Tennessee Williams Film Collection (Warner Bros.) All that’s missing from this boxed set — six movies, one doc, eight discs — is a jar of sweat; even Williams is here, in a 1973 documentary. Then there’s Brando, Beatty, Newman, Taylor, Burton, Gardner, Leigh, Malden, Huston, Kazan — the last of…
United 93–which uses the hijacking of one plane on September 11, 2001, to tell the story of what happened to all four aircraft seized that morning–may be the most wrenching, profound and perfectly made movie nobody wants to see. There is no reason to think that multiplex hordes anxiously await…
The Darwinian theory that schlocksploitation must tighten its twist of the nuts with each new release will be tested strenuously for years–or at least several weeks–by Hard Candy. A pointedly s(l)ick cross between Oleanna and I Spit on Your Grave, thrown like raw meat to Lions Gate for $4 million…
Every year, when ESPN broadcasts the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a tiny flutter of hope rises in anyone who cherishes the life of the mind. Spelling is a sport? Sweet Jesus! For the duration of the competition, the brainy kid who gets his glasses stomped by knuckle-draggers on the playground…
Aeon Flux (Paramount) Many things about this surreal sci-fi flick defy explanation, but nothing more so than the mystery of how it got made in the first place. On paper, it’s an archetypal setup for a bomb: a mostly forgotten cartoon, notable for its visual style and incomprehensibility, revived as…
Wanna knock the prez? Let’s make a show… preferably on television. Paul Weitz’s new satire American Dreamz imagines the Bush regime as an episode in the history of American entertainment and American Idol as the quintessence of U.S. democracy. So what else is new? The vision of America as a…
in the Hole
Countless are the creative souls who struggled with mental illness, as are the novels and films dedicated to them. Again and again, we’ve encountered artists both inspired and undermined by their madness, whose torment and tumult produce works of beauty and depth. So can a documentary about a singer-songwriter and…
If you can tell a society by its smut, America in the 1950s couldn’t have been just a Frigidaire of repressive hysteria. Hidden somewhere in the closets of Pleasantville and Peyton Place, after all, was a stack of fetish mags bearing the face and hourglass figure of Bettie Page and…
Americano (MTI) Before he is due to take a high-powered corporate job, college graduate Chris (Joshua Jackson) heads off with two friends (Timm Sharp and Ruthanna Hopper) to Europe, where they end up in Pamplona for the running of the bulls. There, he encounters one of those saucy Latinas (Blade…
In Nicole Holofcener’s first feature, 1996’s Walking and Talking, the writer-director warmly portrayed an adult female friendship, nudging at emotional issues without resorting to shtick or melodrama. Five years later, Holofcener’s Lovely and Amazing attempted to do the same for a family of women but with wildly different results: Virtually…
For most of January 2005, Michael Keaton was on the road pimping White Noise, the psychological thriller in which he stared at TV screens and pretended to be scared of static. Little wonder, then, that Keaton spent most of that couch time selling not his big-studio comeback but his tiny-budgeted…
Ellie Parker (Strand) This extremely raw portrait of an actress trying — and failing — to make it in Hollywood showcases Naomi Watts in a wrenching and sympathetic performance. Writer-director Scott Coffey shot the movie over nearly six years, beginning in 1999, before Watts was a household name. Though they…
Calling Rian Johnson’s teen indie drama Brick a piece of stunt work might seem tantamount to hitting it with a pie, but it’s a high-speed wheelie of a strangely daring variety. Try this thumbnail definition on for size: a high school noir, complete with a Dashiell Hammett-derived plot line and…
You may not yet have lost your ardor and respect for the pressure-point hammer blow Quentin Tarantino executed on American movies, but it’s difficult at this late date not to view him as an imperative inoculation with unfortunate side effects: gas, bloating, dizziness, delusions of cleverness. Imitators flock when coolness…
We’ve all done it–killed an afternoon drinking in a pleasantly grungy roadhouse somewhere, boozily enjoying the illusion of having fallen off the grid, playing semi-forgotten blues songs on an outdated jukebox, and thinking aloud See, I should capture this feeling. This should be a movie. Sobered up, we don’t make…
We all want to believe that in even the most dangerous or frightening of situations we would have the courage to stand up for our convictions–that we would not name names, that we would not betray our friends or our ideals. Thank God, most of us will never have the…
Amid brutal competition from A History of Violence, Caché (Hidden) and Last Days, the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival went to L’Enfant (The Child), a Belgian drama about a 20-year-old hustler who sells his infant son like a bag of weed. The makers of this provocative movie,…
The Mel Brooks Collection (Fox) Talk about taking the good with the bad; how else to describe a boxed set containing Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (Brooks’ silly masterpieces), and Robin Hood: Men in Tights and History of the World, Part 1 (both overrated, even by people who can’t stand…
At the opening of Lonesome Jim, a terrific new film directed by Steve Buscemi, a country song plays behind scenes of small-town desolation. “Good times’r comin’,” it promises, in the movie’s first joke. Nothing about these initial scenes–not the stark Midwestern landscape, not the sole figure running with luggage, and…
“You want an easy job, go join the Red Cross,” someone says well into Thank You for Smoking, a gleeful farce about capitalist mendacity based on Christopher Buckley’s 1994 bestseller. The implication, made drummingly plain in the film’s every bon mot, is that our ethical barometers skew lazily toward goodness…
If French writer André Malraux was correct when he claimed that “all art is a revolt against man’s fate,” the most horrific events in human history can give rise, incongruously, to images of soul-searing beauty. How else to explain the stunning black-and-white images that fill Fateless, the story of a…
We are in the middle of a B-movie renaissance, if you haven’t noticed. For years now, the politics of the multiplex have forced films to be either big-budget, Burger King-cup blockbusters or tiny “indie” projects about college-educated Caucasians with emotional problems (and viewed by college-educated Caucasians with emotional problems). But…
