It’s hard not to love a movie that posits Britney Spears as a nerd, a high school valedictorian, an aspiring med-school student, an amateur mechanic and the spawn of Dan Aykroyd. When she finally reveals that she’s also a poet, sincerely reading Dido’s lyrics for “I’m Not a Girl, Not…
Though it consists of all-new footage, Escaflowne is still a 93-minute condensation of a 26-episode TV series, with all the pitfalls of such you’d expect: too many characters, no reason to care about them, forced dramatic beats and excessive exposition. Matters aren’t helped by a flat, generic English dub. The…
John Q. Archibald (Denzel Washington), a perfect working-class Everyman, is struggling just to make ends meet; bad turns to way worse when his 9-year-old son (Daniel E. Smith) is suddenly diagnosed with a heart defect that will kill him within weeks unless he can get a transplant. But John, who…
A bombed-out London, fathers shipping off to the front, families left behind to tend to the smoldering rubble, children getting sent to the countryside for safekeeping–sounds like John Boorman’s Hope and Glory, the writer-director’s bittersweet ode to a youth lost to the wreckage of World War II. No such luck:…
Set in Berlin in 1943, this fact-based German film with English subtitles concerns the love affair between two women: a Jew passing as a gentile while working for the underground and a German housewife honored by the Third Reich as an exemplar of Nazi motherhood. Outgoing, direct, supremely self-confident, the…
Amélie, minus most of the charm. With that film’s star, Audrey Tautou, heading an ensemble cast, this romantic comedy is about how even the most random and mundane acts affect destiny. Every chance encounter between strangers has a repercussion, which leads to another interaction and another and another until, eventually,…
Hart’s War, like most mediocre films, is little more than a movie about the movies. Set in a POW camp during the final months of World War II, it owes much of its existence to far superior films, chief among them La Grande Illusion, Stalag 17 and The Great Escape;…
After a long absence from American screens, British stage director Richard Eyre makes his return with an alternately depressing and uplifting drama about Dame Iris Murdoch’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease and the heroic efforts of her husband, John Bayley, to care for her, despite his own advanced age and generally…
Every couple of years, it seems, we’re obliged to get at least one documentary that provides the revelation that porn stars just aren’t happy people. So now we know John Holmes was a drug addict and a criminal, Annabel Chong cuts herself and Stacy Valentine will submit to every surgical…
In case the season has you feeling shamefully joyous, here’s a stark little oasis of misery to remind you that America sometimes sucks and its denizens aren’t all heroes. Featuring painstaking attention to the copious warts of this big, proud country, Monster’s Ball moseys down South to issue the staggering…
Part comedy, part tragedy and all bite, No Man’s Land damns and mocks in equal measure, painting a picture of war’s absurdity that should make peaceniks of us all but likely won’t. Although set in the former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian-Serbian war, the movie transcends its geographic borders: Bosnian-born writer-director…
If they teach the work of Todd Solondz someday, assuming he’s not already in the curriculum somewhere, the lectures are bound to be rather short. To grasp the material without actually attending, just bone up on a little bargain-basement Freud, a whiff of primal therapy and a sprinkle of Jerry…
Though he takes a beating early on, watching his wife and son die in an embassy bombing carried out by Marxist, drug-running Colombian terrorists, it isn’t long before Arnold Schwarzenegger is striding through the jungles of Colombia as if on a Stairmaster, ignoring admonitions that to do so is “frickin’…
A bland, obnoxious 88-minute infomercial for Universal Studios and its ancillary products, chief among them birthday boy E.T. (due for re-release this spring) and the studio tour, this is a kids film for children who won’t shut up; it’s loud enough to be heard over the deafening chatter of restless…
This epic series of 10 hour-long films, each based on one of the Ten Commandments, finishes up with a rare note of whimsy. But first Kieslowski revs up the emotional wringer one last time for episode IX, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” in which a doctor must face…
You’ve got to hand it to any romantic comedy that makes The Mexican and the Sweet November remake seem like enduring classics, which appears to be the chief objective of Birthday Girl. This slipshod sophomore effort from Jez Butterworth (Mojo) has been sitting on the shelf since its original release…
Despite an energetic performance from Rushmore’s Jason Schwartzman and a flash of nudity from Pearl Harbor babe James King, Slackers sucks. There’s simply no one to like: Schwartzman’s lovesick nerd Ethan is revealed to be an obsessive psychopath, while the cool guys he must compete with for the love of…
In May 1997, conductor Zubin Mehta recruited Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern) to mount a stage presentation of Puccini’s final opera, Turandot, which was based on an old Chinese story. “Usually,” Mehta says, “Turandot is full of Chinese clichés…it looks like a big Chinese restaurant.” So it seemed like…
Sometimes the cinema is just heavenly, and this is one of those times. Returning in a beautifully restored print, with new subtitles, is Federico Fellini’s first color masterpiece (from 1965), bursting with unruly insights on ardor and release. The director’s stout and gleaming wife, Giulietta Masina, plays the leading lady…
Originally made for Polish TV in 1987, and seen only sporadically at special festival and museum showings, Kieslowski’s epic series of 10 hour-long films, each based on one of the Ten Commandments, continues with two episodes. Episode VII, “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” raises the question of whether or not it’s…
To call a movie the most accessible Dogme 95 film ever made is not merely damning with faint praise. It also threatens to alienate the two segments of the population that might consider going to see such a film in the first place: fans of the back-to-basics, no-frills-of-any-kind Danish filmmaking…
All those war epics the big movie studios are rushing into release are certainly meant to reflect the present national mood, and if We Were Soldiers or Behind Enemy Lines or Black Hawk Down also happens to strike it rich, that will be fine with the box-office bean-counters. It was…
