Little Black Book, with its Carly Simon soundtrack all but daring you to tune it out before it begins, is being marketed as a daffy romantic comedy in which a woman plows through her boyfriend’s Palm to uncover his past relationships. In truth, the movie’s anything but light and frothy;…
There is nothing mysterious or subdued about Stacy Peralta’s enthusiasms. A product of Southern California’s vivid beach scene, he’s been a surfer since boyhood and was a professional skateboarder in the ’70s before he started making documentaries about the defining moments of those sports. The phenomenally successful Dogtown and Z-Boys…
As a reviewer, it can be very tempting to want in on the ground floor of a phenomenon, to say you were there first when some low-budget feature with a nifty premise made its festival debut, only to be picked up by a big studio and become a national phenomenon…
There is a phrase bandied about that other film industry–“gay for pay”–that means exactly what it says. The queer thing is, this switch-hitting work ethic obviously applies to the “straight” industry as well, since actors not infrequently launch their careers, or rev ’em up, by playing gay. Witness recently Heath…
Perhaps the most unlikely thing to capture on film is the creative process–the spinning of gears, the tripping of wires, the breaking of hearts and the snapping of tempers that go into the making of art. Movies about writers and painters and musicians seldom collapse the barrier between inspiration and…
Jonathan Demme’s gutsy The Manchurian Candidate, which dares to rear its head just as the Democratic National Convention convenes in Boston, is the anti-Bush administration movie for those who refuse to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 or Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed because, well, they just ain’t Right. It’s less a remake…
You may have already heard the stories about A Home at the End of the World. In what many viewers have deemed a big loss, Colin Farrell’s penis no longer appears in the film. The official line is that test audiences found it too distracting, though that seems unlikely, given…
Winner of the Dramatic Audience Award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Maria Full of Grace is an uncomfortably realistic look at a 17-year-old Colombian woman who, desperate for a job, agrees to swallow capsules of heroin and transport them to New York. Although a work of fiction, the film…
Near the beginning of The Corporation, a damning documentary designed to expose everything that is irresponsible, immoral, inhumane and lethal about corporations, the narrator posits the film’s thesis: “We present the corporation as a paradox,” she says, “an institution that creates great wealth but causes enormous and often hidden harm.”…
It would be nice to declare, “Fans of Mike Hodges, rejoice!” or some such thing at the arrival of the veteran director’s latest film; alas, not this time. I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead shares elements with some of Hodges’ previous work, including a familial revenge theme (from his original Get…
Without risking much critical credibility, it can be said that Catwoman succeeds on its own feline terms. Much like a cat, the movie is a superfluous gob of fluff with an attitude ranging from idiotic to nasty. It’s a sleek and self-absorbed animal, adoring itself so ardently that those of…
If you’re wondering how Hollywood could possibly adapt Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, a collection of similarly themed short stories bound together by the slenderest of common threads, the answer is that it didn’t. The credits for I, Robot read “suggested by Isaac Asimov’s book,” but the canny sci-fi fan will…
“Is this one of those avant-garde things?” a dying Cole Porter (Kevin Kline) warily asks Gabe (Jonathan Pryce), a sort of Ghost of Musicals Past who appears out of the ether to shepherd the composer through the this-was-your-life montage that makes up Irvin Winkler’s biopic De-Lovely. “It’s a musical–it should…
The opening moments of The Door in the Floor are not promising. A little girl stands on a chair in a hallway of photos, pointing at the images and speaking about them. Soon, she is joined by a middle-aged man, probably her father, who takes her on a tour through…
“Memory is a wonderful thing, if you don’t have to deal with the past,” declares French Celine (Julie Delpy) to her erstwhile American one-night-stand Jesse (Ethan Hawke) in Before Sunset, the meandering but reasonably charming follow-up to the duo’s 1995 Euromance, Before Sunrise. In the movies as in life, nearly…
Not one of this city’s countless film festivals is as much an extension of its founder, and programmer, as the Dallas Video Festival. To see but a handful of entries in this year’s fest is to know the two sides of Bart Weiss–the political animal who gnaws on movies constructed…
Anchorman, co-written by its star Will Ferrell, plays like a series of outtakes strung together more or less in random sequence. There’s a vague plot, about the fall and rise of a San Diego newsman whose polyester suits are brighter than he is, but this doesn’t propel the movie forward…
All you need to know about Spider-Man 2 is revealed in the opening credits, in which comic-book artist Alex Ross recaps the 2002 original in lovingly, lavishly painted panels. Spidey and Mary Jane Watson are once again entangled in that now-iconic upside-down kiss; nutty Norman Osborn, out of Green Goblin…
Samurai have never been strangers to film; in fact, an entire genre has sprung from their legend, with plenty of attendant offshoots, cross-pollinators and beneficiaries (Westerns, slasher films, Star Wars). Lately, the feudal Japanese warriors have enjoyed a particular bounty of screen time: 2003 brought us The Last Samurai, in…
America’s Heart & Soul, the debut feature from commercial director Louis Schwartzberg, is being depicted in some quarters as the antidote to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, mostly because it’s a documentary, being released around the same time, about the USA. For more simplistic minds who equate anti-Bush sentiment with hatred…
A strong toxin requires a strong antidote. In the case of the Bush administration, the cure is being served in significant part by Michael Moore, who previously delivered the rousing documentaries Roger & Me and Bowling for Columbine. This time, however, the exposé feels even more personal, as Moore reveals…
It’s often a challenge to fairly assess a film that, by its very conception, is simply targeted to an entirely different demographic from one’s own. I am not by nature romantic or female; for those who are, it may have to suffice that the mostly double-X-chromosomed crowd watching The Notebook…
