Monster’s Ball producer Lee Daniels makes his directorial debut with Shadowboxer, and it couldn’t be clearer that he’s trying to follow his previous formula for success. Oscar-caliber actors? Check. Interracial sex? Plenty. A violent demise or two, all in the service of character development? Oh yes. But Daniels maybe could…
The old Lucas/Spielberg stunt of turning B-movie peekaboos into E-ticket thrill rides remains the industry standard–to the virtual exclusion of other multiplex fare, particularly when school’s out. But as not every kid who remade Raiders in Super 8 either gave up the dream or morphed into Michael Bay, there’s at…
V for Vendetta (Warner Bros.) Illustrator David Lloyd calls this adaptation of the comic he made with writer Alan Moore “very good” — so why did Moore beg to have his name removed? The intentions are noble, sure; name another big-studio blockbuster in which a government manufactures fear to keep…
Michael Mann’s Miami Vice is like a car that’s been stripped of everything but its two bucket seats and rebuilt from the ground up. The protagonists are a pair of detectives named Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) and a cover of Phil Collins’ “In the Air…
The Ant Bully is based upon a very short children’s book by John Nickle, who wrote and illustrated the 1999 work all by his lonesome after years of providing illustrations for The Wall Street Journal and Sports Illustrated, not to mention other works of kiddie lit. The book, as most…
For 35 years, Woody Allen was a long shot to stray into the Bronx or Staten Island, much less the alien reaches of London. The creator of Manhattan has always been joined to his chosen borough like pastrami on rye, so when he ventured abroad last year to direct the…
Two weeks ago a colleague insisted that Superman Returns isn’t the remake of the 1978 original, as I wrote, but a reinterpretation–its melancholy flip side. Where the Christopher Reeve model was pop art and a cool breeze, the Brandon Routh version is heavy and solemn, weighed down by the burden…
It would be a mighty sweet thing to see M. Night Shyamalan as the great redemptive storyteller he clearly thinks he is–or as he portrays himself in those American Express commercials. Genuine yarn-spinning, even as a doomed ambition, is virtually extinct in American movies; what had been the system’s priority…
In the latest extravaganza from executive producers Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, millions of dollars and long hours in the digital animation studios have produced…a photorealistic, computer-animated, generic American suburb! Location costs must be getting pretty damn expensive nowadays. As Monster House begins, we follow a leaf slowly descending on…
Edison Force (Sony) Gritty cop stuff must write itself — just make sure everyone’s tough, corrupt, and talking like they stole Mickey Spillane’s thesaurus. Then cast Justin Timberlake. Screech! Employing the talented (at music) popster as a crusading journalist isn’t this lame flick’s worst flaw — merely the one you’ll…
Slipped into the summer movie season like acid in your happy meal, Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly is a blockbuster of counter-programming. No matter that the dude from The Matrix is its star–or would be, if he weren’t half-hidden under a thick swath of digital paint. Linklater’s return to Waking…
Owen Wilson has moved up in the world: He’s gone from crashing weddings to crashing entire marriages. In the listless farce You, Me and Dupree, his eponymous ne’er-do-well shows up on the doorstep of his childhood friend Carl (Matt Dillon), having lost his job and been evicted from his apartment…
Perhaps no one can pinpoint the exact moment vaudeville died, but there’s a moment early in Strangers with Candy where you’d swear you had just witnessed the death of visual comedy. En route to her first day of high school, a tarty middle-aged jailbird–this is not a Disney Channel joint–tosses…
Set in 1942 and ’43 and shot in 1969, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows follows a small group of French resistance fighters in their desperate struggle to survive the Nazis. The movie, too, has been in hiding, at least in the United States, where, amazingly, it went unreleased for 37…
Grand Prix (Warner Bros.) John Frankenheimer, as underrated as he was brilliant, made a racing picture in 1966 that’s yet to be topped 40 years later. James Garner suffered through the director’s churlish demands (which Frankenheimer reveals and owns up to, in archival footage on one of the documentaries here)…
The fact 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was such a hit had much to do with viewers’ pre-launch expectations, which were approximately none. Who could have been blamed for thinking a Gore Verbinski-directed, Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movie based on a theme-park ride wouldn’t proffer anything…
Originally, Ward Serrill set out to make a documentary–and a short one at that–about Bill Resler, an avuncular tax professor at the University of Washington who thought he knew enough about basketball to coach the girls team at Roosevelt High School in Seattle. Never mind that he had no previous…
The Matador (Weinstein) Richard Shepard’s spec script, sent to Pierce Brosnan’s production company out of desperation, wound up as 2005’s best buddy pic — damned if I can recall a funnier movie from last year, except the one with the middle-aged virgin. Brosnan, not afraid to don cheerleading skirts and…
After all that, just… this? After all the anticipation, all the hype, all the product available on toy-store shelves and kiddie sections at bookstores, after all the promise that this would be the most super of Superman movies, all we get is just this…this… remake? Because let’s first call Superman…
For an industry in decline, print journalism has done a fashion publicist’s job of staying in vogue, particularly among the more stylish of career-seeking college grads. Never mind telling these BlackBerry-toting eager beavers that even an unpaid gig in the field is as rare as a winning lottery ticket: The…
By now, for masses of believers in mad Korean pulp as it has been epitomized by Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy, the blood-on-alabaster-skin montage behind the credits of Park’s new Lady Vengeance portends a familiar dynamic. Exercises in Asian horror like we haven’t seen before, Park’s films…
The Devil’s Sword (Mondo Macabro) Few trash movies live up to their reputation, but here’s a balls-out wonder that surpasses it. Grab a 12-pack of Bintang and cue up this jaw-unhinging slab of Indonesian sword-and-sorcery circa 1983–a start-to-finish feast of martial arts, mullets, flying heads, vestal virgins, dry-ice fog and…
