Even more than the recent Depression-era comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the turn-of-the-century drama Songcatcher is an absolute treasure trove of old-timey, traditional folk music. Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia in 1907, the film follows city-bred musicologist Dr. Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer) as she traverses the…
Thirty minutes into Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, I realized I had no idea what was going on…and could not have cared less. The New Age-tinged tale set 60 years in the future–about an alien infestation and the dueling schemes to eradicate it from the planet, one of which could…
In the movies, dead husbands and dearly departed boyfriends have an irksome habit of revisiting the women who once loved them–usually at inconvenient moments. Consider Demi Moore in Ghost. Poor thing had to put up with the dramatically challenged shade of Patrick Swayze, who droned on and on about a…
Now that A.I.’s out of the way and it’s safe again to read movie reviews without dictionary and NoDoz in hand, onward and downward to the Summer of Dumb. Who has time for serious and thoughtful when there’s plenty of stupid to slather all over audiences that like to stay…
Kiss of the Dragon–the latest vehicle for martial arts star Jet Li, a mainland Chinese talent who became a superstar in Hong Kong and has since succumbed to the blandishments of Hollywood–has a little of the best (and a lot of the worst) of Hong Kong films, and a lot…
There’s plenty of French star power in The Closet (Le Placard), a comedy written and directed by the prolific director Francis Veber. The movie stars Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu and Thierry Lhermitte, which in U.S. terms is roughly equivalent to a movie featuring Robin Williams, Nick Nolte and Tom Hanks,…
The German filmmaker Tom Tykwer has a gift for fusing psychological complexity and crackling plot without forsaking the excitements of either. The success of Run Lola Run didn’t exactly turn Tykwer into a household name, but it earned him his props as a young lion of the art houses. Moviegoers…
For almost two decades, Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film based on Brian Aldiss’ 1969 short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” about a robot child named David who wants only to be “real” so Mummy and Daddy will love him. The late director of 2001: A Space Odyssey…
Sexy Beast, the debut feature from British director Jonathan Glazer, is a riveting, scary and often funny foray into a traditional American genre: the gangster film. Like the western, the gangster film has always been predominantly American turf, but–unlike with the western–every decade or so the Brits come up with…
Like countless European-American filmmakers before him, African-American filmmaker John Singleton tends to operate under the faulty logic that vengeance equals heroism. Anyone who doubts this assertion is welcome to compare his grooveless, mean-spirited remake of Shaft to the deceptively simple and human original. This isn’t to say that he’s not…
Now here’s a tricky one. Start with a busload of familiar and appealing stars, shacked up together for a couple of weeks in a house in the Hollywood Hills. Assign them their mission: to emulate themselves–sort of–while dutifully reminding us that human relationships can be complicated. Then set the tone…
If internal combustion ever becomes obsolete–that is, if the auto industry ever allows internal combustion to become obsolete–whatever will movies do for heart-stopping drama? Hoofbeats are dramatic, and the chug of a steam engine is suspenseful, but the roar of a gasoline-powered vehicle stirs the blood of any self-respecting moviegoer…
After winning five Audience Awards and other honors at various gay and lesbian film festivals during the past year, Thomas Bezucha’s Big Eden has finally opened in general release. You don’t have to be an expert on the history of gay cinema to see why–or even to be gay to…
In a year inundated with massive movies, it’s a pleasant surprise to note that a truly spectacular adventure has arrived in the form of a Disney cartoon called Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Gushing aside, let us now consider the Atlanteans, the mythic race whom co-directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise…
The crimes Hollywood has committed against the major Russian novelists would themselves fill a pretty hefty tome. While reducing giants such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Pasternak to lavish costuming and snappy dialogue over the years, the studio moguls also made some eccentric casting choices–for instance, cover boy George Hamilton as…
When he was in his 30s, Ivan Reitman made comedies like a young man. His early movies, among them Stripes and Meatballs and Ghostbusters, were messy, cocky, charming, daffy and restless; they did anything for a laugh, even if that meant dousing John Candy in mud or Bill Murray in…
As ill-titled a movie as you’re likely to discover this year, Henry Bromell’s Panic would deliver itself unto us with much more honesty were it called something appropriate, like Torpor or A-List Clock-Punchers Unite!. It’s a middling film, and while there’s no reason to pick on this fledgling feature with…
There’s a majesty to Michael Winterbottom’s new film, a majesty and a terrible, icy chill. There’s also a fair bit of invention, as the director of the wrenching Jude–based on Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure–has shifted the locus of that author’s fierce, beloved English west country to the much fiercer…
Remember glee? Perhaps not, given our penchant in recent times to chuck giddy hearts aside in favor of being stupid, obnoxious and mean. But hey, it’s all right, because the fizzy, caffeinated beverage known as Baz Luhrmann seeks to re-create this elusive emotion for all of us in the form…
Pearl Harbor isn’t a movie at all, but a highlight reel prepared for a Jerry Bruckheimer career retrospective. It’s as impressive and empty as any movie the producer’s ever made, most of which seem to have been cut and pasted into this World War II monstrosity. There’s Top Gun: Two…
“The values that you grew up with are that people come before things,” offers the mother of one of the protagonists of Startup.com, “and that didn’t seem to be a part of this new world.” You sure got that right, ma’am. While this new video documentary by Chris Hegedus and…
Mainstream films about the sexual awakening of adolescent males invariably come in two forms: sappily self-important (Summer of ’42) or leeringly grotesque (American Pie). Consequently it’s hard to imagine what American moviegoers are going to make of Nico and Dani, a Spanish film about teen-age boys who are neither idealized…
