Those who believe that Jonathan Demme went all soft with Philadelphia and never recovered may not be reassured by his latest movie, an ensemble tale of family pathology gussied up with vérité camera work, world music, and improvising actors both trained and not. You can find the worst and the…
Ostensibly, Zack and Miri Make a Porno should be money-shot Kevin Smith: Pals make a porn to pay the bills and, in the process of gettin’ it on for the video cam, cum to realize their years-in-the-making friendship is really a love affair. Awwwww, how sweet. In other words, it’s…
There will be no more polarizing film released in 2008 than Synecdoche, New York, the directorial debut of Oscar-winning screenwriter and mind-fucker Charlie Kaufman, heretofore known as author of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (Though there is a very good chance Kevin Smith’s latest,…
On a double bill with L.A. Confidential, Chinatown or just about any film made after 1970 about institutional corruption in Los Angeles, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, a period drama based on a 1928 Los Angeles missing-child case, would come off as faintly geezer-ish noir lite. As LAPD scandals go, the case…
Pride and Glory doesn’t make any effort to disguise precisely what it is: a barely-held-together string of vignettes lifted from every cop movie ever made, save, perhaps, Turner & Hooch. It serves up clichés bound together by a flimsy, bored-out-of-its-own-skull story about bad cops, black sheep, good sons and a…
W. may be less frenzied than the usual Oliver Stone sensory bombardment, but in revisiting the early ’00s by way of the late ’60s, this psycho-historical portrait of George W. Bush has all the queasy appeal of a strychnine-laced acid flashback. Hideous re-creations of the shock-and-awful recent past merge with…
A young woman fights off her brutal husband; a gun goes off; a marble spins on the floor where a toddler sits unattended. From B-movie beginnings, The Secret Life of Bees, a family drama set in the civil-rights-era South, chugs along pleasantly like a television special tailored for the crossover…
A new kind of war movie for a new kind of war, Body of Lies is about the War on Terror as it is being waged on the ground, in the air, but most of all in cyberspace. Directed with terrific verve by Ridley Scott (coming after the listless American…
The protag of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a modestly gaudy people’s heroine industriously repairing the social world, one frayed interaction at a time. After extended cameos in two previous Leigh films (as a resourceful pop tart in All or Nothing and the date-raped rich girl in Vera Drake), fine-boned Sally…
The most recent example of bleak chic, Fernando Meirelles’ mostly harrowing adaptation of José Saramago’s international best seller Blindness mixes the high-velocity pace and stylishness of the Brazilian director’s breakout City of God with the Portuguese author’s thinly metaphysical horror thriller. Unflinching at best and treacly at worst, the film…
There are copious ways to link How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Both are based on feather-light books that take a good hour to read for those who scan slowly; both feature actors on the cult side of stardom who do far better…
There’s a whole lotta fucking going on in Choke, Clark Gregg’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s first-person novel about a sex addict named Victor Mancini with severe Mommy issues—fucking in a cramped airplane bathroom, on a barnyard’s itchy haystack, in a grimy toilet stall, in a hospital chapel even. There are…
On some level, you’ve got to hand it to Spike Lee. There is probably less than a handful of directors working in Hollywood today who could put together the financing for a three-hour war movie lacking any marquee names and performed largely in Italian and German with English subtitles. Spielberg…
Earlier this year, when I found myself assigned to jury duty on a drug-related trial at the Los Angeles Superior Court, our jury foreman turned out to be a blond, blue-eyed reality-TV producer from the bedroom community of Altadena. During the jury-selection process, when the judge asked if we had…
It takes a good while for Ricky Gervais to warm up in Ghost Town; it takes even longer for the audience to warm to Ricky Gervais. During the opening minutes of Ghost Town—an occasionally effective mash-up of Ghost, The Sixth Sense and The Frighteners—Gervais, as Bertram Pincus, D.D.S., is nearly…
Masters of the carefully crafted cheap shot, Joel and Ethan Coen have built a career on flippancy. Given their refusal to take anything seriously—least of all the enthusiasm of their fans—the brothers surely got a chuckle from an upcoming academic tome, The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers: “Once again, Kierkegaard’s…
If this year’s Toronto International Film Festival had a subtitle, it could be “When Good Directors Go Bad.” At least that’s what it has felt like around here as one anticipated new film after the next by some of the world’s name-brand auteurs—the Coen brothers, Spike Lee, Jonathan Demme—laid a-than-golden…
It took four credited screenwriters to pen a script in which every other word is “dude” or “bra”; but then, how one “writes” or “directs” a film that’s essentially 90 minutes of Matthew McConaughey’s super-stoned summer-vacay footage remains equally unfathomable, as does its whispered release into theaters before its inevitable…
And so another summer movie season comes to an end, not with a bang but a whimper—what else to call four new releases (Babylon A.D., Bangkok Dangerous, College and Disaster Movie) in the past 10 days that weren’t prescreened for critics by their distributors? These are, literally and figuratively, the…
In its final 10 minutes, Hamlet 2 is little more than chaos, noise and nonsense, and those are 10 perfectly enjoyable minutes. It’s hard to knock any sequence that climaxes with a musical number titled “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus,” done up nice and Grease-y. Problem is, the 80 or so…
Despite his reputation as that rarest of creatures—a Hollywood intellectual—new evidence suggests that Steve Martin reads…prepare yourself…thrillers and spy novels. Or at least that’s the only conclusion one can draw from the “Story by” credit the comedian receives on Traitor, an uneven yet engrossing terrorist thriller that’s one part Syriana…
When I heard that Quentin Tarantino handed the Grand Jury Prize for best feature to Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, telling the audience that the movie “put my heart in a vise and proceeded to twist that vise until the last frame,” my jaw went…
