Is it real or is it biochemical? Does love spring from some mysterious, serendipitous, irrational depth or is it a cut-and-dried chemical reaction, a function of pheromones as cold-blooded as a snake? Dopamine, the feature directorial debut of Mark Decena, poses just such a question. The film takes its title…
Director Richard Linklater’s The School of Rock imagines, sort of, what might have become of voluble rock snob Barry the morning after his grand finale in Stephen Frears’ adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity–after his Marvin Gaye impersonation had faded and been forgotten in the daylight hours, after he quit…
Out of Time, in which we’re to believe 48-year-old Denzel Washington and 32-year-old Sanaa Lathan were high school sweethearts, demands its audience ignore all manner of implausibilities. Chief among them is the behavior of Washington’s Matt Whitlock, chief of police in a tiny coastal town just outside of Miami who…
You gotta love John Sayles. No, really–you gotta, or else a mob of indie-minded cineastes will club you into submission. Sometimes it’s easy to comply, as with City of Hope and Sunshine State, both astute portraits of uniquely American class, race and real estate struggles boiling down to the burning…
The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes’ best-selling travel memoir Under the Tuscan Sun is a virtual case study of Hollywood’s irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take. Mayes’ 1996 book is a nicely written, carefully observed meditation on buying a decrepit Italian villa…
Recently, ornithologists in Antarctica made a startling discovery: Female emperor penguins, being forced against their wills to endure stern patriarchal societal norms, tend to practice iffy mating habits. Close scrutiny revealed that most adult females go bonkers struggling to choose between an exciting-but-destructive “bad boy” penguin and a dependable-but-boring “good…
The script for The Rundown has lingered for more than a decade and was originally a Patrick Swayze vehicle, well before those wheels fell off. Universal Studios revived it because the studio knows what it has in Dwayne Johnson: a gold mine made of bulging biceps, a man who was…
It’s no given that audiences will embrace a passionately homosexual, drug-abusing male prostitute-cum-drag-queen, especially if he happens not to be a particularly nice person to boot. The cinematic tale of Madame Satã, however, has two big points in its favor. One–the most obvious one–is a dynamite leading performance by relative…
Visualize Tokyo. Got it? Now add popular favorite Bill Murray doing his “lovable schmoe” shtick. Toss in American Rhapsody’s up-and-comer Scarlett Johansson doing her standard “like, duh” face. Dip them both into emotional torpor in the sleek Park Hyatt, add local color, stir. Et voilà: Lost in Translation. For Sofia…
Secondhand Lions is cornier than the cornfields spread out in front of the dilapidated rural Texas manse inhabited by Robert Duvall and Michael Caine, playing grumpy old brothers with mismatched accents. (Caine, in fact, has accent enough for three actors–one English, another maybe Texan, another perhaps Australian.) There is no…
Never mind the trailers, which advertise Cold Creek Manor as some kind of horror-thriller, complete with the image of a hand emerging from the shadows to quiet (yes!) Sharon Stone. Mike Figgis, most recently a maker of unwatchable art-house fare shot on digital video (Timecode, Hotel) that suggests a fetish…
Woody Allen churns out one movie a year, and “churned out” is an apt description of how his new romantic comedy, Anything Else, feels. “Disappointingly mediocre” would be another. It’s not that the film doesn’t have its humorous moments or memorable lines. It has many, but the jokes and quips…
When Nicolas Cage plays still and sullen–a man possessed by self-loathing and melancholy in Adaptation, say, or the landlocked angel in City of Angels–he comes off as drowsy. He disappears into those roles like a head plopped in a fluffy pillow, and it doesn’t quite suit him. Cage has excelled…
God bless Johnny Depp. For the second time this year, the man has almost single-handedly redeemed an action movie that would otherwise be indistinguishable from the pack. Introduced right up front in Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico, he’s first seen dressed up like Prince in purple glasses…
Once upon a time there was a guy named Sam Raimi. He grew up in Michigan and made amateur horror movies. He stuck with his hobby, and now he’s a filthy rich A-list producer-director in Hollywood. Beats workin’. Unfortunately, since we haven’t yet seen a genre-redefining horror movie in the…
Most will deny it, but inside every grown man lurks a hypersensitive adolescent girl. Allow me to tell you all about mine and to share some of my poetry… Whoa! Relax. Put away that gun. Just seeking to emphasize that in the case of director Catherine Hardwicke’s debut feature, thirteen,…
It seems like everybody’s raving up Mexican cinema these days–either as a merit badge of self-conscious hipness, or because the stuff is impressive and sometimes both–yet the excitement is definitely deserved with Herod’s Law (La Ley de Herodes). This movie kicks the feisty Y Tu Mamá También right in its…
Before he even had any kind of legacy, Mark “Gator” Rogowski was imagining, in on-camera interviews, what it might someday be. “When fear is gone,” the 18-year-old skater opined, “nothing will remain. Only I will be here.” A few years later, when a drunken binge in Germany led him to…
The 1990-’95 run of Saturday Night Live, when the show was a playground populated by, among others, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, Chris Farley, Kevin Nealon, Mike Myers and David Spade, was a low point in a show with a longer history of making you groan than…
Sin Noticias de Dios, retitled Don’t Tempt Me for U.S. release, didn’t fare too well in Spain upon its release there in December 2001, despite its cast of faces famous and almost famous; it wasn’t quite Gigli, but damned near. The reasons for its tanking like a boxer taking a…
Those who remember Javier Bardem as the heartthrob poet from Before Night Falls, or the distinguished detective in The Dancer Upstairs, may be shocked to find that in his latest film to reach these shores, Mondays in the Sun, the Latin hunk is balding, bearded and fat. Admittedly, he may…
Kevin Costner appeared in his first western when he was 30 and looked to be in his early 20s. He was a slender, restless actor in Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado, the 1985 film in which Costner played the blithe brother of a somber Scott Glenn–all giggles and gunshots, a noisemaker always…
