It’s not easy to pull off a good morality tale. Too often, movies with a message, or about a movement, reduce characters and events to types. They pit unqualified good against unqualified evil–a dark narrative temptation–and, like so much of what issues from Hollywood, do so to ill effect. That’s…
Paul Weitz, with brother Chris, co-wrote and co-directed 2002’s adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel About a Boy, in which a cocky grown man (Hugh Grant) learned how to actually act like a grown man by observing a gawky young boy (Nicholas Hoult) who was nearly abandoned by his suicidal mother…
Nobody messes with Samuel L. Jackson–at least not at the movies. He’s Shaft reinvented, the coolest cop on the street. He’s Mace Windu, the only swashbuckler in the Star Wars galaxy who gets to swing a purple lightsaber. Best of all, he’s Jules Winnfield, the ultra-hip hit man who spouts…
You have to hand it to Sean Penn. OK, you don’t absolutely have to, and if you’re a Red Stater through-and-through, you certainly won’t want to, but give him some credit. After being pilloried in the press for visiting Iraq under Saddam’s reign, torn apart by housecats in a puppet…
Clint Eastwood began digging into the third act of his career–the one that reveals the mature, deep-thinking artist…with a little jazz piano on the side–a dozen years ago, with the discomfiting anti-western Unforgiven. Since then, he’s hardly come up for air or given himself a break. Last year’s Mystic River…
Over a three-month period in 1994, machete-wielding Hutu tribesmen in Rwanda hacked to death 800,000 Tutsi men, women and children. News reports, including film footage of the unfolding carnage, were broadcast around the globe. In the face of such unremitting acts of inhumanity, the world community did nothing. It wasn’t…
The Woodsman Anchored by a carefully studied, thoroughly compelling performance by Kevin Bacon, this portrait of a recently paroled pedophile still at war with his old demons is so thoughtful and provocative that we cannot help but become engrossed. Directed and co-written (from a play by Steven Fechter) by recent…
Our best movies of the year actually may have been anything but the best to a few of our critics–such is the dilemma of offering employment to writers of dissenting opinion. In other words, the No. 1 film of 2004 wasn’t universally heralded by our team. The Dallas Observer top…
To understand this most tumultuous year in film, over which loomed the ghost of a blessed messiah and the shadow of an accursed pariah, turn your eyes from the movie screen and look to the bookshelf. There you will find a copy of Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, which…
The critic who takes notes during The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou will ultimately fill a notepad only with scribbled details: “All the crewmen wear red stocking caps with their tuxedos,” “some names of Zissou’s movies: The Battling Eels of Antibes, Shadow Creatures of the Lurisia Archipelago, Island Cats!,” “one…
The parade of real-life figures strolling into the googolplex has been endless this year: There’s Jamie Foxx as musical Mount Rushmore Ray Charles, Johnny Depp as Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie, Kevin Spacey as forgotten teeny-popper Bobby Darin, Liam Neeson as sexologist Alfred Kinsey, Kevin Kline as standards composer Cole…
When your movie gets riotous laughter out of endless utterances of the word “Focker,” it doesn’t have to try very hard. So it’s no surprise that much of Meet the Fockers, the inevitable sequel to the 2000 hit Meet the Parents, barely breaks a sweat. When in doubt, after all,…
In Spanglish, which is less a story than a snapshot of a crumbling marriage populated by sitcom characters, Adam Sandler plays John Clasky, an average man with an average name and an above-average life. With his burgeoning double chin always covered in a slight shadow of stubble, he’s a celebrated…
This much can be said for the movie version of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: Its villain, Count Olaf, just might be Jim Carrey’s finest screen role. A bitter, would-be master thespian who delights in donning ridiculous disguises and adopting funny accents, he doesn’t seem that far removed…
A Very Long Engagement, the new film by French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (most famously of Amélie), will have its fans. For one thing, there’s no denying its beauty, an onslaught of gorgeous tableaux, painstakingly arranged and shot through filters to exclude colors that don’t suit (i.e., anything other than sepia…
If you’ve already decided to see Ocean’s Twelve, it’s probably best not to read much about it. Unlike its predecessor, a remake that clung to a hoary heist formula, the sequel contains ample pleasures, most of which amuse as the result of surprises both great and small. There’s no one…
They walk among us. They resemble people, approximate our words and actions, present themselves more or less as human. And yet they are more–a different species, with their own dark legends, their own clandestine meeting places. They are dorks, and they are going to be pretty OK with Blade: Trinity…
Mike Nichols’ new film Closer is a boiling pot of lust, mistrust and double-dealing that might well be taken for outright soap opera–or, in quite a few places, soft-core porn–were it not for the sophisticated gleam of its well-heeled London desperadoes and the vicious dazzle of its dialogue. Adapted from…
Movies pushing the indomitableness of human nature tend to make me puke, mainly because they’re often created with a palpable self-congratulatory air by film-biz insiders whose real-life concept of “suffering” extends to being brought an incorrectly prepared frappuccino. This emetic response is doubled when the featured indomitable human happens to…
If you’ve ever gone line-dancing with a gaggle of amputees on crank and hallucinogens, you know something of the feeling engendered by viewing Alexander. This broad, bold and ambitious film by Oliver Stone presents itself as a fairly straightforward endeavor, but its rhythms quickly go strange while its participants hobble…
As the year stumbles toward its conclusion and critics begin penning their best-and-worst compendiums, here’s a holiday contender fit for the all-time Naughty List. Based on the John Grisham novel Skipping Christmas–which, face it, is less a novel than a pint-sized impulse item stacked on bookstore checkout counters–Christmas With the…
Oh, that Johnny Depp. Played in some dime-a-dozen rock bands, did some average television, made a few cutesy little movies. Whatever. Yeah, he messes with his looks in a fun way sometimes, but otherwise he merely rides that nicotine-sunken-cheeks thing all the way to the bank. The guy’s popular, but…
