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…
Click may be the first Adam Sandler movie in which the high concept isn’t dependent upon the star. Sandler comedies tend to take his standard character of the petulant man-child with anger-management issues and place him in different wacky situations: elementary school (Billy Madison), the golf course (Happy Gilmore), the…
It may not be an “iconic manifestation of civilization,” as documentarian Ken Burns proclaims, but The New York Times crossword puzzle is undoubtedly an institution. Printed every day for the past 64 years, in weekly cycles of increasing difficulty, the puzzle draws politicians, working stiffs, comedians, musicians, coders and homemakers…
Night Watch (Fox Searchlight) Every once in a while, Hollywood needs somebody else to steal a genre and totally reimagine it; it keeps old ideas young, like celluloid Botox. Well, Hollywood’s gonna need one big needle to absorb Night Watch, an insane, insanely cool Russian action/horror/sci-fi brew that’s like nothing…
There is no movie more overrated in recent history than Napoleon Dynamite; it’s to cinema what the Doors are to rock and roll, a thing blindly and inexplicably championed as though it were a religion above being blasphemed by nonbelievers. And every time someone tries to explain its appeal–the deadpan…
Remember what a fun couple Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves were in Speed? Well, forget that. In The Lake House, Warner Bros.’ slow and heavy kickoff to the summer romance season, Bullock and Reeves play the mopiest lovers to hit the big screen since Tony and Maria channeled Romeo and…
There’s a fine line between artistic genius and pretentious wankery, and most cineastes will tell you that the films of Matthew Barney exist right around that line. Those who like his work usually admit that it’s almost too insufferably pretentious to bear; those with no patience for it generally acknowledge…
Valley of the Dolls Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Fox) Behold The Godfather and Godfather Part II of drag-queen cinema — two movies that provide the gateway to a lifetime of wig addiction. The films couldn’t be more different in temperament — the 1967 original is mile-high Hollywood kitsch,…
Cars, the latest vehicle to roll off a Pixar assembly line that has thus far yielded nothing but spit-shined classics, answers that age-old question: What would Doc Hollywood have been like had it been populated entirely by cars? If the promise of that particular premise–in which a hotshot (in this…
Like the Grand Ole Opry plopped into a fragrant barn at the county fair, Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion befits its roots in frosty Minnesota soil through its worldview, Buddhist by way of Scandinavia: Life is about suffering. The wind chill is below zero, and so is your spouse;…
It’s clear by now that British director James Marsh regards America as a vaguely amusing madhouse–a reliably primitive, thoroughly benighted backwater infested with dangerous grotesques. He is, after all, the fellow who gave us the supercilious TV documentary The Burger & The King: The Life & Cuisine of Elvis Presley…
The John Wayne/John Ford Film Collection (Warner Bros.) Featuring the most epic pairing of director and actor in Hollywood history, this 10-disc box spews machismo all over. Wayne and Ford defined not only the western and war-movie genres, but also our culture’s image of rugged manhood. Among the highlights is…
With ice caps melting, sea levels rising and Poseidon sinking fast, this is no environment for any disaster movie–particularly a real one–to take our interest for granted. Thus An Inconvenient Truth, named for the superbad news of global climate change, isn’t just another lefty doc for the art-house set, but…
