Sometimes when a director shoots at a barn, the satisfaction comes in simply watching him hit it dead center. So it is with The Good Girl, wherein Miguel Arteta (Star Maps) targets Middle American ennui with wit, compassion and no shortage of ornery malaise. Like Arteta’s second feature, Chuck &…
Robert Evans wrote his autobiography in 1994 as much out of desperation as hubris; it cried out, “Damn it, look at me…please?” He’d produced one film during the past 10 years, The Cotton Club, which was such a colossal failure it rendered Evans a moot point in Hollywood, a position…
Director Neil LaBute (Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty) seems the unlikeliest candidate to direct the film version of British author A.S. Byatt’s Booker Award-winning best seller Possession. (OK, that’s an exaggeration: There’s always Michael Bay.) LaBute’s earlier films were resolutely tied to American culture, and Byatt’s book couldn’t be…
Nothing’s more disappointing than the sequel that feels forced rather than organic. It was inevitable Spy Kids, so good Miramax’s Dimension division released it twice last year (once, in a special “long-form” version containing a handful of added scenes), would spawn a sibling; that movie, as neon-bright as the latest…
In case you didn’t happen to read the tagline on the ubiquitous poster, Xander Cage, also known as XXX because he’s tattooed his first initial three times on the back of his neck, is “a new breed of secret agent.” The old breed, we learn pretty quickly, is Bond, James…
Blood Work, Clint Eastwood’s 23rd film as director, is another crime thriller in the vein of, but better than, True Crime (1998) and Absolute Power (’96). And it bears a striking resemblance to 1993’s In the Line of Fire, the Eastwood vehicle directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Or maybe it resembles…
Hearing that her writer boyfriend (Tristán Ulloa) has been killed in an accident, a Madrid waitress (Paz Vega) named Lucia takes off for an island that figures more centrally in his past than she realized. As in his 1998 masterpiece Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Spanish writer/director Julio Medem here…
Friendship is almost as complicated and compelling as love. It’s romance without the sex, whether between members of the same or opposite genders. Marina (Anna Friel)–pretty, vivacious and rebellious on the outside but insecure and empty on the inside–and Holly (Michelle Williams)–shy, intellectual, also insecure–have been best friends since childhood…
A story of a somewhat troubled young man, who, heavily closeted and socially awkward, took to picking up younger males, drugging them, killing them, then fucking the corpses, chopping them up and sometimes eating them. Cutting back and forth in time between Jeffrey Dahmer’s life of crime and his late…
After endless failed relationships, a middle-aged exterminator and jazz musician (Jeffrey Tambor) begins to think that maybe he’s gay. On his first attempt to pick someone up at a gay bar, however, he meets a beautiful divorcee (Jill Clayburgh), whose recent love life has been equally unsatisfying. The two leap…
This time around, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan puts the surprise at the beginning of his film, and it’s a subtle, shimmering clue–one easily missed and, frankly, one that might not even be there at all. Such are the temptations offered by the maker of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable: Even…
Like George Clooney says in Ocean’s Eleven, do the math: four Canon XL1 digital cameras, one dual 800 MHz Power Mac G4, a copy of editing software Final Cut Pro 3, 18 shooting days, a 2-million-buck budget, one Oscar-winning Best Director and nine high-profile actors (among them: Julia Roberts, Brad…
If nothing else, give French actor Yvan Attal credit for his faith in domestic bliss. At a time when matrimony has a shorter life span than mayonnaise, Attal has sought to mingle the joys and traumas of his own marriage (to actress Charlotte Gainsbourg) with his piquant views on the…
It’s not exactly a good sign when a movie starring Tim Allen, Christian Slater and Richard Dreyfuss gets dumped into one or two art-house theaters after a couple of years on the shelf. Even if none of them is a guaranteed box-office draw, you’d think all three should be enough…
The advent of digital filmmaking has been essentially a good thing, allowing cameras to go places their larger, celluloid-spooling cousins cannot, generally requiring less specialized lighting and, above all, making it affordable to put together a film while maxing out only one credit card. Sure, for every The Celebration you…
Read My Lips (Sur Mes Lévres) puts forth the fascinating and heretofore unexamined theory that being deaf offers its estimable rewards. It allows one the chance to tune out the world, to ignore everything and everyone. To the deaf, chaos can feel like the soothing calm, and madness comes with…
Not much has changed in the 11 years since Mike Myers used the first Wayne’s World movies as a personal launchpad, only tipping his James Bond-spoofing Austin Powers hand when he was strong enough at the box office to reap the rewards of his licensed characters. Now those spy-movie send-ups–the…
A film that posits a world in which giant fake-looking anthropomorphic bears walk among us without people noticing that they look any different from other humans, and a select group of them have been the biggest country-rock band in this alternate-reality world for many years (songs actually penned by John…
After endless failed relationships, a middle-aged exterminator and jazz musician (Jeffrey Tambor) begins to think that maybe he’s gay. On his very first attempt to pick someone up at a gay bar, however, he meets a beautiful divorcee (Jill Clayburgh) whose recent love life has been equally unsatisfying. The two…
During the last weeks before the fall of Saigon, tens of thousands of South Vietnamese, fearful of NVA recriminations, fled the country for the United States, where they were held in relocation camps until American sponsors could be found. First-time director Timothy Linh Bui–who co-wrote and co-produced his brother Tony’s…
Think of it as Todd Solondz light–loads of dysfunction but, thankfully, none of the perversion. In fact, despite deep-seated neuroses, occasionally inappropriate behavior and a propensity for unhealthy relationships, the four females who are the Marks family are a fairly benevolent lot. As observed by writer-director Nicole Holofcener, the characters…
On the first day (of opening weekend), the lord said, “Let there be, like, this year’s Evolution or sumpin’, only with more hope for significant box-office returns,” and there is, and it is called Eight Legged Freaks, and it is good. The silly title needs a hyphen in the compound…
