Sean Penn began 2001 by directing one of the year’s most deeply felt films, The Pledge, in which a frazzled, disconnected Jack Nicholson played a retired cop obsessed with solving the rape and murder of a young girl. He ended it by acting in one of the year’s most woefully…
The air of danger that surrounds Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (À Ma Soeur) never lets up, which is unusual for a film that doesn’t mean to be a thriller. Rather, it’s a merciless look at adolescent insecurity, the mixed signals of emerging desire and the ruthlessness of carnal gamesmanship that,…
There is nothing terribly wrong with Kevin Reynolds’ The Count of Monte Cristo, which the Internet Movie Database lists as the 18th remake of Alexandre Dumas’ tale of innocence betrayed and avenged. It is neither a drag nor a gas; it neither betrays its source material nor adheres too slavishly…
Australian director Ray Lawrence (best known here for the quirky 1985 comedy Bliss) provides some high-toned soap opera nicely flavored with a touch of suspense and some well-timed jolts of humor. Playwright Andrew Bovell’s busy, busy screenplay is crammed with philandering police detectives, grief-stricken psychoanalysts, traumatized gay men, gloomy husbands…
Miguel Piñero was poet, playwright and actor–and thief, liar and junkie. He was in Sing Sing by his early 20s, the iconic leader of New York’s Puerto Rican artistic movement by 30, a dead junkie by 40; yet the causes for Piñero’s life trajectory remain largely unanswerable. Leon Ichaso’s new…
Just in time to take our tired minds off the twin terrors of Osama and Enron comes The Mothman Prophecies, an enjoyable, if utterly stupid, upscale entry in the old Amityville Horror genre. (That is, a horror film allegedly based on spooky and inexplicable real-life events.) The fashionable sheen is…
Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, based on reporter Mark Bowden’s factual account of a 1993 U.S. Army operation gone dreadfully awry in Somalia, doesn’t just kick your ass. It pummels your entire body; it leaves you trembling. Once the premise and setting are established, this brutal combat adventure doesn’t catch…
It would be easy, and tempting, to hail Kandahar as a masterpiece without even seeing it: It’s a foreign film, it takes on social issues, it’s directed by Iranian master Mohsen Makhmalbaf, it speaks to the causes of our war on terror and first hit on U.S. shores right as…
Who would have guessed that 31 years after M*A*S*H, the film that made Robert Altman’s reputation, he still would be turning out movies as good as his latest release, Gosford Park? Full of the director’s usual energy, powered by the sense of controlled chaos that marks all of his ensemble…
Attended by a rather sexy air of intrigue, the hit French film Brotherhood of the Wolf (Le Pacte des Loups) arrives upon our shores, and, refreshingly, it’s left up to us to figure out just what the hell it is. Monster movie? Costume drama? Martial-arts extravaganza? To say the least,…
Cate Blanchett can do no wrong, but even she can’t save Charlotte Gray, a World War II drama that never rises above the level of a 1950s-era adolescent romance novel. The Australian-born actress, who should have won an Academy Award for her performance in 1998’s Elizabeth, plays the titular character,…
Bangkok Dangerous, by twin brothers Danny and Oxide Pang, is an aggressively commercial genre piece that, like some recent Korean releases, has been clearly influenced by the Asian gangster genre once dominated by the now-ailing Hong Kong industry. And if the Pang brothers’ goal is to demonstrate to the world…
It’s almost easier to pick the year’s worst than its finest. Leading the pack is I Am Sam, in which Sean Penn does his Rainman dance for Oscar only to watch it horribly misfire, followed closely by Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Nic Cage, who, given recent choices, might be mentally challenged),…
Had anyone asked me back in September how 2001 was looking, I would have been tempted to rate it as even worse than the dismal 2000 (which suffered further from proximity to the wondrous 1999). But my assessment shifted during the final quarter of the year–half because of some fine…
Appropriately, A Beautiful Mind does not offer a literal translation of the life of John Forbes Nash Jr., the mathematician whose work on game theories won him a Nobel Prize in 1994. The film leaves out significant events, people and places; it amalgamates central figures, disguises prominent locations and hides…
Had The Royal Tenenbaums been made by a first-time filmmaker unburdened by acclaim or expectation, it could be heralded–and then, just as easily, dismissed–as a light, literary exercise in filmmaking that’s as pleasant as it is frustrating. Its tale of a dysfunctional family of geniuses torn asunder then brought back…
It took Andre Dubus all of 18 pages to communicate the grief that fills every frame of Todd Field’s two-plus-hours In the Bedroom, a wrenching bit of filmmaking based on Dubus’ short tale “Killings.” Both story and film tell the same tale in the same solemn and gripping tone, with…
The most daunting thing for an actor is to portray a god, and when that god comes equipped with a tangle of myths and the quickest left jab in history, the actor’s job can soon verge into guesswork. To Will Smith’s credit, he has managed to get, at least partway,…
Love him or not love him, Lasse Hallström has done it again: the human frailty, the sorrowful past, the hopeful future, the triumph of love and family over crushing despair. Ever since he broke out in 1985 with his Swedish feature Mitt Liv Som Hund (My Life as a Dog),…
The tricked-up charms of James Mangold’s Kate & Leopold may be precisely what the moment demands–if you accept the existence of chivalry, the possibility of time travel and the stream of bubbles emanating from Meg Ryan. Skeptics need not apply. Having toured the psychiatric ward in Girl, Interrupted and slogged…
Since the horrors of dominator culture–destruction, devastation, dumb-assness–do not appear to be receding of their own accord, there’s great poignancy to the new cinematic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The film succeeds as massive, astonishing entertainment; enthralling us is its chief…
Having given us The Shawshank Redemption in 1994 and The Green Mile five years later, director Frank Darabont finally busts his way out of prison with his third feature, The Majestic (which, incidentally, has the worst ad art since Green Mile). Working from a script by Michael Sloane–no Stephen King…
