Somewhere outside the Magic Kingdom, there are bored people. Blissfully unaware of the suits who design the multiplex fodder they’ll be mentally munching, these people discover a movie about a pug-nosed and pugnacious little Hawaiian girl bearing the boy’s name of Lilo (voiced by Daveigh Chase) and her barely adult…
The plot of The Bourne Identity is astonishingly straightforward: It is bereft of twists (instead, we’re offered tangible explanations), free of the gaping plot holes that swallow confused viewers and absent the cynical machinations of filmmakers who believe that to entertain it’s necessary to also bamboozle. This adaptation of Robert…
The “one thing” at the heart of Jill Sprecher’s 13 Conversations About One Thing may not have one name. But as you wend your way through this intricate meditation on urban solitude and the nature of fate, you’ll likely discover for yourself whether it’s called happiness, hope, domestic tranquility or…
We’ve only ourselves to blame. Our love for, if not obsession with, the detritus of popular culture has led us here–once more, into a theater screening a multimillion-dollar adaptation of a cartoon that always looked like it cost $4.93 to manufacture. (Of the cartoons proffered by William Hanna and Joseph…
The humidity outside, and even inside the Adolphus Hotel’s hallways, is stifling, but Nic Cage doesn’t sweat it–even in a leather jacket (with requisite fringes), black boots (wrapped in silver chains) and dark jeans, which makes one think he’s still Wild at Heart. He’s dolled up junket-style, playing mean and…
The swaggering neo-Nazi skinhead played here to scary effect by Ryan Gosling takes equal delight in punching out a frightened Talmudic scholar and justifying fascism with his articulate verbal harangues. But something distinguishes him from Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper and Edward Norton in American History X. Gosling’s Daniel Balint…
Sold as a romantic comedy about a 31-year-old grad student unable to find (or unwilling to choose) a bride, Dover Koshashvili’s second feature is hardly madcap or even touching. Zaza (Lior Ashkenazi) is no Bachelor being chased down the street by a mob of would-be brides. He’s merely torn–between his…
“Circuit parties,” the massive days-long gay events held periodically in major cities and fashionable resort towns nationwide, are a subject ripe for movie treatment, and Dirk Shafer’s film does a good job of capturing this scene, particularly its destructive side. While dance parties are supposedly celebratory events, “circuit” affairs are…
This is the kind of film Robert Forster starred in before his career was resurrected by Quentin Tarantino and Jackie Brown; it’s direct-to-video, by way of Starz! Forster stars as Eddie Miller, a traveling diamond salesman on his way out after a heart attack renders him uninsurable. He stays on…
The opening credit sequence of Windtalkers–a montage of Monument Valley–instantly invokes memories of the opening of John Woo’s immediately previous film, Mission: Impossible 2, in which Tom Cruise was dangling off a rock. It is the last moment of similarity between the two. Windtalkers is a World War II epic…
It’s no surprise that the Louisiana-born novelist Rebecca Wells has seen her wildly popular books translated into 18 languages, with no fewer than 6 million copies in print. She’s no deep-thinking stylist, but she has an unfailing gift for injecting Southern sentimentality, low-grade neurosis and mischievous charm into stories that…
So this is what it’s come to: another week, another terrorist-with-a-suitcase-nuke movie. Last Friday, it was up to Ben Affleck to save the world from nuclear annihilation, an unsavory proposition; he succeeded, but not before the Super Bowl disappeared in a holocaust flash. This Friday, it’s Chris Rock’s turn to…
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the French film The Piano Teacher, aside from Isabelle Huppert’s unnerving and masterful performance, is the totally nonexploitative manner in which the story is presented. A tale of sadomasochism and self-destruction, the film easily could have succumbed to the inherently lurid aspects of its…
Whatever problems Stolen Summer may have encountered during the production process, as documented on the HBO reality series Project Greenlight, it doesn’t feel like the disjointed outcome of a troubled shoot. For better or worse–plenty of both, in fact–it’s a movie that has a coherent vision. It’s a shame that…
A police detective (Koji Yakusho, star of Eureka and Shall We Dance?) is confronted with a series of inexplicable homicides. All have the same M.O., but they involve different perpetrators, who remember their actions but cannot explain why they did it. The police finally discover the common link: They’ve all…
Directed by Joe and Harry Gantz, of HBO’s popular Taxicab Confessions, Sex With Strangers follows three couples in the swinging “lifestyle.” Mississippians Shannon and Gerard realized they were cheating on one another, and decided to do so with other couples together so as to eliminate the whole dishonesty thing. Washingtonians…
As astute an appraisal of post-modern feminine confusion as today’s cinema has to offer, this freakish fish story from French-Canadian writer-director Denis Villeneuve (August 32nd on Earth) offers the flash of rock videos fused with solid performances and eerie atmosphere. Imagine an 83-minute Tom Waits video with good-natured twists. Bibiane…
There has always been something infuriating, if not appalling, about killing thousands of people in the name of blockbuster entertainment. Buildings would blaze, streets would turn into rivers of gore, corpses would stack like cordwood–and before September 11, no one thought much about it. Audiences accepted wholesale slaughter on the…
The first generation to be labeled with a letter suffered through some serious metaphysical shit in the ’90s (if you doubt this, try listening to the period-specific music–emphasis on try), but now this societal clusterfuck is searching for antidotes to its own pop-culture poison. Evidence of a renewed hope abounds,…
The weird thing about Rain is that there’s virtually no rain in it. Characters mention precipitation briefly and metaphorically, but the cloudburst never happens. Fortunately, we get light showers of emotion a couple of times, but then–strangely–these wane to an inconsistent and ultimately unsatisfying drizzle. It’s as if fledgling director…
The beauty of Malcolm D. Lee’s smart, sharp comedy lies in its dexterity, as it raises one fist in a friendly Black Power salute and firmly gooses the whole audience with the other. Based on the animated Internet series (at UrbanEntertainment.com), the script explores a soulful, secret solidarity known as…
This latest film from 82-year-old French New Wave stalwart Eric Rohmer is enough of a departure that it may either confound or irritate his fans. Unlike his usual stylistically restrained explorations of morals and manners (My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee), The Lady and the Duke, based on the journal…
