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…
The Rocker bears the decidedly unmistakable odor of something made in 1983 and left on the shelf a good 25 years. Which isn’t to suggest that it’s fetid product in need of tossing out: Parts of it are genuinely delightful, and Rainn Wilson doesn’t squander his first feature-film starring role…
Perhaps this review should begin with a disclaimer: Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen’s 39th film as writer-director, will do little to endear itself to the happily-ever-after crowd or those who consider acts of infidelity punishable by impeachment. Leave it to Allen to make a romantic comedy in which all the…
Early buzz out of Hollywood pegged Tropic Thunder, directed and co-written by star Ben Stiller, as the end-all and be-all of movie-biz parodies—a savage beast with a rough touch featuring Tom Cruise in a career-resurrecting role as bald-headed, big-gutted, foul-mouthed studio boss Les Grossman, who does the fuck-you dance like…
On the surface, Pineapple Express offers precisely what it advertises: a roll-’em-up, smoke-’em-up, blow-’em-up bromantic comedy from the freaks and geeks who have made Judd Apatow’s brand of stunted-man yuks a global franchise. Once more, Seth Rogen’s red-rimmed, half-shut eyes peek out from beneath his tousled Jewfro, which sits atop…
Even as the first girders were laid in the mid-1960s, something about the World Trade Center—that twin-pronged erection jutting from the loins of Western commerce—inspired fantasies of lustful conquest. As James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire tells it, a mischievous French teenager was sitting in a dentist’s office in 1968…
Bottle Shock, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, is a great concept populated by great actors that works hard to make its audience feel great! Only, sadly, it’s far, far from a great movie—a little too sweet to the taste, almost sickly so. Indeed, it’s made-for-cable mediocre…
Notwithstanding all the pundit-driven hot air about the horrors of being young in today’s America, I’m willing to buy the argument that it’s getting harder to survive those years, if only because there’s so much more for the poor dears to worry about—more information, more technology, more stuff to consume,…
Catherine Breillat hitches her wagon to the hottest of European stars, Asia Argento, in a highly entertaining adaptation of French dandy Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s mid-19th-century novel Une vieille maîtresse—once notorious for its treatment of a young libertine’s erotic obsession with a homely 36-year-old woman. Set on the cusp of modern…
I was 13 when Stephen Sommers’s 1999 remake-in-name-only of The Mummy came out—just about the ideal age. Sommers is definitely some kind of junk-addled auteur, and if The Mummy didn’t achieve its obvious goal of topping Raiders Of The Lost Ark, it was close enough as far as I was…
Swing Vote is an election-themed comedy that’s about twice as smart as you expect it to be and still only half as smart as you wish it were. The clever premise, which would have seemed like pure science-fiction no more than eight years ago, concerns a U.S. presidential election whose…
I haven’t seen much at the movies in the past two years that has given me as much unbridled comic pleasure as the sight of Will Ferrell as the win-at-any-cost NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby, calling on Jesus, Tom Cruise and Oprah Winfrey to put out the psychosomatic flames engulfing his…
Making notes in 1949 for a review of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, George Orwell wrote that “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be…while holding untenable opinions.” Which is a nice way of saying that Waugh, a world-class satirist of everyone from the rich down, was also…
