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…
The Number 23 grips hold of one stupid idea and runs so far with it, in so many directions, to such little purpose, that it nearly won me over from sheer berserkoid effort. In a nutshell, this nutso movie observes what happens to a man (Jim Carrey) under the impression…
Morally irreproachable and flat as a pancake, Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace is set among bickering House of Commoners in late 18th-century London, but the movie belongs squarely in the currently blooming subgenre of Whites Saving Dark-Skinned Victims of Empire. Or at least it would be were Apted able to bring…
Shut Up & Sing (Genius) It’s a shame that one of 2006’s best documentaries is being released without extras; it would have been nice, for instance, to hear feisty Natalie Maines talk with directors Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck about her reaction to the film, in which the Dixie Chicks…
We Americans complain of Big Brother’s unblinking eye in the post-Patriot Act, corporate e-mail era—as well we should. But, as The Lives of Others makes plain, things could be worse. Set in East Berlin circa 1984, when one in 100 citizens of the German Democratic Republic was a government informant,…
You remember Andrew Ridgeley, don’t you? He was the other guy in Wham!, the one who found himself stranded in 1986 after George Michael had faith enough in his own talents to break up the act. Ridgeley went on to record one solo record before CBS Records decided, yeah, no…
In December 2002, ABC’s 20/20 ran a story on Eric O’Neill, an undercover surveillance specialist for the FBI. The piece was titled “Spycatcher,” because it was O’Neill who, at a mere 27 years old, helped bring down Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who, for more than two decades, sold thousands…
Marie Antoinette (Sony) Sofia Coppola’s third feature grabs you by your frilly lapels from the jump, with Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not in It” showering guitar chords all over the credits as Kirsten Dunst nods to the audience, as if to say, Hang tight–this thing’s gonna be a gas. Only…
Having endured civil war, separation from their families, hunger and dehydration during a thousand-mile trek through sub-Saharan Africa, and 10 years in a U.N. refugee camp while awaiting myriad challenges of resettlement in the United States, the three “lost boys of Sudan” in God Grew Tired of Us can certainly…
Let us applaud, on principle, Anthony Minghella’s return to small-scale storytelling. Breaking and Entering marks his first original screenplay since the oddball romcom Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991) and a retreat from the jumbo-sized period pieces of his Miramax-to-the-max phase. Overrated as they are, The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley…
Ticket buyers to Factory Girl are in for a drag; not even the drag queens will like it. Cookie-cut from the biopic assembly line, this life and times of Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller) is the least fabulous movie imaginable about the most fabulous persona in that most fabulous of scenes,…
The Science of Sleep (Warner Bros.) Feature films are to video directors what sitcoms are to stand-up comedians, and for every David Fincher and Seinfeld, there are dozens of artists who should have stayed in the field they know best. Michel Gondry, who made his name directing fantastic videos for…
Though I’m sure it’s purely coincidental, the decision to release the Diane Keaton-Mandy Moore romantic comedy Because I Said So with the scent of this year’s Sundance Film Festival still fresh in the air provides us with an excellent opportunity to review the wayward career of the movie’ s director,…
PARK CITY, UTAH—We all know about the cathartic power of blues music, but until the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, who knew that it could serve as a cure-all for everything from nymphomania to childhood sexual abuse? In Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, whose out-of-competition premiere screening…
