With the release of The White Countess, the much-honored Merchant Ivory canon is complete. The Bombay-born producer Ismail Merchant died in May 2005 at age 68, and whatever direction his longtime collaborator and life-companion, director James Ivory, now chooses, the working partnership that gave us a dozen elegantly furnished period…
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Magnolia) The best two hours you’ll ever spend learning about accounting, Enron is one part civics lesson, one part Greek tragedy, and one part political cartoon. Director Alex Gibney makes no pretense of objectivity; he wants you to hiss and boo at Ken…
Sam Peckinpah’s Legendary Westerns Collection (Warner Bros.) At a mere $42 through most Web sites, this four-film boxed set ranks among the best ever compiled; not only does it contain the restored version of one of the greatest movies of all time (The Wild Bunch) but also three other brilliant…
The studied British theatricality and sharp wit of Mrs. Henderson Presents are likely to make it a favorite among nostalgiaphiles, theater buffs and the tea-and-crumpets set. Sailing along on the strength of another showy performance by Judi Dench, Stephen Frears’ period frolic is this year’s Being Julia, adorned with the…
Over the years, moviegoers who double as sports fans have had ample opportunity to pick and choose their favorite miracle–Shoeless Joe Jackson emerging from the tall corn, Rudy suiting up for Notre Dame, Rocky going the distance with Apollo Creed, the U.S. hockey team taking down the Russkies. As if…
Over the centuries, the legend of Tristram and Iseult has fueled the derring-do of King Arthur, aroused Richard Wagner’s operatic thunder, driven poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Tennyson and Edwin Arlington Robinson to the heights of passion, and helped stock the back streets of Manhattan with companies of leaping Jets…
When a movie promises that a character played by Queen Latifah may well die during the course of the action, one might hope that the movie in question is Hostel, so that she could be beaten a few times and then dismembered, ideally by someone who sat through The Cookout,…
Broken Flowers (Universal Home Entertainment) Bill Murray, who long ago swapped manic kineticism for melancholy deadpan, is once more mired in a middle-aged funk; what else is new? As Don Johnston, an aging lothario whose latest young girlfriend is walking out as the audience is just settling in, Murray’s on…
The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen’s finest film since…oh, let’s see… Bullets Over Broadway, is it? Or perhaps Deconstructing Harry? Or maybe Sweet and Lowdown? One forgets where the good stuff left off, because there’s been so much bad stuff since. It’s not difficult to understand the…
What’s an unemployed former super spy to do? Faced with a midlife career change, suave Pierce Brosnan seems to have chosen wry self-mockery, reinventing himself as a scruffy, fallen James Bond surrogate: sometimes still furnished with a license to kill and a certain gift for cool but far more likely…
Nowhere Man (Image Entertainment) There’s good reason why you’ve never heard of this UPN show from the mid-’90s, which lasted 25 episodes before getting shuttled off to, well, nowhere. It’s a convoluted mind-fuck that owes its existence as much to The Prisoner as The Fugitive, and if you missed one…
Amid Hollywood’s zillion-dollar explosions and computer-enhanced trickery, plenty of quieter, better films sneaked into theaters virtually unnoticed this year. Following are our reviewers’ favorite overlooked movies of 2005. Some of them never made it to local screens, but many have since made it to the video store: Balzac and the…
Those who will sit around wondering whether Munich is the work of an anti-Israeli or just a self-hating Jew–which is to say, Steven Spielberg, who has been branded both by Israeli officials and newspaper columnists in recent weeks–give the movie and its maker far too much credit. The story of…
The notion that Wolf Creek is opening nationwide on Christmas Day brings to mind the scene from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, in which a young boy opens up his holiday gift and finds a severed head. The movie is about as diametrically opposed to the concept of “goodwill…
In 1968 it was a movie. In 2001 it became a musical. Now it’s a movie again? Yep, and there’s actually pretty good reason to return The Producers to the screen. The original film, though intermittently inspired, was slow and often boring, and its homophobic, misogynistic humor no longer plays…
The Jerry Lewis chromosome is running amok again inside Jim Carrey, and if you don’t feel like getting clubbed half to death with a slapstick, stay away from Fun With Dick and Jane. On the other hand, if Carrey’s tireless antics–slithering onto nightclub tables, speaking in tongues and all manner…
We popcorn-chomping hitchhikers never know who will pick us up on the roadside. In Flirting With Disaster, it was a neurotic Manhattan adoptee on a nationwide search for his biological parents. The desert-parched heroines of Thelma & Louise brought us along as they raised hell en route to their doom…
For your Heath Ledger holiday-movie options, you have a) a cowboy in love with another man and b) history’s most infamous womanizer. Since the name Casanova is synonymous with an unquenchable thirst for straight sex with women (or at least boasting about it), the role might seem to be a…
The gifted Irish novelist and filmmaker Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Michael Collins) says that his overriding concern is “how individuals work with what they’ve been given.” Case in point: Jordan’s new feature, Breakfast on Pluto. This bittersweet, gender-bending drama takes a page from Candide–its beleaguered hero, too, happily perseveres…
The studied British theatricality and sharp wit of Mrs. Henderson Presents are likely to make it a favorite among nostalgiaphiles, theater buffs and the tea-and-crumpets set. Sailing along on the strength of another showy performance by Judi Dench, Stephen Frears’ period frolic is this year’s Being Julia, adorned with the…
It’s impossible to talk about The Ringer, a comedy about someone pretending to be retarded in order to rig the Special Olympics, without mentioning that episode of South Park in which Cartman does the same thing. The Ringer was already in production when that episode was made and has taken…
Serenity (Universal) Joss Whedon’s film version of his TV series Firefly came and went like a lightning bug in October; the predicted phenom stuck around the multiplex just long enough to lose millions. But like Firefly, which sold enough boxed sets to warrant a movie, Serenity’s bound to do well…
