Occasionally I can be convinced it’s the singer, not the song. I’ve no love for Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time,” but can’t get enough of Brit band Travis’ laconic redo of said iconic single, which squeezes out the then-teen temptress’ toxic sugar till it’s just a bittersweet lament. On…
French putz Xavier (Romain Duris) is depressed. The poor guy lives in Paris, has Amélie’s Audrey Tautou as a girlfriend, eats gourmet vegan dinners prepared for him by his free-spirited mother and is being set up for a graduate degree in economics by a friend of his father’s. “I don’t…
Talk about tough acts to follow: The original 1999 Matrix, a critical and commercial smash, came almost as a revelation out of nowhere–if the combination of Joel Silver, Warner Bros. and roughly 60 million bucks qualifies as “nowhere.” After more than four years, The Matrix Reloaded–the first of two sequels…
Ross Hunter, dead seven years, hasn’t been this alive at the movies since the 1950s and ’60s, when he produced some of the weepiest melodramas and cheeriest romantic comedies ever to barely stick to the screen. His ghost has been wandering up and down the aisles ever since Don Simpson…
Forthcoming is an impressive collection of expensive junk amassed for a movie The New York Times predicted four years ago had “big prospects as a cult classic,” most notably a video game (Enter the Matrix, its very title a command to reach into your back pocket) and a DVD collection…
Nobody can convey more, doing nothing, than Billy Bob Thornton. His minimalist style is appropriate for the ironically named Levity, but what is conveyed never quite generates the emotional charge of Sling Blade or Monster’s Ball. Writer-director Ed Solomon is best known as the screenwriter of the two Bill &…
Perhaps only a fanatical Russian filmmaker, steeped in a history as ruthless and magnificent as the nation’s harsh winters and endless landscapes, could have dreamed up and executed such an audacious plan: an 87-minute, dreamlike journey through 300 years of Russian/Soviet history, told in a single, uncut Steadicam shot that…
In March 2002, days before President Bush was scheduled to visit Peru, a car bomb exploded near the U.S. embassy in Lima, killing nine and injuring dozens. Government officials, here and in Peru, blamed the attack on Shining Path–a Marxist terrorist organization with roots dating to the 1960s, though it…
Neil LaBute is back to his old self, and the cinematic world is a better place for it. Honestly, what was he thinking when he made Possession? Did the charges of misogyny, still lingering from In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, get to him so much…
What a strange enterprise, making a movie about reading a book. It’s the kind of paradox philosophy students chew over at 3 o’clock in the morning–and a prospect any Hollywood producer would flee from as fast as his Ferragamos could carry him. But for Mark Moskowitz, a lifelong bibliophile re-examining…
Long ago Eddie Murphy had grown tired of Eddie Murphy parts: the fast-talking high-jiver, the preening put-on. Even before he began parodying himself in Bowfinger and Showtime and I Spy, the latter two perhaps accidentally, he accepted high-paying roles in low-rent movies that neutered and humiliated the character he had…
Whoever said that “laughter is the most subversive weapon of all” could have been talking about Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s sly and corrosively funny political comedy Divine Intervention. A film-festival favorite both in and outside the United States (it won the Special Jury Prize at last year’s Chicago International Film…
It is rare to find a film that defies one’s expectations as sweetly and satisfyingly as this coming-of-age comedy-drama from first-time feature writer-director Peter Sollett. The surprise isn’t in the plot–that would be too easy–but, rather, in the extraordinarily subtle and convincing ways the characters grow and change before our…
At some fast-approaching point in pop-culture evolution, we’re due to hit Total Outsider Saturation, wherein everybody is an outsider and therefore there is no longer an outside. In the fleeting meantime we have scintillating reminders of the struggle like X-2: X-Men United, the latest bid from comic book land to…
The Chicago-based filmmaker Steve James rose to prominence in 1994 with Hoop Dreams, a gritty, uncomfortably intimate portrait of two inner-city kids who try to escape poverty and deprivation through basketball. Shot over four years, it was at once a stirring indictment of the social services bureaucracy, a tribute to…
In Confidence, Edward Burns plays Jake Vig, a con artist whose body temperature runs a few degrees below normal. Even when things seem to go bad, when a would-be partner betrays him with a phone call or a seedy-greedy Dustin Hoffman lays maybe-gay and grubby paws all over him, Burns…
You can’t be sure what to make of Identity for its first hour: Director James Mangold’s first foray into the horror genre plays so much like a joke it’s almost impossible to tell whether he’s making you laugh on purpose or because, well, he is director James Mangold, maker of…
Director David Cronenberg has led his loyal fans down some pretty spooky corridors, including the telepathic netherworld of Scanners, the violent sibling rivalry of twin gynecologists in love with the same woman (Dead Ringers) and the drug-haunted imagination of William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch). So it comes as no surprise…
It had become sport in recent years to dismiss the USA Film Festival for what it wasn’t rather than what it was becoming. No, it is not a South by Southwest Film Festival or an Austin Film Festival, where would-be independent filmmakers gather each year to discuss a project or…
It’s the actor’s dream, to have more work than there is time to do it. At times, it may not all be the most pleasurable work, but for every paycheck there is the payday of working with a Ridley Scott, a Michael Mann, a Harold Ramis, a Norman Jewison, a…
Just to admit this up front, my ideal concept of musical comedy involves Bryan Adams and Dave Matthews garroting each other onstage with their own damnable guitar strings. Nonetheless, even viewers with a more centrist appreciation of the genre may feel disappointed by this friendly new folk-music curiosity called A…
Better Luck Tomorrow, about Asian-American high-schoolers making good grades but up to no good, arrives with the furor (albeit minor–a rumpus, perhaps?) attendant a Sundance Film Fest fave. In this case, Internet movie-gossip hounds bark among themselves about changes made to the movie after MTV Films and Paramount Classics got…
