There exists some debate about audience familiarity with the term “grindhouse” and even a certain confusion about the origins of the word itself—whether it refers to the movies that constituted a gilded age of exploitation cinema or to the all-night urban theaters in which they were regularly shown. It matters…
No director works closer to his unconscious than David Lynch, and stimulated by the use of amateur digital video technology, his latest feature ventures as far inland as this blandly enigmatic filmmaker has ever gone. A movie about Lynch’s obsessions, Inland Empire is largely a meditation on the power of…
Twin Peaks: The Second Season (Paramount) So, here it is: perhaps the most infamous shark-jumping in TV history. The first season of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s comedy-horror-mystery-soap opera caused a cultural frenzy of “damn good coffee” quips and questions over who murdered prom queen/town doorknob Laura Palmer. It’s also…
At various times over the last decade, David Fincher, Sam Mendes and Michael Mann were attached to direct Scott Frank’s screenplay for The Lookout, about a brain-damaged high school hockey stud who’s smooth-talked by distant acquaintances into robbing a small-town bank. That Frank—best-known for straightening and sharpening the tangled lines…
Neutrally retitled from the more pertinent Orchestra Seats, Avenue Montaigne is a French soufflé of the old school, a romantic comedy set in Paris’ arty district, where neurotic writers and actors wring their manicured hands and—at least in flirty little numbers like this one—rub shoulders with the hoi polloi. For…
Children of Men (Universal) Set in a tomorrow that looks like yesterday, Alfonso Cuarón’s wrenching adaptation of P.D. James’ novel feels more like documentary than fiction. In the movie’s world, women have gone barren, and immigrants are tossed into prison camps; it’s the proverbial nightmare to which we might actually…
Those of us who plan our annual schedules according to film festival start dates have learned one thing this year: Zooey Deschanel—who’s had multiple movies in every fest in 2007, including two here—is the new Parker Posey. Does that sound cranky? Well, you must excuse the weariness; we’re still groggy…
Inland Empire: A movie about David Lynch’s obsessions, Inland Empire includes familiar tropes such as a movie within the movie and the notion of Hollywood as haunted house. But nothing in Lynch’s work is truly familiar. Reality is first breached when a ditsy Polish gypsy traipses into the disconcertingly empty…
As Charlie Fineman, a New York dentist who lost his wife and three young daughters in one of the September 11 plane crashes, Adam Sandler sports a mass of bedraggled locks and walks with his head hung low, the sounds of the city drowned out by The Who or Bruce…
In the same week that sees Adam Sandler playing a grieving 9/11 widower in Reign Over Me, another lone figure reeling from post-traumatic stress fills the central role in the new Antoine Fuqua-directed thriller, Shooter. Named Bob Lee Swagger and played with appropriately gruff machismo by Mark Wahlberg, he’s a…
Hard-core phantasie geeks will relish role-playing every enemy of The Last Mimzy, a family-style sci-fi adventure whose director Bob Shaye is better known to them as the evil wizard—the alien executive who peed all over the Fellowship. Shaye, in his other job as New Line Cinema topper, has let it…
By Monday afternoon, they had all left Austin—the A-minus-listers who flew into Texas to promote their studio products with encroaching release dates. Among them were Shia “Is He or Isn’t He Indy Jones?” LaBeouf touting the Rear Window redo Disturbia, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Isla Fisher and Matthew Goode talking up…
The space-time continuum smacks the shit out of Sandra Bullock in Premonition, the latest in nonlinear nonsense, but the fun really gets going when she starts to smack back. As Linda Hanson, humdrum mom of Anywhere, U.S.A., Bullock sets things up by doing her thing, effortlessly establishing the girl next…
Casino Royale (Sony) James Bond gets a stirring shake-up in the best–yeah, Goldfinger fans, the best–film in the series’ 44-year history. Daniel Craig’s 007 has more going on above the neck and below the waist than even Sean Connery’s. He’s a genuinely compelling character–a bruised, fallible, cold-blooded bastard whose mixed…
Long ago there reigned a clan of Speedo-wearing militaristic psychopaths called the Spartans. They lived beneath a copper-colored sky, on a copper-colored land, amidst copper-colored fields, in copper-colored homes made from copper-colored stone. Legend has it they would outline their copper-colored pecs and abs with ash to enhance their manly…
Gross-out horror is never far from comedy, and The Host, Bong Joon-ho’s giddy creature feature, has the anarchic mess factor worthy of a pile of old Mad magazines. A broadly played clown show full of lowbrow antics, Bong’s big splat is itself a sort of monster—the top-grossing movie in South…
Revenge of the Nerds: Panty Raid Edition (Fox) Revenge of the Nerds is a great movie. No, really. It’s got a bitching new-wave soundtrack and some truly inspired performances–memorable enough to wreck the careers of Robert Carradine (Lewis) and Curtis Armstrong (Booger). But mostly it’s the mix of innocence and…
It may be hard out there for a pimp, but it ain’t too hard for a writer-director to make a movie whose marketing hinges on the lurid spectacle of Samuel L. Jackson pulling a half-naked Christina Ricci around on a chain. This sort of cheap trick is what they used…
Wild Hogs—in which John Travolta, William H. Macy, Tim Allen, and Martin Lawrence play emasculated suburbanites taking a cross-country motorcycle trip to rediscover their masculinity—doesn’t even sound like a real movie when you describe it to people. They give you that yer-shittin’-me stare, as though it were even possible to…
Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny (New Line) You probably already know where you stand on Tenacious D, the pudgy hard rock comedy duo that made Jack Black famous. And if you haven’t heard of them, this isn’t the place to start: Their DVD of short films and music…
When the editorial cartoonist turned amateur sleuth Robert Graysmith published Zodiac, his sprawling, meticulously researched account of the eponymous San Francisco serial killer, he wrote that the tale was “the most frightening story I know,” and it was easy to understand why. Graysmith was writing in 1985, some 16 years…
In 2003, Mark and Michael Polish made Northfork, though just barely; the brothers, also responsible for art-house fave Twin Falls Idaho about conjoined twins who fall for the same woman, lost funding just before shooting began and had to beg for money to finish their reverie about lost souls wandering…
