Holland’s gift to world cinema, Paul Verhoeven, can be a very bad boy and a very good filmmaker. Any of his movies could have been titled Basic Instinct—not least his epic World War II thriller Black Book, in which a Jewish chanteuse who has watched her family massacred by Nazis…
For all the huzzahs deservedly heaped upon 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, in which it took a good long while to discern the living from the walking deceased, the zombie-flick spoof was little more than an extended sketch taken, oh, 19 minutes beyond its breaking point. But the movie, created…
Speaking as the owner of a new puppy, I can say definitively that a dog is both more and less annoying than the average person. Year of the Dog makes much the same point with its pack of uncontrollable pooches, including a cute beagle that rips into the wrong bag…
Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show (Sony) The greatest boxed set ever–not so much for the made-up irritainment as for the real thing, which this collection serves up by the ton. There are 23 brilliant episodes of the HBO show here, but they pale in comparison to…
To fully appreciate the merits of Vacancy, you need to have the proper technology. Digitally projected lurid images and THX-amplified creaks and moans are all well and good, but what director Nimród Antal’s creepy cockroach of a thriller really cries out for are the shabby delights that can only be…
Writers Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth receive sole credit for the movie Disturbia, which is surprising, as the film clearly is based on both a previously published work (a 1942 short story by Cornell Woolrich titled “It Had to Be Murder”) and the John Michael Hayes-penned, Alfred Hitchcock-directed, Academy Award-nominated…
Sleeping Dogs Lie (First Look) Writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait takes a subversive concept (honesty is overrated) and marries it to an outrageous scenario (a woman’s family learns that she once, uh, performed for a dog) to create . . . a romantic comedy? Well, sort of. Like Goldthwait’s underrated Shakes the…
Frylock, Meatwad and Master Shake—the three Stooges inhabiting Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters—will survive should you choose to avoid their movie. Truth be told, you’ve probably never heard of them anyway, unless you’re a regular viewer of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block or vaguely recall…
Lest we imagine that the publishing industry went to hell only after James Frey and J.T. Leroy clambered on board, here comes Lasse Hallström to remind us of a literary dustup emblematic of a much earlier nadir for American mendacity. The Hoax parses the rise and fall of faker Clifford…
The young men move about the muddied hillside engaging in a friendly afternoon game of that national pastime known as hurling. On their way home, they are accosted by a platoon of “Black and Tans,” the occupying soldiers sent from England to stamp out the crackling embers of Irish independence…
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…
