The Number 23 grips hold of one stupid idea and runs so far with it, in so many directions, to such little purpose, that it nearly won me over from sheer berserkoid effort. In a nutshell, this nutso movie observes what happens to a man (Jim Carrey) under the impression…
Morally irreproachable and flat as a pancake, Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace is set among bickering House of Commoners in late 18th-century London, but the movie belongs squarely in the currently blooming subgenre of Whites Saving Dark-Skinned Victims of Empire. Or at least it would be were Apted able to bring…
Shut Up & Sing (Genius) It’s a shame that one of 2006’s best documentaries is being released without extras; it would have been nice, for instance, to hear feisty Natalie Maines talk with directors Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck about her reaction to the film, in which the Dixie Chicks…
We Americans complain of Big Brother’s unblinking eye in the post-Patriot Act, corporate e-mail era—as well we should. But, as The Lives of Others makes plain, things could be worse. Set in East Berlin circa 1984, when one in 100 citizens of the German Democratic Republic was a government informant,…
You remember Andrew Ridgeley, don’t you? He was the other guy in Wham!, the one who found himself stranded in 1986 after George Michael had faith enough in his own talents to break up the act. Ridgeley went on to record one solo record before CBS Records decided, yeah, no…
In December 2002, ABC’s 20/20 ran a story on Eric O’Neill, an undercover surveillance specialist for the FBI. The piece was titled “Spycatcher,” because it was O’Neill who, at a mere 27 years old, helped bring down Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who, for more than two decades, sold thousands…
Marie Antoinette (Sony) Sofia Coppola’s third feature grabs you by your frilly lapels from the jump, with Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not in It” showering guitar chords all over the credits as Kirsten Dunst nods to the audience, as if to say, Hang tight–this thing’s gonna be a gas. Only…
Having endured civil war, separation from their families, hunger and dehydration during a thousand-mile trek through sub-Saharan Africa, and 10 years in a U.N. refugee camp while awaiting myriad challenges of resettlement in the United States, the three “lost boys of Sudan” in God Grew Tired of Us can certainly…
Let us applaud, on principle, Anthony Minghella’s return to small-scale storytelling. Breaking and Entering marks his first original screenplay since the oddball romcom Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991) and a retreat from the jumbo-sized period pieces of his Miramax-to-the-max phase. Overrated as they are, The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley…
Ticket buyers to Factory Girl are in for a drag; not even the drag queens will like it. Cookie-cut from the biopic assembly line, this life and times of Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller) is the least fabulous movie imaginable about the most fabulous persona in that most fabulous of scenes,…
The Science of Sleep (Warner Bros.) Feature films are to video directors what sitcoms are to stand-up comedians, and for every David Fincher and Seinfeld, there are dozens of artists who should have stayed in the field they know best. Michel Gondry, who made his name directing fantastic videos for…
Though I’m sure it’s purely coincidental, the decision to release the Diane Keaton-Mandy Moore romantic comedy Because I Said So with the scent of this year’s Sundance Film Festival still fresh in the air provides us with an excellent opportunity to review the wayward career of the movie’ s director,…
PARK CITY, UTAH—We all know about the cathartic power of blues music, but until the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, who knew that it could serve as a cure-all for everything from nymphomania to childhood sexual abuse? In Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, whose out-of-competition premiere screening…
PARK CITY, Utah — Ten days of terse texting among professional narcissists working on little or no sleep in one of the last cold spots left on Al Gore’s inconvenient Earth: Welcome to Sundance ’07, where wounding homefront melodrama Grace Is Gone sells and it hardly pays to be nice…
PARK CITY, Utah–Even by the lacerating standards of recent Sundance docs Why We Fight and Iraq in Fragments, the nonfiction at this year’s fest felt, well, real — alarmingly so. Indeed, after doing battle with films about U.S. policies on Iraq, Darfur, and global warming, this critic was nearly moved…
One morning, Gary Walkow was suddenly transformed into a successful Hollywood filmmaker. Gone were the hat-in-hand searches for financing, the deferred salaries, the long shooting days with undermanned crews, and the months upon years spent touring the festival circuit while seeking a distribution deal. For a moment, he was taking…
PARK CITY, Utah –On the first Saturday of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, I rolled out of bed and hustled up Main Street for the 8:30 screening of Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as adult siblings caring for an irascible elderly parent. Only I…
Catch a Fire (Focus) In his commentary for the underrated, undervalued Catch a Fire, director Phillip Noyce discusses the inspiration: witnessing the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. He wanted to comprehend “the terrorist’s mind,” so he found a story that accomplishes such a difficult thing: the…
Maurice Russell, a septuagenarian actor facing the end of his career and life, gazes raptly at the present that fate has given him: the company of a sullen but strangely desirable teenage girl. At first, his appraising looks give her the creeps, but something about his courtliness piques her curiosity—not…
New-school genre junk food: Take a Tarantino wannabe with Sundance credentials, add a large, famous-enough cast and a show-biz backdrop, season the violence with references to Sergio Leone and Takeshi Kitano, serve cool and garnish with a cynicism beyond irony. Smokin’ Aces is writer-director Joe Carnahan’s third and most elaborate…
Cocaine Cowboys (Magnolia) Slam! Bang! Pow! Snort! This tawdry and giddy documentary tells the story of Miami’s transformation from a place where old people go to die to a place with so much drug money that the Mercedes dealers were constantly out of stock, where the hit men would rather…
Park City, UTAH–On the first Saturday of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, I rolled out of bed and hustled up Main Street for the 8:30 a.m. screening of Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as adult siblings caring for an irascible elderly parent. Only, I…
