For all their exceptionality, there is also a numbing sameness to the movies of Hayao Miyazaki, the revered animator who has bewitched Japanese audiences since the late 1970s and bewildered American ones since 1999, when Princess Mononoke was among the first of his movies to receive significant Stateside release. There…
Robert Rodriguez just keeps cranking ’em out. This hasn’t always been a good thing–Spy Kids 2 and 3 felt rushed in a way that the first one didn’t, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico looked cheap compared with its cinematic predecessor, Desperado. But the more Rodriguez keeps at it,…
The consequences of marital discord in Mr. & Mrs. Smith go way beyond sleeping on the couch or maintaining icy silence at the breakfast table. Thanks to a cartoonish premise by British screenwriter Simon Kinberg–and the dictates of the summer-movie marketplace–the battling Smiths of the title go at each other…
Lords of Dogtown is an odd, disorienting commodity–a fictional version of a documentary (Dogtown and Z-Boys) about the birth of skateboarding in 1970s Venice, California, that was written by the man who directed said doc, in which he was a central figure. Stacy Peralta, whose Dogtown and Z-Boys now serves…
There was no reason to expect much from Cinderella Man, Ron Howard’s biography of boxer James Braddock, who in the summer of 1935 became the most unlikely heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. After all, it’s a true tale whose outcome has been predetermined; surely there could be no…
It’s fair to say that Madagascar, directed by one man who made Antz and another who used to work on Ren & Stimpy, is virtually plot-free–nothing more, really, than a scene or two from The Great Escape cut and pasted into an episode of Survivor. Its threadbare storyline, about four…
Adam Sandler cast as a former pro quarterback–that laughable setup is about the only funny thing about this pointless, witless remake of The Longest Yard, which wasn’t intended to be taken as a comedy in 1974 and won’t be mistaken for one in its latest incarnation. (It was also remade…
It’s a question to which the response should be more than a shrug, but it’s the only thing I can offer anyone who asks, “So, how was it?” The final installment in the mostly irrelevant second Star Wars trilogy is far superior to its immediate two predecessors, The Phantom Menace…
“Somewhere, this could all be happening right now,” spoke the narrator in the trailer for the first Star Wars movie (thereafter known as Episode IV: A New Hope), and to those who were small children then, it rang true. For an entire generation, the Star Wars trilogy could never be…
The mockumentary is a tricky thing and not to be attempted by amateurs, many of whom treat the form like a joke without need of a punch line; damn the filmmaker who thinks it clever and ironic enough to “interview” “real people” “talking” about other “real people” who, of course,…
It won’t ruin anyone’s experience of 3-Iron, the new film by Korean writer-director Kim Ki-duk, to reveal that it closes with a single epigraph: “It’s hard to tell that the world we live in is either reality or a dream.” Presumably, the correct translation would replace “that” with “whether”; even…
Jane Fonda comes from a good Hollywood family and used to be a pretty fair actress herself. Klute, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Coming Home were three of the better films of their time. So, after getting a look at herself in her first movie in 15 years, La…
Much of Crash, an L.A.-stories portmanteau about the suffocating embrace of racism, is hard to watch, harder still to listen to. Its characters–the creations of co-writer and director Paul Haggis but also of people who live next door and perhaps even inside of you–say and do things they shouldn’t. Theirs…
Whatever you do, don’t accuse Ridley Scott of turning his back on a fight. Doesn’t matter if it’s slimy-fanged space aliens attacking Sigourney Weaver, Roman slaves in tough against hungry lions down at the Coliseum or American GIs going at it with Somali insurgents. Sir Ridley is always happy to…
Author Douglas Adams died at age 49 on May 11, 2001, of a heart attack suffered during a workout at a Santa Barbara, California, gym. His biographer, M.J. Simpson, blamed Adams’ demise in part on his unending battle to get The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on a big screen,…
Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a thoroughly professional, frequently spectacular piece of muckraking. But any American who hopes to watch this portrait of unfettered corporate greed, cynical power-lust and outrageous deception without going postal about an hour into the thing would do well to bring…
Among the many mysteries surrounding The Interpreter is the one that finds Sydney Pollack heralded as a major American director, a maker of Serious and Important Movies. His filmography, marked by mawkish mediocrities (Out of Africa, as vibrant as a coffee-table book; The Way We Were, its romance as plausible…
“No more soccer!” declares small-time thug Sing (writer-director-star Stephen Chow) as he vigorously stomps on a child’s ball. In the context of Kung Fu Hustle, it’s a pathetic attempt by Sing to make himself look tough. The larger signal, however, is to followers of Chow’s work–it’s a direct reference to…
Of the 30 or so films playing the USA Film Festival, now celebrating its 35th anniversary, only one has never been shown to an audience before: former D magazine contributor Jeff Bowden’s directorial debut, Dirt, which documents a season of dirt-track racing at the Devil’s Bowl Speedway in Mesquite. Shot…
Matthew Parkhill’s Dot the I is the kind of tricked-up mental exercise that may intrigue the most impressionable film school students and a philosophy major here and there. But anyone who’s gotten through sophomore year without declaring him the next great thinker of the Western Hemisphere is more likely to…
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that your moviegoing family is absolutely up to date on every major release this year. Not a Friday goes by that you don’t go see something new. Then you look in the paper and see that the only major release coming up this…
If nothing else, give Dana Brown credit for enthusiasm. A documentary filmmaker in name only, he is really the camera- and microphone-equipped president of several booster clubs–among them what might be called the International Society of Beach Bums and, thanks to his latest exercise in hero worship, the Dune Buggy…
