Some art-house programmer would be wise to schedule a double bill of The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza’s talkumentary about the dirtiest joke ever told, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, writer-director Judd Apatow’s near-brilliant movie about a grown-up geek who simply lost interest in trying to get laid. Both offer countless giddy variations…
Red Eye may not seem to be your typical Wes Craven movie. It’s not really horror, there are no marketable monsters, and unlike Cursed, Scream 3 and other recent Craven offerings, it’s actually an enjoyable time at the movies. But heroine Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is very much in the…
Ain’t nothing in this world more tedious than highbrow erotica, which works itself into a lather and then wipes off the sweat before anyone notices how awfully and inappropriately worked-up it got. Asylum, adapted by Closer’s Patrick Marber and Chrysanthy Balis from the novel by Patrick McGrath, is just that…
Pity the daily newspaper critic who must review The Aristocrats without using such phrases as “a longshoreman’s arm up a little girl’s ass,” “then my wife goes down on my son while the dog’s licking his balls,” “my grandmother’s covered in my come,” and “is it shit before piss, or…
Once you get past its negligible plot, scant dialogue and almost zero action, Gus Van Sant’s elliptical rendering of the final hours in the troubled life of a grunge musician is rarely boring. That may seem like a backhanded compliment, but given the absence of such customary cinematic conventions as…
The contentedly independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has brought his restless energy to a series of surreal road movies that move nicely along on the strength of rare characters, quirky humor and a willing embrace of chance adventure. These quest stories for hipsters have transported Jarmusch’s fiercely loyal audience from New…
There has always been much to love about the Dallas Video Festival: its eclectic scheduling of full-length features alongside experimental shorts that last this long, its awards named for unheralded pioneers and visionaries (Ernie Kovacs, and now Albert Maysles) and the unbridled, contagious enthusiasm of its founder and artistic director…
And so, once more, the googolplex emits the stink of the network rerun, this week offering yet another worthless big-screen take on small-screen detritus. As Hollywood wonders–cries, actually, over spilt spoiled milk–why audiences are staying away from theaters, offering theories ranging from the absence of such phenoms as The Passion…
If the Navy is looking for splashy recruiting tools, it could do worse than Stealth, a zillion-dollar action movie stuffed with futuristic jet fighters, glamorous carrier pilots and an overload of explosive, mostly digital derring-do. Here is Top Gun revised and updated, complete with a new array of enemies–swarthy Middle…
Must Love Dogs, it should be clearly stated, is not the greatest romantic comedy ever made about a quirky couple who meet at a dog park. That honor goes to Dog Park, the oddball 1998 flick starring Luke Wilson and Natasha Henstridge, written and directed by former Kids in the…
“Hit me,” says Mark Zupan–begs, actually, like a kid clamoring for a new toy. “I’ll hit you back.” He means it, too, and his ripped pecs and buzzed scalp and tattooed back and arms and bushy gangster goatee promise just as much menace. The dude’s bad and doesn’t need to…
Going to the theater this summer has been like stepping into a time machine where your fondest childhood memories are retooled by cynics and sadists. Bewitched, Herbie: Fully Loaded, last week’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and now Bad News Bears are meant to be gobbled like comfort food by…
If Vince Vaughn puts any effort into what he’s doing, it doesn’t show, which is perhaps one of the benefits of always appearing to be hungover. The man probably has to check the bags under his eyes at the airport, and he’s about as in shape as a toddler’s fistful…
Roald Dahl’s inner child was evidently a contrary lad–precocious, dark-minded, contemptuous of adult supervision and fueled by a sense of justice that often proceeded via cruel whim. In Dahl’s twisty children’s stories, villains throw kids out of windows, beautiful women turn out to be hideous witches in disguise and parents…
Movies based on comic books have become dime-a-dozen events–appropriate given the cover price of these titles was 10 cents when they debuted decades ago. It wasn’t so long ago Warner Bros. teased the release of Richard Donner’s Superman by insisting, “You’ll believe a man can fly”; now, you’ll not only…
The British indie filmmaker Sally Potter, a former dancer, lyricist and performance artist, clearly has a taste for adventure. In 1992 that led her to Orlando, a screen adaptation of the experimental Virginia Woolf novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who hangs around for 400 years, eventually morphing into a hip…
Gregg Araki likes to shock. That’s no secret to anyone who has followed the director’s career, but a cartoonish layer of unreality has usually kept the polymorphous sexual pairings and graphic violence somewhat at a distance. There’s a little bit of that in Mysterious Skin, but mostly it stays grounded…
Quite simply and quite literally, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds is Close Encounters of the Third Kind turned inside out: We’re still not alone, only this time the aliens are out for our blood, which they spray all over the countryside like so much red…
Bewitched may go down as the first movie about a fictional failed actor that creates a real-life failed actor. This hackneyed, hapless and utterly useless redo of an overrated 1960s sitcom is excruciating to sit through for a dozen reasons. But nothing is more intolerable than the sight of Will…
Not many people saw Lost and Delirious, the 2001 boarding-school drama about two girls in obsessive love, and that was probably for the best. Yes, Piper Perabo (Coyote Ugly) made a stunning androgynous rebel, but she couldn’t rescue the film from its unctuous self-importance. My Summer of Love, a bewitching…
Anyone who would insist that movie reviewing is not a real job (‘sup, Mom) hasn’t been forced to sit through screenings of Bewitched and Herbie: Fully Loaded in the span of five days–and by forced, I mean either you see both movies, write 800 words about each or else you…
DC Comics has kept its superheroes locked in a fortress of solitude for almost a decade, forcing the likes of Superman and Batman to warm the bench while longtime rival Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man and the Hulk and the X-Men and Blade galloped up and down the playing field. Not counting…
