken love for longtime BFF Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), who’s on her way to Scotland to marry Mr. Right Now since Mr. Right’s too chickenshit to say boo before her…
