Sorrow sprouts wings and flies in Jim Sheridan’s radiant new film In America, which pits the pain and grief of unimaginable loss against the resilience of the human heart. In this semi-autobiographical tale from the writer-director of My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father, a working-class Irish…
Honey is one of those movies you will see (or not, whatever), swear you’ve seen before in several other guises and incarnations, then immediately forget you ever saw to begin with. Its story, about a would-be dancer trying to plot her escape from mean streets (or mean movie sets and…
In his career as a Hollywood action figure, Tom Cruise has been dressed in some pretty hip outfits–a macho fighter pilot’s sleek leather jacket, a NASCAR driver’s logo-speckled fire suit, assorted silken Armani sports jackets, even black cape and fangs. So it’s a bit unsettling to see the Cruiser stuffed…
It has become a subject of much discussion and debate among film fetishists in recent weeks: For which movie will Sean Penn win the Academy Award, Mystic River or 21 Grams? Perhaps this seems like so much jockeying for blurbs on a movie poster or a newspaper advertisement–Sean Penn’s up…
In director Ron Howard’s The Missing, Tommy Lee Jones’ Samuel Jones takes his place among the oldest archetypes in the Western genre–the white man who has lived among the Indians till he has at last become one. This plot device, used in Hombre and Nevada Smith and myriad other movies,…
Michael Crichton seems pretty clever. The doctor-screenwriter-novelist digs odd history (Eaters of the Dead, a.k.a. The 13th Warrior), clashing cultures (Rising Sun) and cutting-edge biotechnology (Jurassic Park, and virtually his whole canon). His 1999 novel and its inevitable new movie adaptation, Timeline, both attempt to deliver all this and more,…
Bad Santa, in which Billy Bob Thornton plays a drunken department-store Santa who repeatedly swears at children, pisses himself publicly, chain-smokes like an industrial plant and cracks safes on Christmas Eve, is the least sentimental holiday release ever made. No one is redeemed, no one comes to believe in the…
If you’re hankering for a movie about an awkward yet lovable “outsider” type who wanders into a pastel mock-up of Middle America and cajoles the straights to get saucy, you’re in luck. It’s called Edward Scissorhands, and it’s been available on video for years. Renting it will absolve you of…
It took four years, but finally Dark Castle–Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver’s horror division, which puts out a movie a year around Halloween–has made something that’s genuinely scary. It may be no coincidence that this time around, Silver has scored a higher-profile cast than usual and a better-known director in…
In the annals of fraud and fakery, a discredited ex-magazine reporter named Stephen Glass likely will wind up a mere footnote. The people who forge Van Goghs and the con artists who bilk naïve grandmothers out of their life savings (not to mention certain fast-dancing corporate executives) even more richly…
When we first see Fanda, the craggy, octogenarian hero of a sublime Czech tragicomedy called Autumn Spring, he alights from a sleek black limousine under a rich canopy of trees and begins looking at a luxurious country mansion with obvious distaste. “Quite shabby,” he says to the obsequious sales agent…
Russell Crowe to his agent: “More Oscar-bait. Now.” Agent, considering his cut of Crowe’s $20 million payday: “Yes, sir.” A possible scenario, anyway. Thus, Crowe is back in another iconic, self-serious performance, and his beefy mug will stare down upon us from this season’s heroic movie posters until Tom Cruise…
With its soundtrack stockpiled with songs of romance and Christmas and a screenplay by the man who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, it’s appropriate Love Actually feels less like a brand-new movie than a greatest-hits compendium. It offers nothing new and instead makes…
A not terribly long time ago in an uninhabitable galaxy called Burbank, a generally astute movie studio founded by four Polish siblings alienated a young hotshot filmmaker. The studio was Warner Bros., and the project was a cold, disturbing, highly stylized vision of a mechanized future called THX-1138. Not wholly…
‘Tis the season and all that jive; beneath the tree this first week of November you will find two films set during the final week of December, when sugar plums and candy canes go on sale at the concession stand for all the good little girls and boys’ parents to…
The spooky beauty of Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s strange take on the Columbine massacre, arises not from the shock of sudden violence but from the filmmaker’s steady gaze at the numbing routines of life inside a suburban high school. With what first looks like cool detachment, Van Sant (My Own…
The riddles of identity that drive and disturb Philip Roth’s impressive body of fiction usually focus on contemporary Jewish characters whose conflicts between self-absorption and self-hate remain poignantly (and often hilariously) unresolved. But in The Human Stain, the first Roth novel to be adapted as a film in three decades,…
Remember that silly little-girl version of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, snuffling “I’m difficult!” through a charming tantrum? Well, make it a point to greet Ryan’s new incarnation in the psycho-sexual thriller In the Cut. Post-Crystal, post-Hanks and even post-husband Dennis Quaid (toward whom this performance almost plays…
Pieces of April, made by playwright-turned-novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director Peter Hedges, could be confused for a compendium reel of someone’s home movies. Shot on digital video using existing light, it looks like something assembled by a film student for a final and lost soon after, left behind for a stranger to find and…
In the beginning, there was The Evil Dead, and Stephen King looked down upon it and saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let there be Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, that the message of writer-director Sam Raimi be spread across the land!” So it was written, so…
Everything’s going to be all right. If there’s a theme to this year’s Deep Ellum Film Festival, perhaps it’s that single, simple sentence of reassurance, repeated in a handful of movies screening this week and suggested in several others. A dying artist says it to an immigrant family that’s suffered…
Given the way the United Nations has been taking a beating in the American media over the past year or so, it may not be a bad thing that the new movie Beyond Borders is at heart a two-hour infomercial for Kofi Annan’s organization. As a call to action, the…
