Movie Reviews
War of the Worlds
In a culture where "horror movie" has come to mean something full of gore and mutilation, Steven Spielberg's approach to "War of the Worlds" is a breath of fresh, bloodless air. I spent much of it agape in horror, terrified by what was happening to t...
Bewitched
Regular readers are surely tired by now of my raving about what a genius Will Ferrell is, but "Bewitched" adds another chapter to my thesis. Here is a badly paced, poorly constructed movie that is equal parts goopy romantic-comedy and toothless Holly...
Land of the Dead
George A. Romero may have created the zombie film as we know it, but he has been surpassed by his imitators, who have learned to make zombie flicks with greater skill than the master himself. "Land of the Dead," Romero's fourth, is good, but last year's "Shaun of the Dead" and the "Dawn of the Dead" remake were better; "28 Days Later" was better than them all. "Land of the Dead" isn't as witty as those films, nor as creative -- nor, to be honest, as scary. The plot -- set after the events in Romero's last films, with the earth overrun with zombies -- is too busy and multi-faceted. Romero includes a few dismemberings and killings that are particularly clever, but in general he cannot achieve the dark humor and exhilaration of his imitators.
March of the Penguins (documentary)
Here is a rather straightforward documentary that tells us, in simple terms, what penguins do, yet creates a dramatic and fascinating story in the process. There are pitfalls at every turn: While Mom is in the ocean replenishing her strength to return to Dad and the newborn, she could be eaten by a leopard seal. While trekking back to the breeding grounds, she could be waylaid and not return in time to save the baby from starvation. The fact that filmmaker Luc Jacquet got himself and his crew to Antarctica during the winter -- when the temperature can be nearly 100 degrees below zero -- is impressive enough. Then witness the mournful cries of a mother whose chick has been claimed by the elements, the sweet, picturesque sight of a mother, father and baby standing as a family, the comedy of penguins slipping on the ice and knocking each other over -- it's all here. Except for the part where sometimes leopard seals eat them, penguins are just like you and me.
Rize (documentary)
This documentary that proves that sometimes the most bizarre things MUST be true, because you could never make them up. Directed by photographer David LaChapelle, "Rize" chronicles the emergence of "clowning" and its break-off genre, "krumping." The former began in the '90s as a type of street dancing in which the performer could vent his aggressions and frustrations peacefully. It involves face paint and actual clown costumes. Krumping came later, started by disgruntled clowners who seceded to begin their own movement. We meet the dancers, and we see the climactic dance-off at the Los Angeles Forum, where the audience decides which style is better. Where LaChapelle errs is in not spending enough down time with the dancers. Whenever we see them, they are either dancing or talking about dancing. The movie is interesting, as far as it goes, but we never get a feel for who these kids are, or why we should care about them.
Yes
The experiment in "Yes," written and directed by Sally Potter, is to see whether a modern writer can compose dialogue in rhyming iambic pentameter without the stunt overshadowing the film's actual content. The answer is a qualified yes, the style usually works, and the movie usually works, too. It's the story of a woman, called only She (Joan Allen) -- upper-class, monied, and stuck in a loveless marriage with a philandering husband (Sam Neill) -- who has an affair with a Lebanese chef called He (Simon Abkarian). Matters of fidelity, religion and politics emerge, and through it all, everyone speaks in verse, and not just when giving speeches. The dialogue is rhythmic and poetic, too, even Shakespearean. At times the words feel constrained by the limitations imposed on them, with unnatural-sounding language and rhymes that sound forced. Some of the actors occasionally slip into a sing-song voice, too, which does the language no favors. But in large part, it works. It's rare to see a movie that sounds like poetry, and rarer still to see one whose ideas and themes warrant such treatment.
Herbie: Fully Loaded
It's your garden variety Disney cannibalization of its own movies, an unnecessary retread of the old Herbie movies in which a magical VW Beetle has a mind of its own. This time, Herbie has fallen into disrepair and is rescued by Maggie (Lindsay Lohan, sporting dual-side airbags), the daughter of a NASCAR racer who fixes Herbie up and restores him to his former glory, etc., etc. The movie is harmless, witless, unoriginal, uninventive, mildly entertaining and not liable to do any permanent damage to anyone who watches it. Remember, it didn't get made because someone had a great story in mind, or a great script already hashed out. It got made because someone at Disney figured they could make a few bucks by reviving an old character. It's exactly as good as you'd expect a movie like that to be.
The Perfect Man
An apocalyptically bad tween-girl comedy full of people who do stupid things and then are surprised at the consequences. I include the filmmakers in that assessment, too. Here they have taken an impossible starting point, compounded it with an absurd premise, and then set the whole thing ablaze with a series of preposterous plot points -- and now they are probably sitting in their offices, wondering why their movie has done so poorly at the box office. I would say the filmmakers must be retarded, but even the mentally challenged know you should not center a movie around the idea that Heather Locklear is having trouble finding a man.
My Summer of Love
That I am not bowled over by "My Summer of Love" may be the result of having attended the Sundance Film Festival six years running and thus having already seen more than my share of movies about lesbians falling in love. This is a very good coming-of-age story of love and obsession, but not a remarkable one. It's set in a small English village in what appears to be the late 1970s, where teenage Mona (Natalie Press), a bored orphan who lives with her older brother, meets Tamsin (Emily Blunt), home from boarding school for the summer and living in her parents' little estate up the road. The girls become BFF and spend all their time together, and before you know it they are completely smitten with one another, in that immature, end-of-the-world way that adolescents have of being in love. These young actresses perform with extraordinary conviction, and Paddy Considine is also very good as Mona's brother, his story of self-discovery nicely paralleling the girls'. But I found the movie's surprises not at all surprising, nor its conclusion anything beyond what I expected.
Me and You and Everyone We Know
The dialogue in this film has a wonderful, magical quality to it. People often talk to each other, even to strangers, in a way that falls somewhere between whimsical and philosophical, yet it never comes off as pretentious. It's about a handful of people in an anonymous Los Angeles neighborhood, and while there is a central plot line, writer/director/star Miranda July is more interested in the characters as a group. How does a community function? How can we live among so many humans yet still be alone? No scene is extraneous, and everything contributes to the whole. You laugh now and then during the film, but mostly you smile -- at the simple connections people make, at July's seemingly guileless screenplay, at the general tone of wonderment and love for mankind.
Heights
The view from "Heights" is not a pretty one. With its unflinching look at modern big-city relationships, it paints a picture of people hardened by heartbreak. Set entirely on one fall day in New York, the intimate film focuses on several Manhattanites whose connections with each other become more clear as time goes on. There is Diana Lee (Glenn Close), an Oscar-winning actress now in rehearsals to play Lady Macbeth on Broadway; her daughter, Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), a photographer, who is marrying Jonathan (James Marsden) in a month; a young actor named Alec (Jesse Bradford) who auditions for Diana and lives in Isabel and Jonathan's building; and Peter (John Light), a writer doing a piece on a gay photographer whose lovers frequently appear in his photos (and elsewhere in this movie). These are sophisticated people, for the most part, and they live in a sophisticated city. You wonder if their problems are the same as yours or mine or anyone else's who doesn't live in Gotham. That said, the more universal elements -- feeling betrayed, feeling uncertain, feeling scared -- are well-played by the cast, particularly Glenn Close, who gives one of her best performances in years.
Batman Begins
"Batman Begins" is the fifth modern live-action movie to be made about the Caped Crusader, but it's the first one to show why a criminal would fear him. Played with ferocious intensity by Christian Bale, Batman in this film growls, roars and threaten...
Firefly
There are enough solid ideas in "Firefly" to make it a great film, if its screenplay were tightened by a few pages and a more deft director took the reins. Someone like M. Night Shyamalan (pre-"The Village," obviously) could do wonders with material ...
Turning Green
To the canon of quirky indie films about teenage boys coming of age we can add "Turning Green," a smartly written, beautifully shot comedy by first-time writer/directors Michael Aimette and John G. Hofmann. It's no "Tadpole" or "Igby Goes Down," but ...
Inside Out
To see the most lurid and preposterous suburban thrillers, you usually have to go to the straight-to-video rack, where people like Shannon Tweed will enact tales of seedy melodrama for your titillation. But now here is "Inside Out," a movie every bit...
In Memory of My Father
I couldn't attend my grandfather's funeral a few months ago. I regretted this, not just because I would like to have helped memorialize him, but because of my siblings' reports on what happened when the whole extended family got together. We hadn't s...
Little Athens
"Little Athens" is most reminiscent of "Go," that hip late-'90s indie hit that followed several groups of young adults over the course of one tumultuous weekend. In both films, the central characters do not learn anything or become more enlightened p...
The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl in 3-D
Robert Rodriguez based this tiresome adventure tale on stories concocted by his 7-year-old son, and it shows. It has the random, nonsensical whimsy of a child's off-the-cuff storytelling -- that is, it has no beginning, middle or end and little internal logic. The hero is a daydreaming boy named Max whose creations/delusions, the titular superheroes (who are also children), recruit him to help save their home planet from a villain. The film's message is that imagination is important and children should be encouraged to follow their dreams, and those points are made well over 1 billion times over the course of the movie. But these wan adventures -- punctuated by lengthy 3-D sequences in dull, muted colors where nothing "pops" or even needs to be in 3-D -- are tedious and uninspired. You'd think a movie about the virtues of using your imagination would be more, you know, imaginative.
The Honeymooners
Whatever you liked about the 1950s sitcom "The Honeymooners" -- Jackie Gleason, the black-and-white charm, the mid'50s quaintness, or just plain old nostalgia -- is gone in this big-screen version. The characters are African-American now, Ralph no longer threatens to send Alice "to the moon," and the over-simplified plots that were cute in 1955 come off as stupid now. And the dialogue! Check out this exchange between Ralph Kramden and Alice's mother: "Someday you are gonna push me too far!" "The only thing that could push you is a bulldozer!" Honestly, do you want to see a movie with jokes like that? I didn't think so.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
The greatest asset of "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" is its premise: Two assassins who work for rival agencies are married to each other, neither one knowing that the other is a hired killer. From that idea a thousand different plots could be launched, and t...
Howl’s Moving Castle
Hayao Miyazaki's follow-up to "Spirited Away" is this blissfully weird animated fantasy that matches "Spirited Away" for imagination but not for overall whimsy and lovability. It's good stuff, though, overall, part "Wizard of Oz" and part "Beauty and the Beast," about a girl in early-20th-century England (or thereabouts) who is turned into an old woman by a witch. The girl/woman seeks the help of Howl, an impetuous young wizard who has had run-ins with the witch himself. Much of the film is enjoyably odd and occasionally funny, though never overwhelmingly so. Far from being a masterpiece of storytelling like its predecessor was, it is instead a perfectly acceptable, pleasantly diverting fairy tale for old and young alike.
5×2: Five Times Two (French)
Conventional wisdom says there are two sides to every story, but François Ozon seems to believe two aren't enough. Many of his films -- "Under the Sand," "8 Women" and "Swimming Pool" being the most recent -- focus on ambiguity and uncertainty, often leaving the audience with tantalizing questions. His latest, "5x2: Five Times Two," comprises five segments that show a couple's relationship from their first meeting up through their divorce. But Ozon presents the story in reverse order: The first scene is in the arbitrator's office, settling the terms of the divorce; the final moments are at an Italian beach resort some three years earlier, the new couple taking a dip in the ocean. This structure lets Ozon toy with our expectations. The husband appears to be an unforgivable jerk at the end of the marriage, but as the film goes on and time moves backward, additional facts emerge that make his wife seem far less sympathetic than we had given her credit for. Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi gives a standout performance as the wife. Her expressive face conveys emotions that look like betrayal and sadness but that might be something else, once we consider them in light of all the facts. It's a tricky role in a tricky film, and it's handled well. Her character is the one to watch throughout the film, as it is in her demeanor that we learn all the answers -- or all the questions, anyway. Since it's Ozon, a lot of the questions have multiple answers.
Pure
"Pure" is a grim, somber story about a drug-addled mother and her stoic little boy who tries to help her kick the junk. It's so well-acted that it deserves admiration, but some of its pedestrian plot elements drag it down toward mediocrity. If you're going to endure a movie this bleak, it had darn well better be a GREAT movie. The star is Harry Eden, barely 11 when the movie was filmed, yet utterly adult in his handling of his role as the junkie's son Paul. Paul has a tough face, hardened by neglect, distrustful of nearly everything -- but he loves his mum. His devotion to her is powerful, and very movingly conveyed by Eden. The movie, flawed and dreary though it is, may be worth seeing just for him.
High Tension (French)
The gruesome slasher film "Haute Tension" (now being released in the States under the title "High Tension") is often unpleasant and difficult to watch -- an assessment some will view as a victory, I'm sure. It is not the buckets of blood that bother ...
Cinderella Man
"Cinderella Man" begins with a quote from author Damon Runyon: "In all the history of the boxing game, you'll find no human interest story to compare with the life narrative of James J. Braddock." The inclusion of this statement is a bold move, perha...
Lords of Dogtown
Despite having teenage wastoids who spend all their time skateboarding as its protagonists, "Lords of Dogtown" is a Real Movie. It has themes and character arcs and nothing but mid-'70s rock on the soundtrack. What could have been only a pandering sk...
Apres Vous (French)
Here's a movie that has all the makings of a delightful French farce, yet never fully embraces them. It's about a shlub of a maitre d' (Daniel Auteuil) who stops a man (Jose Garcia) from hanging himself in the park one night, then feels obligated to help the poor sap straighten out his life. This includes tricking the guy's ex-girlfriend into liking him again, except the maitre d' falls in love with her in the process, as tends to happen in these situations. A good enough plot for a wacky comedy, but "Apres Vous" only goes about it half-heartedly, eventually turning into a standard romantic-comedy, which is altogether a bad idea. It's not a bad movie, per se. It just needs a stronger focus to make it good. Be a farce or be a rom-com, but whatever you be, be it well.
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
This is a movie about four teenage girls who find a magical pair of pants -- it fits each of them perfectly, despite their widely varying body types -- and take turns wearing them one summer. It is, in other words, really a movie about four girls' summer vacations. I don't know why the pants even got dragged into it. As far as movies about girls' summer vacations go, this one is a little smarter and less pandering than most: one girl loses her virginity and regrets the experience, another deals with death, another faces her absentee father, another goes to Greece. (OK, not all the stories are very deep.) Yet it maintains its fun, glossy shine, and its target audience will giggle and swoon at the appropriate moments.
The Longest Yard
The first shot in "The Longest Yard" is of an attractive bikini-clad woman gliding through a backyard swimming pool at a Southern California party. This is the film's way of assuring us that, despite the ensuing 114 minutes of references to testicles...
Madagascar
I will tell you up front that the kids who were in the audience when I saw "Madagascar" seemed to enjoy it, and maybe that's all you need to know. But if you're interested in knowing what's wrong with the movie, and why it's a soulless, ill-conceived...
Saving Face
Alice Wu's semi-autobiographical "Saving Face" is only a slight variation on the trendy story where a gay person comes out of the closet in a strict conservative environment -- this time it's a traditional Chinese-American community in Flushing, New York -- but Wu gives it enough charming humor to make it fresh and enjoyable. Wilhelmina (Michelle Krusiec), Wil for short, is a hot-shot Manhattan surgeon who, unbeknownst to almost everyone, is a lesbian. Meanwhile, her beautiful widowed mother (Joan Chen) has caused a scandal by getting pregnant and refusing to name the father. Mom and daughter both have secret romances now, and both are torn between being happy and making their community happy. It's that parallel storyline that gives "Saving Face" some of its extra oomph: Coming-out stories are common enough, but seldom do the figures doing the coming out have mothers who are pregnant under mysterious circumstances. If the assortment of wacky ethnic relatives feels a little too "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," and if there is a clichéd "tell me you love me" moment in an airport -- well, you can overlook that sort of contrivance. The movie wins you over with warmth and honesty.
Tell Them Who You Are (documentary)
In this documentary, Mark Wexler makes a movie about his father, Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler, with the latter constantly telling his son what to do. (That's the danger in making a film about your famous filmmaker father, I suppose.) As a lover of film history, I'm always delighted to see the story of an unsung Hollywood legend. (A lot of people couldn't even tell you what a cinematographer does, let alone name a famous one.) That in itself would be useful, but "Tell Them Who You Are" goes a bit further, documenting Mark and Haskell's tortuous path to making amends and relating to one another. That universalizes the movie, making it not just a behind-the-scenes history chapter but an insightful father-son comedy-drama.
Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith
Both "Star Wars" prequels -- "The Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones" -- received A- grades from me. I was so caught up in the thrill of the films, by the technical wizardry and imagination, that I didn't notice, at first, the deep flaws in th...
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire (documentary)
To fully appreciate the horror of the genocide that occurred in Rwanda in 1994, I recommend the fact-based Don Cheadle film "Hotel Rwanda," yes, but first see "Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire" for background. After this doub...
Kicking & Screaming
Will Ferrell is really two different but closely related people. One of them is buttoned-down and verbally astute, able to earn laughs through an oddly worded understatement while doing nothing more physical than opening his eyes widely. The other on...
Monster-in-Law
The first "laugh" in "Monster-in-Law" is when we see two dogs humping. That is how the movie chooses to begin its 105-minute reign of generic, unimaginative comedy: canine coitus.
I am dismayed to report that it gets no better from there. This sm...
Unleashed
Rarely have the opposing flavors of graphic violence and human kindness been as oddly combined as they are in "Unleashed." It's a martial-arts movie about a brutal killer, but hey! It's also a sweet story of redemption and growth. The aforementioned ...
Mad Hot Ballroom (documentary)
Of all the things to bring to big-city elementary schools as an elective program ... ballroom dance? It's a crazy idea, and I'm so glad someone did it, because it leads us to "Mad Hot Ballroom," an exuberant documentary that follows three New York City schools as they prepare for the annual city-wide competition. The dancing scenes are endlessly entertaining, especially early on, when the boys are still getting used to dancing with girls, but director Marilyn Agrelo spends time with the kids away from the ballroom, too, so we get a feel for who they are and who we want to root for in the competition. Documentaries that are this much fun and this full of innocent energy are rare. Too many lousy movies have been made about the transformative power of dance; in "Mad Hot Ballroom," you understand perfectly how the music and the rhythm could change someone's life for the better.
Layer Cake
The protagonist of "Layer Cake," whose name we never learn -- the credits call him XXXX -- says he's not a gangster. "I'm a businessman whose commodity happens to be cocaine," he says.
The distinction may not be important to the police of London, ...
Mindhunters
As far as preposterous, imbecilic thrillers go, "Mindhunters" is a fun one. I didn't believe a minute of it, and all my laughter was at its expense (the film itself is deadly serious), but I was never bored by it, either. It's in the category of movi...
Crash
The Los Angeles of "Crash," a moody drama of intersecting characters and stories, is an exaggerated one in which everybody is racist. Whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians and Middle-Easterners, all ethnicities hold prejudices against all the others. The m...
House of Wax
There is precisely one creepy idea in "House of Wax," and it's the one everyone already knows, about a maniac turning people into wax-museum figures. Yet this remake-of-a-remake (first in 1933, then Vincent Price's famous 1953 version) persists in wa...
Kingdom of Heaven
In real life, the Crusades involved Christians killing Muslims and taking over their land. (I am simplifying.) That such methodology was misguided and not at all what Christ taught is not in question. The Crusades are one of those embarrassing moment...
Mysterious Skin
Brian Lackey tells us that in 1981, when he was 8 years old, "five hours disappeared from my life." It happened again two years later, on Halloween 1983. He came to believe that he was abducted by aliens on those occasions, hence the missing time and...
The Girl from Monday
Hal Hartley is a minor legend in the world of independent filmmaking, having directed nearly two dozen small films in the past two decades. I have never seen a single one of these movies, but my first exposure to Hartley, his new "The Girl from Monda...
XXX: State of the Union
Samuel L. Jackson declares in "XXX: State of the Union" that "'Triple-X' is the designation we give to special agents with skills in blah blah blah," and he goes on for a minute and I didn't get it all down. But he's lying, though, or it's been a whi...
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The risks inherent in blending comedy and science-fiction are so great that the combination is not often attempted. Consider: Sci-fi depends on the audience taking its far-out ideas seriously. If you introduce laughs into the mix, even on subjects ot...
Ladies in Lavender
Somewhere in "Ladies in Lavender" is a very sweet story about a sad old lady who has never known love. But that story is lost in the film's -- well, I don't know where it's lost. Sometimes you think it's going to be about a young man finding himself, but then no, that was just a passing thing. So why keep neglecting the real story? We meet two elderly sisters who live in a tiny English seaside village in the 1930s. Janet (Maggie Smith), we learn, had a love who died in the first World War. But Ursula (Judi Dench) has never even loved, let alone loved and lost. They rescue a young Polish man named Andrea (Daniel Bruhl) who washes up on the shore, apparently shipwrecked, and nurse him back to health, Ursula's feelings eventually evolving into something more than grandmotherly concern. But as much as we want her to be happy, we also know an Ursula-Andrea partnership is not in the cards. If there is a reason to see the film, it is for Dench and Smith. You can see their theatrical training in the way they approach their characters, giving them small flourishes and nuances beyond what less-seasoned actresses would think to give. They are the sort of performers that students of fine acting are pleased to watch in anything, even if it's sweet-but-unsatisfying, unremarkable stuff like this.
King’s Ransom
Did I miss the announcement of a contest to see who could make the worst film of 2005? Because that seems like a really stupid idea for a contest, since it's so easy to do. Yet a competition is the only explanation I can think of for all the D- and F...
The Interpreter
How good a director is Sydney Pollack? So good he can take an ordinary political thriller like "The Interpreter" and make it seem like something special. Why, there are moments when you actually think you're being thrilled!
You're not, though, at ...
A Lot Like Love
A movie like "A Lot Like Love" asks a lot of its leading man and lady. So much of their relationship is conveyed by their casual conversations, their chatting as they walk down the streets of Los Angeles and New York, with little focus on plot. The m...
The Game of Their Lives
With Disney having cornered the market on inspiring fact-based PG-rated sports films, it's strange that anyone else would even bother trying to horn in on it. It's even stranger that it would be IFC, better known for gritty arthouse fare than for pop...
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (documentary)
Here's a public service: The whole confusing mess of the Enron scandal, explained in the simplest terms possible. Of course, it's STILL complicated and hard to follow, but still. I'm glad someone broke it down even this far. This infuriating documentary interviews experts and key players and includes footage from the congressional hearings, all in the name of showing what, exactly, Enron did and why it was so bad. Alex Gibney, working from Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind's book, assembles a witty, clear-cut summary of events, with no pretension of being fair or unbiased. Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, among others, are lying, cheating thieves, and when the movie is over, you'll be convinced of that, too.
Double Dare (documentary)
Consider the life of a stunt double. Your job is to do anything that's too dangerous for the star, who is, by implication, more important, more attractive and more talented than you. In a particularly action-heavy program, your body is seen almost as...
Torremolinos 73 (Spanish)
This is a charming, low-key comedy set in Spain in 1973, where the American sexual revolution has not yet taken hold. Alfredo (Javier Camara) and Carmen (Candela Peña) are a poor, happy couple who begin making homemade sex movies for "The World Audiovisual Encyclopedia of Reproduction" -- institutionalized porn, really, but hey, they're young and they need the money. The movie is sexually frank, but I wouldn't call it titillating. The whole point is that Alfredo and Carmen don't look like porn stars -- they don't even look like movie stars -- but like regular people. Writer/director Pablo Berger's attention to detail extends not just to the early-'70s decor and costumes, but to the natural way the characters handle their odd situation. The film celebrates love and sexuality realistically, not pornographically.
Sky Blue
There is an epic, even Shakespearean, story of love, technology and environmentalism lost in the self-serious jumble that is "Wonderful Days," a Korean animated film that has been dubbed into English and is being released here under the title "Sky Bl...
The Amityville Horror
The remake of "The Amityville Horror" arrives just in time to appear wholly unoriginal and a product of its era. Just as the hokey 1979 original felt precisely like a horror film from 1979, the new version is as 2005 as they come: lots of "jump" scar...
Down and Derby
The "soccer mom goes berzerk" mentality, where parents overtake their children in their enthusiasm for youth sports, is rife with comic possibilities. Just last week, "South Park" had Stan's dad getting drunk at the Little League games and fighting w...
Millions
Danny Boyle might be the most unpredictable director currently working. Where other young filmmakers tend to have a particular tone to their work -- you can always tell a Wes Anderson movie, for example, or a Coen Brothers effort -- Boyle's films thu...
House of D
David Duchovny's a smart, talented fellow who wrote and directed a few "X-Files" episodes, so you'd trust him with a small independent film. Yet here's "House of D," which he wrote and directed, and which he nearly ruins by including not just a menta...
Palindromes
Todd Solondz is exploring mankind's ugliness again, only this time I'm not sure why.
I got it with "Welcome to the Dollhouse," "Happiness" and "Storytelling." Those movies, despite focusing on such unpleasant topics as pedophilia and rape, were -...
Fever Pitch
The Farrelly Brothers allow themselves only one true Farrelly Brothers Moment in "Fever Pitch," and that is when a character's friends help him into the shower after a "lost weekend" and one of them begins attending far too zealously to the man's per...
Sahara
Much of what happens in "Sahara" relies on the heroes finding very old items that are still in working condition, including the wreckage of an airplane and a 150-year-old cannon. If these machines did not function -- which they surely would not if yo...
Kung Fu Hustle (Chinese)
The camera in "Kung Fu Hustle" is never where you expect it to be, and it never moves the way you think it's going to. It is a perfect match for the movie itself, which is wildly funny and inventive, a giddy re-imagining of martial-arts flicks that m...
King of the Corner
Leo Spivak has a combination of problems that is supposed to make him sound like Everyman but that really makes him sound like EveryMovieCharacter. His teenage daughter is growing up too fast, his aged father is crankily awaiting death, he hates his ...
Winter Solstice
"Winter Solstice" is such a low-key drama that I'm not sure anything happens in it at all. I like its characters, though; they feel like real people, with real hang-ups and motivations, and their dialogue sounds natural. I just wish they would DO som...
Sin City
When I recall moments from "Sin City," what I see in my mind are stark graphic-novel images -- men drawn with jagged lines and sharp angles, women with impossible curves, the dialogue conveyed in all-caps bubbles above the characters' heads. This, de...
Dust to Glory (documentary)
The Baja 1000 is the longest point-to-point race in the world, covering a thousand miles through the desert of northern Mexico and open to all manner of vehicles, from motorcycles to dune buggies to vintage VW Bugs (but not the new models). "Dust to ...
Look at Me (French)
We have this image of the French, that they're all upper-class cigarette-smoking, wine-drinking, cheese-eating, literature-reading, artsy-movie-watching snobs. "Look at Me" is about those kinds of French people, though it suggests they're really more...
Beauty Shop
After seeing "Beauty Shop," I sympathize with the plight of African-Americans even more than I already did. Imagine being part of a culture that is so under-represented by Hollywood that garbage like "Beauty Shop" is the only thing you have to call y...
Nina’s Tragedies (Hebrew)
Coming-of-age comedies about teenage boys with prurient desires for hot older women are a dime a dozen. Make that woman the boy's aunt, though, and now you've got something!
Or something. "Nina's Tragedies," a bittersweet comedy/drama from Israel,...
D.E.B.S.
The main thing missing from "D.E.B.S.," which is a comedy, is comedy. Apart from that, it's a perfectly good comedy.
Based on a short film that everyone seems to agree was 10 times as funny as the feature, "D.E.B.S." is about a top-secret governm...
The Ballad of Jack and Rose
As far as I can tell, the point of "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" is to warn us not to be single-minded idealists who ruin our lives and the lives of others through our obsessions.
Well, OK. I hadn't planned on it, really. The warning is appreciat...
Oldboy (Korean)
It is a twisted mind that conceived "Oldboy," and while I am frightened to know that imaginations this macabre exist in the world, I am delighted that they have been set toward making movies, as opposed to, say, running for public office.
"Oldboy...
Guess Who
As much as I try not to like Ashton Kutcher, he keeps appearing in movies where he is goofily charming and often very funny. "Guess Who" is a quintessential role for him -- affable, put-upon and mildly clueless -- and he and his co-star Bernie Mac (a...
Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous
It is a low moment in "Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous," not to mention one that panders shamelessly to the film's target audience of women and gay men, when Sandra Bullock and Regina King dress as men-dressed-as-women to perform a Tina Turne...
The Ring Two
The laws of Hollywood dictate that any film grossing more than $100 million must produce a sequel, regardless of whether anyone has a good idea for it. The only things more common in America than lackluster sequels are critics' columns bemoaning them...
Ice Princess
The only thing wrong with "Ice Princess" is that I am not enough of a 14-year-old girl to appreciate it. In fact, I'm not really a 14-year-old girl at all. I mean, I watch "American Idol," but that's as far as it goes.
I was one of many film criti...
Melinda and Melinda
One of my favorite quotes on the subject of comedy comes from Mel Brooks: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when YOU fall into an open sewer and die." An event can be either comic or tragic, depending on how deeply we care for the people in...
Hostage
From its stylized, graphic-novel-esque opening credits to its fiery, operatic finale and resolution, "Hostage" tries to be bigger and better than an average suspense thriller. It indulges in some clichés, but it avoids many others. And though it des...
Robots
Have we reached critical mass for computer-animated movies about fantasy worlds where everything is a jokey parallel to our own? It's underwater, but it's just like New York, so the crosswalk signs say "Swim" and "Don't Swim"! Or it's the fairy tale ...
The Upside of Anger
Joan Allen has been nominated for, but has never won, three Oscars: Best Actress for "The Contender," and Best Supporting Actress for "Nixon" and "The Crucible." She was not nominated for "Pleasantville," but surely she was worthy. And this year, we'...
Off the Map
"Off the Map," which premiered at Sundance in 2003, is a quintessential Sundance movie. Its plot is simple, its artsy, quirky characters relate to each other in unusual ways, and its theme deals with the vague notion of "navigating through life." If ...
Mail Order Wife
I'm a little embarrassed to admit that "Mail Order Wife" had me fooled. It is a mockumentary, which is to say it's a scripted film played by actors that is made to look like a documentary. And I, not knowing a single thing about it before I pressed "...
In My Country
I can say this for "In My Country": A more well-intentioned film has not been made. Directed by John Boorman and based on Antjie Krog's book "Country of My Skull," the movie dramatizes the feelings of South Africa during the tender healing years that...
Waterborne
We learn in "Waterborne" that our own human nature may be a greater threat to society than any terrorist attack. Like those Martians discovered on "The Twilight Zone" decades ago, all you have to do is make people THINK there's a crisis and they'll t...
Dear Frankie
All movies require you to believe something, or at least to pretend not to disbelieve it. What "Dear Frankie" asks is that you take its word for it that its heart is in the right place. If you succumb to the suspicion that it is pushing your buttons ...
Intimate Stories (Spanish)
"Historias Minimas" means "Minimal Stories," and a truer title for this good-natured but tedious film could not have been chosen. (It has been retitled, for some reason, "Intimate Stories," which is not apt at all.) It shows us three disparate charac...
Be Cool
Having somehow missed "Get Shorty" when it was released, I watched it for the first time on DVD the night before seeing its sequel, "Be Cool." I don't recommend a back-to-back viewing like this. It makes it obvious how fun "Get Shorty" is, and what a...
The Pacifier
The first baby puke in "The Pacifier" occurs within 10 minutes. Poop and pee follow shortly -- this film wallows in poop and pee -- and it is not long before we have run the gamut of juvenile things normally associated with PG-rated "family" comedies...
The Jacket
"The Jacket" moves like a thriller yet rarely does anything thrilling. Take out all the obvious marks of thriller-dom -- the tense music, the flashy editing, the frightened looks on people's faces -- and you'd have a decent psychological drama. It's ...
Bride & Prejudice
We Americans are only partially aware of India's Bollywood films, the ones with the lavish costumes and random song-and-dance numbers that you see parodied or referenced here and there. So Gurinder Chadha, a Kenya-born, London-raised woman of Indian ...
Gunner Palace (documentary)
Among the myriad documentaries that have emerged in the past few years to laud or lambast George W. Bush's war in Iraq, "Gunner Palace" is the one with the least divisive agenda. The filmmakers are apparently against the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but ...
Cursed
It amazes me that the man who wrote the smart, self-aware teen horror flicks in the "Scream" series could also write "Cursed," a film that indulges in most of the clichés that those films mocked. The twist in "Scream" was that the kids had actually ...
Diary of a Mad Black Woman
If you don't like the tone of "Diary of a Mad Black Woman," just wait five minutes and it will change. It is, at various times, a soap opera, a madcap farce, a melodrama, a crime drama and a Christian missionary tract. A film that can shift gears lik...
Man of the House
Between R. Lee Ermey and Tommy Lee Jones, "Man of the House" is a very eyebrow-ful movie, not to mention a Guy Named Lee-ful movie. It is not, however, despite its best efforts, an awful movie, but merely a lazy one. In fact, it's occasionally even c...
What Is It?
Probably the most representative scene in Crispin Glover's "What Is It?" is the one in which a nude woman wearing a monkey mask brings a watermelon to a naked cerebral palsy-stricken man who is sleeping on a clamshell. That wild, random confluence of...
Up and Down (Czech)
Czech filmmaker Jan Hrebejk's 2000 movie "Divided We Fall" was a depiction of Nazi-era Czechs sticking together in a time of crisis. It was a funny and touching film that earned an Oscar nomination (and would have won, had that not been the year of "...
Constantine
The world of "Constantine" is a complicated one, combining elements of Catholicism, philosophy, theology and good ol' comic-book horror. Our guide through this complex system is Keanu Reeves, who demonstrated in the "Matrix" films that, if nothing el...
Son of the Mask
When people decry the travesty of "Son of the Mask," it is based on the supposition that "The Mask," to which it is ostensibly a sequel, was a great film whose memory must be respected. But in fact that film was mediocre at best, being little more th...
