Some of the best performances of the year can be found in Mean Creek, a small independent film that marks the auspicious feature debut of 31-year-old writer/director Jacob Aaron Estes. An ensemble drama with a relatively unknown cast, the film looks at six kids and what happens when an innocent…
There’s a new movie called Hero. Don’t confuse it with that dusty Dustin Hoffman vehicle, nor with the epic Bollywood musical espionage extravaganza Hero: Love Story of a Spy (though that’s worth a mind-altering look if you can find it). America and India aren’t directly involved here, but huge imperial…
You know how fear is scary? Well, director E. Elias Merhige is into that, especially in his new serial-killer thriller Suspect Zero. Absent, however, is the dark-comic malevolence the director smartly cultivated in his successful and disquieting Shadow of the Vampire a few years ago, bullied and bulldozed out of…
Every once in a while, a film comes along that so blatantly disregards emotional authenticity that one fears for the sanity of its director. Can he actually believe that people talk this way? Act this way? Do these things? Worse, can he think he has made a coherent and feeling…
Stander has been waiting to be made for some 20 years, its screenplay having been written by Bima Stagg shortly after South African cop-turned-robber Andre Stander fought a gun battle with Fort Lauderdale police in February 1984. Writer Bima Stagg had lived in South Africa in the 1980s and fully…
The future is almost here. At least, it is according to screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (Pandaemonium) and director Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People), two cinematic visionaries whose combined vision in Code 46 sparks tremendous intrigue–and unrest. At once a weirdly familiar sci-fi trip, a bleak romance, a treatise on…
The conventional wisdom on Nicotina is that it’s a Mexican Snatch. Upon first blush, it’s easy to see where the comparisons come from–they’re both more or less diamond-swiping caper films in which the caper all but fades into the shadows of the guys and dolts incapable of pulling it off–but…
Summer movies don’t get much sillier or more empty-headed than Without a Paddle, and that includes Catwoman and King Arthur. What we have here is a low-wattage buddy flick proposing that a trio of boyhood friends, now 30 years old, can shed the last vestiges of their adolescence by traipsing…
A good friend likes to say that there’s only one kind of great pop song–the song that someone had to create, as though the writer and performer had no choice. The song can be corny or cynical, upbeat or downhearted; it doesn’t matter. All that counts is that the person…
Garry Marshall is at it again. The director of Pretty Woman, Beaches and the original Princess Diaries has returned to peddle his particular brand of überschmaltz in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, in which he disguises an insidious worship of wealth and privilege as a “feel-good” comedy about a…
You’re not likely to hear this critic utter the phrases “American remake” and “good idea” in the same breath. Godzilla, anyone? La Femme Nikita bastardized into Point of No Return? The Ladykillers? Just say no! Yet when Hidayo Nakata’s shocker Ringu was remade successfully as The Ring by workmanlike Gore…
Sheathed in a custom-tailored gray suit and sporting expensively barbered silver hair, Tom Cruise looks like an older, harder version of the self-absorbed L.A. sharpie he played 16 years ago in Rain Man. But in Collateral, a frenetic Michael Mann thriller that runs up a Baghdad-level body count, Cruise’s character…
Little Black Book, with its Carly Simon soundtrack all but daring you to tune it out before it begins, is being marketed as a daffy romantic comedy in which a woman plows through her boyfriend’s Palm to uncover his past relationships. In truth, the movie’s anything but light and frothy;…
There is nothing mysterious or subdued about Stacy Peralta’s enthusiasms. A product of Southern California’s vivid beach scene, he’s been a surfer since boyhood and was a professional skateboarder in the ’70s before he started making documentaries about the defining moments of those sports. The phenomenally successful Dogtown and Z-Boys…
As a reviewer, it can be very tempting to want in on the ground floor of a phenomenon, to say you were there first when some low-budget feature with a nifty premise made its festival debut, only to be picked up by a big studio and become a national phenomenon…
There is a phrase bandied about that other film industry–“gay for pay”–that means exactly what it says. The queer thing is, this switch-hitting work ethic obviously applies to the “straight” industry as well, since actors not infrequently launch their careers, or rev ’em up, by playing gay. Witness recently Heath…
Perhaps the most unlikely thing to capture on film is the creative process–the spinning of gears, the tripping of wires, the breaking of hearts and the snapping of tempers that go into the making of art. Movies about writers and painters and musicians seldom collapse the barrier between inspiration and…
Jonathan Demme’s gutsy The Manchurian Candidate, which dares to rear its head just as the Democratic National Convention convenes in Boston, is the anti-Bush administration movie for those who refuse to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 or Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed because, well, they just ain’t Right. It’s less a remake…
You may have already heard the stories about A Home at the End of the World. In what many viewers have deemed a big loss, Colin Farrell’s penis no longer appears in the film. The official line is that test audiences found it too distracting, though that seems unlikely, given…
Winner of the Dramatic Audience Award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Maria Full of Grace is an uncomfortably realistic look at a 17-year-old Colombian woman who, desperate for a job, agrees to swallow capsules of heroin and transport them to New York. Although a work of fiction, the film…
Near the beginning of The Corporation, a damning documentary designed to expose everything that is irresponsible, immoral, inhumane and lethal about corporations, the narrator posits the film’s thesis: “We present the corporation as a paradox,” she says, “an institution that creates great wealth but causes enormous and often hidden harm.”…
It would be nice to declare, “Fans of Mike Hodges, rejoice!” or some such thing at the arrival of the veteran director’s latest film; alas, not this time. I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead shares elements with some of Hodges’ previous work, including a familial revenge theme (from his original Get…
