Somewhere, in deepest New South Wales, Australia, there exists a humble sheep paddock. (In this particular case, the paddock is nearly devoid of sheep–barring the odd sound effect–but never mind that.) The setting is rural, it’s pastoral, it’s quaint as all heck–and it also happens to be hallowed ground for…
Amid the plethora of films starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Mena Suvari, Chris Klein and Jason Biggs, it’s nice–in theory, at least–to see a contemporary romantic comedy like Someone Like You, where the characters, while hardly over the hill, are all over 30. In practice, however, “nice” is really about as…
Justice may be blind, but vengeance, it turns out, has a very short memory. So it goes in Memento, the much anticipated “puzzle” movie from Christopher Nolan (Following), which–as is already fairly well-known–plays out its plot more or less in reverse. Pitting the protagonist (and us) against short-term amnesia and…
As its title suggests, Spy Kids is an action fantasy aimed primarily at the preteen/early-teen audience. For all its thrills–and it has plenty–it’s strictly a PG film…which is all the more surprising when you consider its source: Robert Rodriguez, master of bloody gunplay and monster films that sometimes even push…
We can run, we can hide, we can even try switching films, but there’s just no escaping that pesky Gene Hackman. He starred in The Conversation, he is ubiquitous, and revere him we must–virtually every single time we go to the movies. (There’s even a song by Robyn Hitchcock about…
In David Maquiling’s quirky little first feature, Too Much Sleep, a rudderless 24-year-old who lives at home with his mother and works nights as a security guard must go on a quest. Rising lazily from his bed, he sets out into the tidy suburbs of New Jersey to track down…
It’s a scenario we’re all familiar with by now: young single guys in search of hot babes, firing one-liners at each other, making pop-cultural references ad nauseam, and ultimately finding out that women are somewhat less shallow than they’ve been led to believe. At least, it’s a scenario you know…
To keep it simple, Enemy at the Gates plays like a cross between the PlayStation game Medal of Honor, a World War II Nazi-shoot-’em-up viewed through a sniper’s scope, and a Harlequin romance novel. It’s history lesson as video game, video game as soap opera, soap opera as highbrow drama,…
It’s always dangerous, when describing a film, to label it as “whimsical.” For one thing, it’s often hard to get a bead on what exactly that means. Then, once you get some idea, you realize that it generally means either (a) a movie that’s trying to be funny but isn’t;…
The heroine of Andrucha Waddington’s Me, You, Them is a force of nature who holds men in her thrall and deftly reshapes them to suit life. Without knowing it, they fall prey to her charms, her spirit, her very scent. But she’s no Cleopatra dripping with jewels, no Lucrezia Borgia…
Van Gogh was a lunatic who cut off his ear. Picasso was a self-absorbed cur who abused women. Warhol turned out to be a weird, desperate loner, Basquiat a doomed junkie. Try as he might, shriveled little Toulouse-Lautrec failed miserably at romance. As for El Greco’s explosive affair with that…
Director John Herzfeld’s last feature, the droll and underrated 1996 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle that, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track…
Hollywood appears to be developing a healthy sense of humor about Valentine’s Day, which, from this cynic’s perspective, is a good thing. In the new millennium, rather than dole out romantic trifles like Return to Me as per the usual plan, we’ve seen Valentine (bitter ex-nerd cuts beautiful people to…
As pure bang-up adventure, The Mexican is certainly more user-friendly than childish junk like The Way of the Gun, but the attempt to weave adult relationship psychobabble and cultural significance into the action rings utterly false, resulting in whiny gringos in taco-land. Along the road to the explosive conclusion, there…
Im Kwon Taek has long been the best-known Korean director in America; in fact, it would be fair to say that he’s pretty much the only even vaguely known Korean director, and even then his renown is strictly among festivalgoers. The general distribution of his latest film, Chunhyang, should be…
With In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai solidifies his stature as the most subtle and most idiosyncratic of Hong Kong directors. In an industry best known for its accessible, crowd-pleasing comedies and action films, Wong has turned out a series of increasingly risky dramas that make little or no…
Commencing with titles none too subtly placed over the bosom of a troubled young mother (Russian actress Dina Korzun) and wending its swift way through the generous advances of a lovable lout (Paddy Considine, the one-man goon squad of A Room For Romeo Brass), Last Resort is a film obsessed…
It’s almost impossible to know what to make of Monkeybone after one viewing; there’s so much going on in this dreamland of stop-motion and computer-generated animation and celebrity cameos that you almost have trouble keeping up with it. Indeed, like a half-remembered dream, the movie’s often so overwhelming that even…
Lance Barton, thin as paper and frail as fine china, is such a horrific stand-up that during an amateur-night performance at the Apollo Theater, he is booed with such force–the audience whips up its own whirlwind–he’s literally knocked off the stage. Lance’s manager insists he’s such a failure because he’s…
Sara is quirky and free-spirited. That, at least, is the premise of the hilariously wretched new weepie Sweet November, of which Sara, embodied by the breathtaking Charlize Theron, is the heroine. But if you’re smart enough to run in terror at the threat of a movie character who’s quirky and…
Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, with a screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, is being released exactly 10 years after Silence of the Lambs, the film that established Hannibal Lecter as an iconic villain in our culture, right up there with Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, Friday the 13th’s Jason,…
The man who made Problem Child, Beverly Hills Ninja, and Brain Donors–which are to humor what Robert Downey Jr. is to clean living–has, perhaps all too explicably, become Hollywood’s most coveted and celebrated comedic director. “From the director of Big Daddy”–so blares the trailer for Saving Silverman, touting Dennis Dugan…
