When Nicolas Cage plays still and sullen–a man possessed by self-loathing and melancholy in Adaptation, say, or the landlocked angel in City of Angels–he comes off as drowsy. He disappears into those roles like a head plopped in a fluffy pillow, and it doesn’t quite suit him. Cage has excelled…
God bless Johnny Depp. For the second time this year, the man has almost single-handedly redeemed an action movie that would otherwise be indistinguishable from the pack. Introduced right up front in Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico, he’s first seen dressed up like Prince in purple glasses…
Once upon a time there was a guy named Sam Raimi. He grew up in Michigan and made amateur horror movies. He stuck with his hobby, and now he’s a filthy rich A-list producer-director in Hollywood. Beats workin’. Unfortunately, since we haven’t yet seen a genre-redefining horror movie in the…
Most will deny it, but inside every grown man lurks a hypersensitive adolescent girl. Allow me to tell you all about mine and to share some of my poetry… Whoa! Relax. Put away that gun. Just seeking to emphasize that in the case of director Catherine Hardwicke’s debut feature, thirteen,…
It seems like everybody’s raving up Mexican cinema these days–either as a merit badge of self-conscious hipness, or because the stuff is impressive and sometimes both–yet the excitement is definitely deserved with Herod’s Law (La Ley de Herodes). This movie kicks the feisty Y Tu Mamá También right in its…
Before he even had any kind of legacy, Mark “Gator” Rogowski was imagining, in on-camera interviews, what it might someday be. “When fear is gone,” the 18-year-old skater opined, “nothing will remain. Only I will be here.” A few years later, when a drunken binge in Germany led him to…
The 1990-’95 run of Saturday Night Live, when the show was a playground populated by, among others, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, Chris Farley, Kevin Nealon, Mike Myers and David Spade, was a low point in a show with a longer history of making you groan than…
Sin Noticias de Dios, retitled Don’t Tempt Me for U.S. release, didn’t fare too well in Spain upon its release there in December 2001, despite its cast of faces famous and almost famous; it wasn’t quite Gigli, but damned near. The reasons for its tanking like a boxer taking a…
Those who remember Javier Bardem as the heartthrob poet from Before Night Falls, or the distinguished detective in The Dancer Upstairs, may be shocked to find that in his latest film to reach these shores, Mondays in the Sun, the Latin hunk is balding, bearded and fat. Admittedly, he may…
Kevin Costner appeared in his first western when he was 30 and looked to be in his early 20s. He was a slender, restless actor in Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado, the 1985 film in which Costner played the blithe brother of a somber Scott Glenn–all giggles and gunshots, a noisemaker always…
The praising of Hollywood summertime cinema is the pastime of pale critics who, come late July, start to wonder what the strange yellow orb is hanging in the sky. Hence the gallons of kind ink spilled over some of the season’s sequels, which shipped spoiled but were guzzled nonetheless by…
The last thing the Roman Catholic Church needs at this point is another exposé of its misdeeds. The shock of the pedophilia scandals and of the official cover-ups isn’t going away anytime soon, and when last we looked, the former bishop of the Phoenix Diocese was out on $45,000 bail…
Probably best known in this country for Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, French writer-director Claude Berri has also made numerous comedies in his career, many of them concerning the male species’ desire for companionship and often comical attempts to obtain it. His latest film, The Housekeeper (Une…
Freddy vs. Jason Directed by Ronny Yu. Written by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift, based on characters created by Wes Craven and Victor Miller. Starring Robert Englund, Ken Kirzinger, Monica Keena and Kelly Rowland. Opens Friday. Anyone not already a fan of A Nightmare on Elm Street dream-stalker Freddy Krueger…
Not to worry. Whenever summer machismo levels threaten to fall below mad-dog range, Hollywood invariably steps in to restore the status quo. Witness S.W.A.T. , a thoroughly unremarkable police action movie starring the magnetic Samuel L. Jackson as L.A.P.D. Sergeant Dan “Hondo” Harrelson, known affectionately to his men as “the…
“Simon must propose to me now,” exclaims pretty, simpleminded Rose (Rose Byrne), “before he meets somebody else or gets to know me better!” Welcome to the none-too-subtly-named Mortmain family, wherein foundering patriarch James (Bill Nighy)–for all symbolic definitions a dead writer–has been allowing his prolonged delusions of literary grandeur to…
Ah, Paris–City of Light, of Love, of Liver Damage and Lung Cancer. C’est formidable, non? Who in need of a posh vacation would turn down the opportunity to luxuriate in its finest hotels, to stuff oneself with sumptuous snails and to work on a terribly flat romantic drama called Le…
Military clerk Ray Elwood (Joaquin Phoenix) is something of a modern-day Sergeant Bilko. Anything you need, he can get. Any scam that’s possible, he’ll run. Never mind the bumbling Colonel Berman (Ed Harris) who ostensibly runs the unit–Elwood has him wrapped around his finger. There’s just one major difference between…
It’s a great pleasure to behold a chunk of art that’s both dank and fresh at the same time, and this appraisal perfectly fits the superb Dirty Pretty Things. The latest from veteran director Stephen Frears (Gumshoe, Prick Up Your Ears, High Fidelity) immediately transports the viewer to a subjective…
For a few minutes, at least, things don’t look so bad. Watching Ben Affleck swagger around as the thuggish title character of Gigli (“Rhymes with really,” he tells us, twice) is amusing for a bit. Affleck’s eminently qualified for the role, actually–that of a low-level hood pretending to be more…
From the lofty American vantage point, Mexico’s New Wave filmmakers have materialized like magic, the unexpected fruit of a renaissance that even many cinematically alert Yanqis hardly took the trouble to notice. Meanwhile, these new directors have fashioned a vivid style that combines, in various proportions, Latin American literary experimentation,…
Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald asserted that “there are no second acts in American lives.” But a horse named Seabiscuit and the three disparate men who shared his success would surely disagree. Based on the best-selling nonfiction book by Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit recounts the true story of an unprepossessing, knobby-kneed horse…
