For Eric Schaefer, it all began when he was a masters film student at the University of Texas at Austin in the mid-1980s. One day, he stumbled across a reference to a forgotten movie called Birth of a Baby, which isn’t a prequel to Birth of a Nation but a…
The Santa Clause, released at the height of Home Improvement’s popularity, played like a Very Special Holiday Episode of that now-defunct television series–what might have happened if an egg nog-saturated Tim Taylor fell asleep with visions of sugar plums in his head and woke up sporting a white beard and…
There’s an invigorating, inspiring film about a famous dead person opening in a few days: Julie Taymor’s Frida, scheduled to arrive November 1, which is loving but never unconditionally so, and every bit as rousing as its subject matter, painter Frida Kahlo. Taymor uses the screen just as Kahlo used…
If you’re a fan of the baseball-cap-wearin’, Nader-votin’, muckrakin’, best-sellin’, corporation-confrontin’ son of a gun known as Michael Moore, all you need to know about his latest film, Bowling for Columbine, is that it’s more of the same. You know, the mix of easy humor, political potshots, attempts (some successful,…
Once more, it all boils down to the stamps–which, if you have seen Stanley Donen’s 1963 comic-thriller Charade, nearly ruins the last 10 minutes of Jonathan Demme’s remake, The Truth About Charlie. But Demme isn’t at all concerned with such mundane things as shock-’em finales; he won’t be bound by…
You ever notice those people? You know, the so-called “stand-up comedians”? Who are those people? What’s the deal with them? And what does that mean, anyway, “stand-up”? I mean, it’s not like we’re gonna think they’re sitting down unless they tell us otherwise! Yes, a decade or so later, it’s…
The current TV ad campaign for the sleeper hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding plays cleverly on the film’s cross-cultural appeal by substituting the words Italian, Jewish and Russian for Greek. The implication: A person from any ethnic or religious background will relate to this story’s characters, drama and humor…
Not as bad as its rep–Miramax has been hiding this sucker on the shelf for danged near two years–but not good enough to overcome its status as damaged goods, which is almost a shame, since audiences will miss Billy Bob Thornton’s best performance, and hairpiece, in years. (He’s having a…
The French word for turkey is dindon, so French New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s latest movie is basically fricasé du dindon. Snoots will no doubt rally to its cause, but rarely does an established filmmaker so ardently waste viewers’ time. It’s mostly to do with memory, presumably his own spluttering…
The scrappy salvage tug Arctic Warrior sets out to plunder the legendarily missing and newly discovered luxury liner, Antonia Graza, and all bloody hell breaks loose for Captain Sean Murphy (Gabriel Byrne, 100 percent sodium chloride), robust team leader Maureen Epps (Julianna Margulies) and their crew, guided by a completely…
This exceedingly graphic Holocaust drama concerns the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, a special squad of Jewish prisoners who, in exchange for better food and a few extra months of life, escorted their fellow Jews into the gas chambers, then cremated their corpses. It was a pact made with the devil. Actor Tim…
Paul Thomas Anderson, the would-be Altman without the madman-genius baggage getting in the way, has forever ruined Adam Sandler. No longer will Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, Little Nicky, the Waterboy, Big Daddy–or whatever moronic icon he seems to be playing this week–again be allowed to grace the big screen by…
Death is too often taken literally, and this unfortunate perspective is sustained by much cinema, despite the medium’s dubious kiss of immortality. There’s easy drama in tragedy and grisly ends, but not commonly do moviemakers successfully deliver symbolic death, the subtly grim yet vital bridge between lively verses. Happily, director…
Give Tom Tykwer considerable credit for knowing he couldn’t possibly outdo Run Lola Run, his frenetic breakthrough that made critics cheer and took MTV pacing to a whole new level, blending animation with live action, still photos and alternate realities in a way that made sense and raised the viewer’s…
Much like a psychic, a cinema critic must look through a movie and see the other side. In the case of the new thriller The Ring–a remake of the 1998 Japanese hit, Ringu–the formative forces swim into focus without effort. There’s a Dreamworks boardroom, some executives exclaiming that Shrek can’t…
Honestly, I’ve never been much into schmaltzy movies about the old neighborhood. The whole scene seems pretty hellish; all that cutesy talk about this good old street or that once-hoppin’ nightclub. Therefore, when it’s announced there’s a movie called Welcome to Collinwood about a bunch of Hollywood actors playing shticky…
It’s a family affair when widowed, repressed Lilia (Hiyam Abbas) and her spunky daughter Salma (Hend El Fahem) just can’t get enough of a suave drummer, Chokri (Maher Kamoun). This bold and lyrical first feature from Raja Amari expands the pat notion that middle-aged women just wanna have fun into…
More inspired by than adapted from Leo Tolstoy’s story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Bernard Rose’s film is set in the very fast lane of a modern Hollywood that would have chilled the great Russian author to the bone. Ivan is a high-powered agent who snags a major actor as…
Part watered-down Neil LaBute, part Seinfeld episode (especially the one in which George’s fiancee licks the poison glue and dies) and part Waking Life, Just a Kiss follows a group of youngish couples (Ron Eldard, Kyra Sedgwick, Marisa Tomei, Patrick Breen and Taye Diggs, among others) in New York as…
Usually a master of creating aliens that go bump in the night, director David Twohy (Pitch Black) herein takes a turn toward ghosts and haunted houses, only this particular supernaturally afflicted domicile happens to be an American World War II submarine whose crew comes to the rescue of three survivors…
Roger Avary’s screenplay for The Rules of Attraction is a remarkable work of literature: the disassembly and reconstruction of an impenetrable book by Bret Easton Ellis; a simplification and amplification of the 1987 novel’s attack on the bored, beautiful and wealthy; a streamlined and mainlined version of a story originally…
Good Lord, there hasn’t been this much blond hair on screen since the Von Trapp children sang and danced their way across the Alps in The Sound of Music. The fact that these latest golden locks belong to the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Wright Penn and Renée Zellweger suggests…
