Consider a world in which morality and legality have been replaced by frontier-style justice and freakish despotism. In which dwindling resources and a diseased environment summon the most callow and petty aspects of human nature. In which confused urbanites join deranged cults, abusers claim unwarranted authority, and children witness horrors…
Silver City is being marketed as a biting, bitter send-up of George W. Bush. Hence the copious use of trailer footage in which Chris Cooper, as Colorado gubernatorial candidate Dickie Pilager, stumbles over simple sentences, dodges reporters’ questions with mindless macho explications (“My message to the criminals is this: You…
The most crucial piece of equipment in Hollywood is obviously not the movie camera. It’s not the casting couch. Not even the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud or the personal trainer. It’s the Xerox machine–which was preceded by carbon paper. That’s why, over the years, we have had three Mrs. Norman Mains…
Rare is the film that caters to fans of rabbits, motorcycles, Gordon Lightfoot and fellatio, but now, thanks entirely to Vincent Gallo, we have that demographic nailed. With The Brown Bunny, the cinematic enfant terrible who gave us the awful pleasures of Buffalo ’66 returns, but don’t expect a retread…
Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi This Israeli dramedy is certainly not the most maudlin boy-meets-world movie released here this year (that’d be Valentin), but writer-director Shemi Zarhin doesn’t exactly surprise either. Precious Shlomi (Oshri Cohen) is essentially a mildly autistic teen Rain Man, master of instantaneous mathematical solutions but, you know, misunderstood…
Some of the people who helped bring you dank, morose amusements such as The Crow, Dark City and The Matrix have a new movie to offer. Like The Matrix, it features a dork who flies through the air. As in Dark City, we witness the protagonist’s world radically changing shape…
Oh, Janis. Oh, gorgeous, outrageous, soul-ripping, rockin’ bluesy momma Janis Joplin. She’s a volcano. She’s a tsunami. She’s a fearless, reckless, raging American beauty. Watch her tear open her chest to reveal her hot, pulsing wounds. Watch her rage with burning, glorious light. Watch her smile that sweet Janis smile…
In Victorian England, 40,000 novels were published every year. Of the few that have endured, perhaps none is more worthy of a film adaptation than Vanity Fair, if for no other reason than this: It’s a chore to read. Clocking in at 850 pages, with frequent excursions into unrelated subjects…
In We Don’t Live Here Anymore, an overwrought domestic drama about a pair of entangled couples, Peter Krause plays philandering writer Hank Evans, struggling to produce as he propositions female students at the college where he teaches. Blithely pretentious, fretful only over his writing, Hank observes from a distance as…
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;…
