It’s a sign that a nation may be losing its collective mind when it grants a nutty hack like Quentin Tarantino an exalted title like officer of arts and letters, but there’s France for ya. Whether Gallic pop culture is rousingly progressive or embarrassingly adolescent is anyone’s call, but few…
Sitting through Raising Helen is an exercise in frustration, because somewhere inside this big heap of Hollywood nothing is a something (someone, actually) worth saving and savoring. Her name is Joan Cusack, always a supporting player but never a star no matter her grace and warmth and charm even in…
The first time through, you might dismiss Coffee and Cigarettes as a filmmaker’s recess, playtime before the serious business of making a real feature. Jim Jarmusch never intended this new movie, a collection of 11 shorts made over the past two decades, to be a movie at all. It began…
The first few minutes of Shrek 2 are cluttered with more references to the movies than David Thomson’s thick, rich history text New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Watching the movie is like sitting next to an ADD patient with access to a remote control and a hundred premium cable channels;…
In 2004 A.D., as the five remaining members of the legendary Monty Python comedy troupe lie in coffins in a Vanity Fair spread to jeer at their own deaths, it’s really nice to have them back together commanding the big screen. Behold anew their wonderfully wiggy Monty Python’s Life of…
In the mood to launch a thousand ships? Fine, but it’s gonna cost you. Feel like sacking the Temple of Apollo? OK, but bring drachmas. Depending on who’s counting, Warner Bros.’ pre-summer blockbuster Troy budgeted out at anywhere between $175 million and $250 million, including the big wooden horse, assorted…
What becomes of Morgan Spurlock’s body after a month of eating and drinking nothing but McDonald’s assembly-line foodstuffs is not surprising. He bloats up, gaining nearly 30 pounds in 30 days. His sex drive peters out, among myriad disappointments visited upon Spurlock’s vegan-chef girlfriend, who’s only too happy to discuss…
Breakin All the Rules Part of an ever-expanding subgenre that includes The Brothers, Two Can Play That Game and Deliver Us From Eva, Breakin’ All the Rules serves very little purpose beyond reminding us that there are black people in the world and they have love lives as well as…
“We must keep the atmosphere electrified!” announces creepy Igor in reference to an abominable experiment in Van Helsing, but he could be appraising the entirety of this enormous event movie. Breathless cutting, nonstop special effects and a pummeling soundtrack camouflage very silly plotting and mediocre-to-sappy dialogue–and yet the thrash-and-burn technique…
If you’ve seen a movie at a Landmark theater in the past year or so, you’ve probably enjoyed the trailer for Shaolin Soccer. Over a lilting Asian flute that morphs into pounding percussion, airborne soccer players execute kung fu moves that send the ball blazing across the field (or, in…
That sound you hear is the stampeding feet of millions of pubescent and prepubescent girls racing to movie theaters this weekend to catch sisters Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen in their first feature film since 1995’s It Takes Two. The Olsen twins began their acting careers at the age of 9…
Those seeking a spiritual counterpart to the yin of Lynne Ramsay’s masterfully moody Morvern Callar will find their yang in David Mackenzie’s exquisitely sorrowful Young Adam. Art-house aficionados may recall that in Ramsay’s recent film, a young male writer commits suicide, leaving his simple girlfriend to absorb his very being…
Ever evolving, always changing, the universe nonetheless sustains many constants: Hair metal never really goes away. British women inevitably become besotted grumps. And short men always turn into intolerable control freaks. Another “true generality” holds that males of all statures develop their innate behavioral characteristics within patriarchal cultures that, while…
One thing few may mention about Mean Girls is that it could have been unrelentingly terrible. It isn’t–it’s actually pretty fabulous on its own terms–but consider: a rush-job comedy (hastily lensed a few months ago) constructed around a high-concept title with built-in ka-ching and endless potential as talk-show fodder. Produced…
Laws of Attraction is the kind of film you might mistake for “cute” or “charming” at first glance. Maybe you will open the paper and spot the ad with Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore canoodling and think to yourself how nice it would be to see James Bond defrosting indie…
This may sound an eensy bit hyperbolic, but dig: Mayor of the Sunset Strip is the greatest rock-and-roll movie of all time. Of course, as with any advanced class, it’s good to bone up on the prerequisites. If you haven’t explored rock in film (and rockin’ film) from The T.A.M.I…
I am going to give 13 Going on 30 too much credit, though it’s hardly worth the effort; Lord knows the filmmakers didn’t put much into it. It’s a shame, as far as these things go, because what could have been an engaging, maybe even enlightening story about the unfairly…
Suicide made merry. Brotherly devotion tinged with carnal deceit. Personal tragedy transformed by malicious humor. These are some of the oil-and-water notions advanced by Lone Scherfig’s Wilbur, a mood-switching meditation on love and death that goes out of its way to yank our chains. From the sly come-on of her…
Among the so-called highlights of this year’s USA Film Festival, which opens Thursday and runs through April 29, is Napoleon Dynamite, which sold for some $5 million at the Sundance Film Festival in January and offers further proof that what plays in Utah sometimes ought to stay in Utah. It’s…
If only Dogville were at least involving enough to be perplexing. Sigh. In simplest terms–which it definitely deserves–Lars von Trier’s latest thingamabob is a large, pretentious blob of coulda-been. As in, it coulda been deep and insightful. It coulda been sociologically challenging. It coulda been formalistically thrilling. But it isn’t…
The six-month intermission is over; those of you left in the lobby, wondering if Uma Thurman ever did kill Bill, may now return to your seats and unbuckle your belts and resume your gorging. Rest assured that Kill Bill: Vol. 2, the final half of Quentin Tarantino’s fifth movie, offers…
Here’s a subject with which no one should ever have to grapple: Is this new version of The Punisher, starring Thomas Jane as the comic-book assassin, better than the 1989 adaptation with Dolph Lundgren? They both offer slight variations on a tale first told in a 1974 Spider-Man comic, where…
