If We Were Soldiers smells at all familiar, perhaps you’re confusing it with the stink emanating from a nearby theater screening Black Hawk Down. After all, on their shiny blood-drenched surfaces, they’re damned near the same movie: Both are based on books that recount true-life battles that claimed the lives…
Sometimes genius draws nigh, mollifying the gnashing critic with the promise of wild narrative fusion, perhaps even rollicking wit. Alas, sometimes genius then languidly squirms aside, like a loathsome strumpet, leaving one’s hopeful wantonness piqued but unfulfilled. Both cases apply to the boldly peculiar Scotland, PA., which sweeps up Shakespeare’s…
Barry Skolnick’s remake of 1974’s The Longest Yard never gets as amusing as its opening sequence, a fake sneaker commercial in which soccer thug Vinnie Jones, playing soccer thug Danny “Mean Machine” Meehan, spoofs James Bond. It took three writers to adapt the Burt Reynolds vehicle about an incarcerated football…
Nanni Moretti’s meditation on a family’s trauma in the wake of a teen-age boy’s death in a scuba-diving accident is both spare and unsentimental, and that may surprise those benighted Americans who think all Italians are one part tantrum and one part tomato sauce. Best known here for the 1994…
The rock-and-roll Zapruder film, more or less, highlighted by the ultimate low: the murder of Meredith Hunter, committed by Hell’s Angels during a free show at the Altamont Speedway that proves everything gratis indeed comes with a hell of a price. A film within a film, David and Albert Maysles…
“One man is about to do the unthinkable. No sex. Whatsoever. For…40 Days and 40 Nights.” Um, hello? Is that, like, supposed to be hard? But Matt (Josh Hartnett) isn’t like the rest of us. Beautiful women throw themselves at him daily, and it’s such a problem. Why? Well, he’s…
Those possessing a vampire’s keen senses may see through the Goth grunge of The Queen of the Damned to a deeper ideological conflict lurking beneath. On one side there’s novelist Anne Rice, sweepingly sensuous and profoundly humorless, who welcomed the cannibalization of her second and third bloodsucker books to create…
“This isn’t sex–this is pornography!” screams the enraged director when his new cinematographer starts to get too artistic for his own good. As absurd as it sounds, this piece of dialogue from The Fluffer–a cautionary tale of romantic obsession in the adult-video industry–is absolutely correct: The distance between the on-screen…
“Glean” is a word not often used in English, except in the context of gleaning information. But in French it has a more common, more specific use–to pick up produce or other foodstuffs left behind by the harvest. In the mind of veteran filmmaker Agnès Varda (Le Bonheur, Vagabond), it…
With its catchy (if arguably distasteful) title and first-rate cast, How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog promises vastly more than it delivers. An L.A.-based Brit playwright in a slump (Kenneth Branagh) tries to fix his latest play, while arguing with his wife (Robin Wright Penn) about whether to have a…
It’s hard not to love a movie that posits Britney Spears as a nerd, a high school valedictorian, an aspiring med-school student, an amateur mechanic and the spawn of Dan Aykroyd. When she finally reveals that she’s also a poet, sincerely reading Dido’s lyrics for “I’m Not a Girl, Not…
Though it consists of all-new footage, Escaflowne is still a 93-minute condensation of a 26-episode TV series, with all the pitfalls of such you’d expect: too many characters, no reason to care about them, forced dramatic beats and excessive exposition. Matters aren’t helped by a flat, generic English dub. The…
John Q. Archibald (Denzel Washington), a perfect working-class Everyman, is struggling just to make ends meet; bad turns to way worse when his 9-year-old son (Daniel E. Smith) is suddenly diagnosed with a heart defect that will kill him within weeks unless he can get a transplant. But John, who…
A bombed-out London, fathers shipping off to the front, families left behind to tend to the smoldering rubble, children getting sent to the countryside for safekeeping–sounds like John Boorman’s Hope and Glory, the writer-director’s bittersweet ode to a youth lost to the wreckage of World War II. No such luck:…
Set in Berlin in 1943, this fact-based German film with English subtitles concerns the love affair between two women: a Jew passing as a gentile while working for the underground and a German housewife honored by the Third Reich as an exemplar of Nazi motherhood. Outgoing, direct, supremely self-confident, the…
Amélie, minus most of the charm. With that film’s star, Audrey Tautou, heading an ensemble cast, this romantic comedy is about how even the most random and mundane acts affect destiny. Every chance encounter between strangers has a repercussion, which leads to another interaction and another and another until, eventually,…
Hart’s War, like most mediocre films, is little more than a movie about the movies. Set in a POW camp during the final months of World War II, it owes much of its existence to far superior films, chief among them La Grande Illusion, Stalag 17 and The Great Escape;…
After a long absence from American screens, British stage director Richard Eyre makes his return with an alternately depressing and uplifting drama about Dame Iris Murdoch’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease and the heroic efforts of her husband, John Bayley, to care for her, despite his own advanced age and generally…
Every couple of years, it seems, we’re obliged to get at least one documentary that provides the revelation that porn stars just aren’t happy people. So now we know John Holmes was a drug addict and a criminal, Annabel Chong cuts herself and Stacy Valentine will submit to every surgical…
In case the season has you feeling shamefully joyous, here’s a stark little oasis of misery to remind you that America sometimes sucks and its denizens aren’t all heroes. Featuring painstaking attention to the copious warts of this big, proud country, Monster’s Ball moseys down South to issue the staggering…
Part comedy, part tragedy and all bite, No Man’s Land damns and mocks in equal measure, painting a picture of war’s absurdity that should make peaceniks of us all but likely won’t. Although set in the former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian-Serbian war, the movie transcends its geographic borders: Bosnian-born writer-director…
If they teach the work of Todd Solondz someday, assuming he’s not already in the curriculum somewhere, the lectures are bound to be rather short. To grasp the material without actually attending, just bone up on a little bargain-basement Freud, a whiff of primal therapy and a sprinkle of Jerry…
