Rarely does a theme unify a film festival; such gatherings, for the most part, are glued together only by movies few have seen and movies few will ever see, the unwanted or misunderstood offspring of would-be artists and could-be visionaries, kooky veterans who long ago ditched the mainstream for the…
So, you wish to know if Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is as good as the first Harry Potter movie. Is it as charming, visually gratifying, faithful to filthy-rich author J.K. Rowling’s inescapable books? Well, that’d be yep times four, as it’s definitely an enchanting spectacular for Potter…
Writer-director Todd Haynes’ loving re-creation of a 1950s-style Hollywood melodrama (think Douglas Sirk) is a puzzling affair. Watching Far from Heaven is like taking a trip back in time–not to the real world of 1957 but, rather, to the reel 50s, as personified by such classic “women’s films” as All…
If the title is a Jeopardy question, then the answer might be “How does Steven Seagal come across these days?” or maybe “How will you feel after an 88-minute rip-off of The Rock with action confined to slo-mo gun firing and random glass-shattering?” Seagal, who’s slowly morphing into an untalented…
A tough Paris cop (Jean Reno) flies to Tokyo for the funeral of his great lost love, only to find out that she has left him in charge of the rebellious teen-age daughter (Ryoko Hirosue) whose existence she had kept a secret from him. When the girl turns out to…
It is the essential sexiness of holy archetypes that stirs up a ruckus in Carlos Carrera’s competent if unremarkable tragedy, adapted by screenwriter Vicente Lenero from the 1875 book by Portuguese author Jose Maria Eça de Queiroz. We first meet our young, present-day hero (and anti-hero) Padre Amaro (Mexican superstar…
So enchanting it takes your breath away, Jean Cocteau’s 1946 live-action version of the famous fairy tale remains one of the most magical films ever made. Boasting a new print, struck from the restored French negative, and an improved, albeit not perfect, soundtrack, this glorious black-and-white film–in French with English…
Three years on, the besieged phenomenon–the scourge, Antichrist or the Vanilla Ice of the ’90s, pick ’em–has been rendered beloved; when they, slick bizzers in suits and on cell phones, speak of “Eminem” and “gross” in the same sentence, they’re talking only receipts, merchandise, profit. The man, just touching 30,…
The repellent Casanova portrayed by Campbell Scott in Roger Dodger has an instinct for looking up skirts and down blouses, but no capacity for looking in the mirror. Part salesman, part caveman, Madison Avenue copywriter Roger Swanson is, deep in his cynical heart, as loathsome to himself as he is…
The question “All right?” is asked of every character, on many occasions, throughout Mike Leigh’s latest film, All or Nothing. In working-class London, it seems, it’s the preferred substitute for “Hello” or “What’s up?” Whether or not it elicits a response is almost irrelevant; the question itself is a formality…
Director Chris Eyre, whose engaging 1997 road movie, Smoke Signals, helped energize a modest new wave of Native American filmmaking, is bound to open even more eyes with his bold second feature, Skins. Filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and Nebraska, it’s a vivid look at two…
With Frida–the story of profoundly passionate and uncompromising Mexican-Jewish painter Frida Kahlo–it’s evident that a few folks in marketing know how to work the demographics (it’ll be extremely PC, possibly mandatory, to gush in adoration of it), but that’s the first and last cynical comment of this review. Frida is…
Listen up, retards: Killing time is over. Melt down your weapons, now, forever. Wouldn’t it be nice if that sentiment echoed around the world? Well, certainly it does, every day, but weapons have a nasty tendency of drowning out sensible words. For this reason–now more than ever–it’s greatly inspirational to…
For Eric Schaefer, it all began when he was a masters film student at the University of Texas at Austin in the mid-1980s. One day, he stumbled across a reference to a forgotten movie called Birth of a Baby, which isn’t a prequel to Birth of a Nation but a…
The Santa Clause, released at the height of Home Improvement’s popularity, played like a Very Special Holiday Episode of that now-defunct television series–what might have happened if an egg nog-saturated Tim Taylor fell asleep with visions of sugar plums in his head and woke up sporting a white beard and…
There’s an invigorating, inspiring film about a famous dead person opening in a few days: Julie Taymor’s Frida, scheduled to arrive November 1, which is loving but never unconditionally so, and every bit as rousing as its subject matter, painter Frida Kahlo. Taymor uses the screen just as Kahlo used…
If you’re a fan of the baseball-cap-wearin’, Nader-votin’, muckrakin’, best-sellin’, corporation-confrontin’ son of a gun known as Michael Moore, all you need to know about his latest film, Bowling for Columbine, is that it’s more of the same. You know, the mix of easy humor, political potshots, attempts (some successful,…
Once more, it all boils down to the stamps–which, if you have seen Stanley Donen’s 1963 comic-thriller Charade, nearly ruins the last 10 minutes of Jonathan Demme’s remake, The Truth About Charlie. But Demme isn’t at all concerned with such mundane things as shock-’em finales; he won’t be bound by…
You ever notice those people? You know, the so-called “stand-up comedians”? Who are those people? What’s the deal with them? And what does that mean, anyway, “stand-up”? I mean, it’s not like we’re gonna think they’re sitting down unless they tell us otherwise! Yes, a decade or so later, it’s…
The current TV ad campaign for the sleeper hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding plays cleverly on the film’s cross-cultural appeal by substituting the words Italian, Jewish and Russian for Greek. The implication: A person from any ethnic or religious background will relate to this story’s characters, drama and humor…
Not as bad as its rep–Miramax has been hiding this sucker on the shelf for danged near two years–but not good enough to overcome its status as damaged goods, which is almost a shame, since audiences will miss Billy Bob Thornton’s best performance, and hairpiece, in years. (He’s having a…
The French word for turkey is dindon, so French New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s latest movie is basically fricasé du dindon. Snoots will no doubt rally to its cause, but rarely does an established filmmaker so ardently waste viewers’ time. It’s mostly to do with memory, presumably his own spluttering…
