In the original Resident Evil video game–named Biohazard in its Japanese incarnation–a brash young American infiltrates a large manor house in the country, only to find it inhabited by terrifying, soulless zombies. But since Gosford Park already came out, the makers of the Resident Evil movie had to go with…
Precious and cloying, Harrison’s Flowers sets out to prove itself a story of hope and human endurance, but swiftly deteriorates into a terribly obvious melodrama and rough-hewn vanity project for lead actress Andie MacDowell. (One can almost hear her shouting to her agent: “Hey, Meg Ryan landed a search-and-rescue picture,…
Given the latest outbreaks of Middle East violence–not to mention the continuing traumas of September 11–it is timely, if unsettling, that a new Israeli film about religious fervor and extremist political commitment in that embattled nation is being released in the United States. Written and directed by 33-year-old Joseph Cedar,…
While the governments of the two Koreas plan symbolic gestures that could lead to a long-dreamed-of peaceful reunification, Ryu (Han Suk-Gyu) and Lee (Song Kang-Ho)–two special agents in South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, which handles threats from the North–must track down a female North Korean super-assassin named Hee, whose recent…
Richard O’Brien’s 1975 drag show/sci-fi-gothic parody carries on at weekly midnight screenings, attended by its devoted audience-participation following. Even these cultists have often underrated it as a film–it’s a pretty good rock musical, with a witty ensemble cast led by Tim Curry in a hilariously swaggering, drolly macho performance as…
Science fiction can wow us with gadgetry, but only the truly ambitious stuff lights up our imaginations with disturbing and unshakable aberrations, be they incredible shrinking men, 50-foot women or Sting’s winged panties from Dune. In this vast genre, it figures that the ultimate human construct–time–proves most unsettling of all,…
By day, they drive their rippling torsos beneath the blinding desert sun, pausing intermittently to gaze sexily into the distance. By night, they head for the open-air discos of Djibouti to get squiffy with the locals. When time allows, they wash their socks, shave and wander around in cylindrical white…
Call it the art-house, or thinking person’s, Ocean’s Eleven. If you’re in the mood for an all-star ensemble but prefer conversation and reminiscence over thievery, try Last Orders, a Fred Schepisi film that features the strongest lineup of English talent this side of Robert Altman’s mega-cast in the forthcoming Gosford…
As bounty hunter Buccum, Ice Cube zaps people unnecessarily with tasers, points his gun at a kid, tortures a man using metal screws and engages in ethnic slurs–all in the service of obtaining some diamonds that aren’t rightfully his to begin with. Flawed heroes are one thing, but this is…
In the mid-1980s, San Francisco-based Paul Pena–a black blues singer/guitarist best known for writing the Steve Miller Band hit “Jet Airliner”–was listening to shortwave radio when he came upon a broadcast of “throatsinging,” a vocal style from the tiny region of Tuva, then part of the Soviet Union. The technique…
Shot 20 years ago and languishing unfinished on the shelf until 1998, this tale of an artist working at the edges of the New York music scene would have had a hard time finding an audience back then. Now, it just barely qualifies for one. The late Jean Michel Basquiat–playing,…
Cell phones and silk saris, dot-coms and arranged marriages–the latest film from Indian-born director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala) captures the heady mix of old and new, rich and poor, traditional and modern that defines contemporary India. A sort of Father of the Bride set in New Delhi, it…
If We Were Soldiers smells at all familiar, perhaps you’re confusing it with the stink emanating from a nearby theater screening Black Hawk Down. After all, on their shiny blood-drenched surfaces, they’re damned near the same movie: Both are based on books that recount true-life battles that claimed the lives…
Sometimes genius draws nigh, mollifying the gnashing critic with the promise of wild narrative fusion, perhaps even rollicking wit. Alas, sometimes genius then languidly squirms aside, like a loathsome strumpet, leaving one’s hopeful wantonness piqued but unfulfilled. Both cases apply to the boldly peculiar Scotland, PA., which sweeps up Shakespeare’s…
Barry Skolnick’s remake of 1974’s The Longest Yard never gets as amusing as its opening sequence, a fake sneaker commercial in which soccer thug Vinnie Jones, playing soccer thug Danny “Mean Machine” Meehan, spoofs James Bond. It took three writers to adapt the Burt Reynolds vehicle about an incarcerated football…
Nanni Moretti’s meditation on a family’s trauma in the wake of a teen-age boy’s death in a scuba-diving accident is both spare and unsentimental, and that may surprise those benighted Americans who think all Italians are one part tantrum and one part tomato sauce. Best known here for the 1994…
The rock-and-roll Zapruder film, more or less, highlighted by the ultimate low: the murder of Meredith Hunter, committed by Hell’s Angels during a free show at the Altamont Speedway that proves everything gratis indeed comes with a hell of a price. A film within a film, David and Albert Maysles…
“One man is about to do the unthinkable. No sex. Whatsoever. For…40 Days and 40 Nights.” Um, hello? Is that, like, supposed to be hard? But Matt (Josh Hartnett) isn’t like the rest of us. Beautiful women throw themselves at him daily, and it’s such a problem. Why? Well, he’s…
Those possessing a vampire’s keen senses may see through the Goth grunge of The Queen of the Damned to a deeper ideological conflict lurking beneath. On one side there’s novelist Anne Rice, sweepingly sensuous and profoundly humorless, who welcomed the cannibalization of her second and third bloodsucker books to create…
“This isn’t sex–this is pornography!” screams the enraged director when his new cinematographer starts to get too artistic for his own good. As absurd as it sounds, this piece of dialogue from The Fluffer–a cautionary tale of romantic obsession in the adult-video industry–is absolutely correct: The distance between the on-screen…
“Glean” is a word not often used in English, except in the context of gleaning information. But in French it has a more common, more specific use–to pick up produce or other foodstuffs left behind by the harvest. In the mind of veteran filmmaker Agnès Varda (Le Bonheur, Vagabond), it…
With its catchy (if arguably distasteful) title and first-rate cast, How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog promises vastly more than it delivers. An L.A.-based Brit playwright in a slump (Kenneth Branagh) tries to fix his latest play, while arguing with his wife (Robin Wright Penn) about whether to have a…
