The hero of Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen is an isolated teen-ager mired in a gray Scottish slum with only a vague dream of family life to sustain him. Like previous Loach heroes–the impoverished boy who finds hope training a falcon in Kes, say, or the downtrodden working stiff struggling to…
The first question on the minds of most potential viewers of Owning Mahowny is probably something along the lines of “What’s up with that spelling? Who spells ‘Mahoney’ with a ‘w’?” Do the marketing people think we somehow won’t get that it rhymes with “owning” if there isn’t a “w”…
Here’s another stranger-in-a-strange-land yarn, but Matt Dillon in his feature directorial debut delivers loads of atmosphere to tart up the threadbare paradigm. Playing a slick nobody insurance broker on the lam from the FBI, Dillon journeys from Big Apple ennui to Cambodian exotica in search of his mentor, the typically…
Whenever the stars of the adolescent street-racing fantasy 2 Fast 2 Furious were feeling balky or temperamental on the set, as movie stars are wont to do, the cure was probably easy–an oil change and a tune-up. John Singleton’s adrenaline-spiked sequel to the surprise summer hit of 2001, The Fast…
Credit the quality of a superior educational system. Or the native wit of two quick thinkers with a gift for understanding the human animal. Or the power of happy collaboration. In any event, Lawless Heart, the second feature co-written and co-directed by the young Brits Neil Hunter and Tom Hunsinger,…
If we can glean any trend so far in the feature films of Icelandic actor-turned-director Baltasar Kormákur, it would be his ability to offer up utterly unsympathetic characters who are difficult to identify with, while somehow managing to keep us interested in their fates regardless. His feature directorial debut, 101…
If you’re reading this paper, chances are you’re more literate than the average American. If you’re reading the film reviews, it’s also likely that you’ve become familiar with words like “bravura” and “eponymous,” which seem to exist only in the vocabularies of professional movie assessors. But what if you were…
Another week, another remake–summer, that season of air-conditioned originality, must be upon us. Only unlike The In-Laws, which creaked into theaters last week, this latest updating of a decades-old action-comedy has two things going for it: Its forebear is a veddy British caper film little-seen in the United States, which…
If grown-ups were meant to watch Walt Disney cartoons, God would have kept us all in the third grade for two or three decades. Still, somebody has to drive the SUV every time the Disneyfolk decide to lure the little ones down to the multiplex, and as long as the…
Many moviegoers see hyperactive Jim Carrey as the second coming of Jerry Lewis, but no one’s ever mistaken him for God. Clearly, he’d like to change that–at least for now, at least at the box office. Hey, you’d feel the same way if your last movie were The Majestic. In…
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…
