This Jew has spent several hours in the past week reading all four Gospels, as well as various supplementary (and often inflammatory) texts, upon which Mel Gibson based his The Passion of the Christ. I’ve read the interpretations of scholars, the apologias of popes and the damnations of zealots. I’ve…
This is not a good movie. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights is, in fact, a bad movie. The script bleeds one cliché after another; the female lead can’t fire up the heat necessary for her role; and the plot resolves nearly every conflict it introduces within minutes. Worse, even as the…
Seldom over the course of a relatively storied career has Gene Hackman garnered sustained laughter in films billed as comedies. He’s wondrous at playing virtuous or wicked, paternal or pissed-off, but never quite comfortable in the role of comedian; he may be an actor of uncommon range, able to communicate…
It’s clear by now that Meg Ryan, the bubbling sweetheart of half a dozen romantic comedies, means to bring new substance and seriousness to the latest phase of her career. Witness the lonely New York English teacher she played in last year’s brainy slasher flick In the Cut. In no…
So this grown man walks into another teen girl movie. He is not stunned to learn that it concerns clothes, fun, clothes, peer pressure and clothes. The world outside can be ugly as hell, though, so he commences with the cynicism on low. This particular teen girl movie is not…
Some acts of courage command everyone’s respect–the firefighter’s return to a burning house to rescue a child, the infantryman’s sacrifice of self for a wounded comrade, the weary black woman’s refusal to yield her seat on a segregated bus. Sometimes, though, courage can seem clouded–especially when it’s a response to…
There have been copious books written about architect Louis I. Kahn, whose monumental creations were like ancient Roman buildings transplanted into some near-distant future. His structures, among them the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, made him among the…
Highwaymen is much like its villain, a former automobile insurance man who cruises the nation’s freeways in search of young women to run down in order to create his own brand-new crash photos. Behind the wheel of his ’72 El Dorado, Fargo (Colm Feore) is an amalgam of the hinges…
With 50 First Dates, it seems as though Adam Sandler is trying to compile a greatest-hits film, cobbling together the stuff that worked in his previous films in hopes that it’ll play even better all in one go. There’s the falsetto comedy-song bit from every episode of Saturday Night Live,…
At the opening of The Fog of War, the brilliant new documentary from director Errol Morris, we see a composed, sharply groomed and middle-aged Robert McNamara preparing to brief the press on the Vietnam War. He asks two questions: First, if the chart he’s set up is visible, and second,…
On its surface, Jose Padilha’s absorbing documentary Bus 174 shows us how a homeless 21-year-old named Sandro Rosa de Nascimento hijacked a city bus in Rio de Janeiro on July 12, 2000, how he took 11 passengers hostage at gunpoint and became the raving centerpiece of a five-hour urban drama…
This may seem incredible, but there’s a group of people in the world called “the Japanese,” and apparently some of them like to travel to other countries. Within the skewed perspective of Japanese Story, this amazing “novelty” is represented by an uptight young corporate heir named Hiromitsu (pretty Gotaro Tsunashima),…
Surf’s up. Palm trees sway invitingly in the breeze. The sparkling beaches are amply decorated with bikini babes and hard-body surfer dudes. Everybody has a nice cold drink with a wedge of fresh lime in it. Seen that way, The Big Bounce is as alluring a midwinter pitch for the…
Behold a tale of true love (between a boy and a bicycle), of tireless courage (from a bitty grandmother with a club foot) and of a very shocking new definition of sexy (three wizened matriarchs who ravenously slurp down frogs). This is The Triplets of Belleville, an animated extravaganza of…
There is a recent generation of American men who came of age too late for free love and wanton property-grabbing, and too early for post-grunge emotional wankery and info-age immediacy. Stuck on their iceberg, isolated by oceans from anything real like the original punk or goth movements, or Australia’s cinematic…
Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! opens with a movie within the movie. It’s the 1940s, and a hunky, square-jawed soldier (played by Tad Hamilton, who’s played by Josh Duhamel) stops his car along the side of a damp road; a woman, dressed in virginal nursing whites, gets out of…
The setting: an institutional high school in the affluent suburbs. The protagonists: two boys–intelligent, charming and smoldering–with typical suburban lives, including intact families and plenty of spending money. The plot: carnage. Assembling pipe bombs from ingredients purchased at Home Depot and commandeering shotguns slipped from the family cabinet, the boys…
Feel like an evening at the ballet? Robert Altman’s The Company, a lovely and superficial montage of performance, is less a movie than a series of impressions, a rich sampler of a season with one of America’s premier dance companies–the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. There’s scandalously little by way of…
In 1998, a passionate majority of Venezuelans elected a new president. His name was Hugo Chavez, and he was the first leader in generations to come from outside the ruling class. He vowed to redistribute Venezuela’s oil wealth and to involve the people intimately in the political process. Openly comparing…
So, have you ever wondered what exactly goes into the painting of a portrait? You might have suspected there’s more to it than a painter saying something along the lines of, “Hey, baby, can I, uh, paint you?” and then someone else saying, “Yeah, sure, that’d be cool.” You might…
Not a lot of people know this, but our word “actress” is derived from the Greek phrase strumpetos luckyos, meaning “prostitute who somehow landed an agent.” The reason that this etymological root remains largely unappreciated is that it is entirely fake, fabricated for the present purpose of irritating a lot…
As a reader, it can be easy to assume that all the critics at a particular publication are more or less of the same mind, but here at New Times, that isn’t the case. We’re just too damn independent-minded to take our colleagues’ views into consideration, which is why, when…
