Movie Reviews
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
The humor in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" boils down to this: Aren't Greek people funny? Fortunately, the answer is yes, and this is one of the funniest, most joyous movies to come along since the Greeks invented comedy.
It was written by Nia Varda...
Nine Queens (Spanish)
Most foreign films that make their way to the United States gained the acclaim necessary to achieve distribution by being high-minded, ambitious or artsy. The French equivalent of "Joe Somebody," for example, would never be shown outside its native l...
Frailty
"Frailty" is a disturbing and deeply flawed movie that, despite its faults, I cannot stop thinking about. It gets by on the power of its ideas, rather than on their often-weak execution.
Those ideas, though, are enough to keep you creeped out for ...
Human Nature
Charlie Kaufman wrote the whacked-out script for "Being John Malkovich" and has followed it up with "Human Nature," a story just as daft and surreal, though not quite as funny.
Rhys Ifans -- the odd roommate in "Notting Hill," the reprobate socce...
Changing Lanes
Though the advertising suggests it's a suspense thriller, "Changing Lanes" is really a moral fable. It has as much character as it does plot, and far more introspection than explosions.
It's about men with too much pride, and it's about what reve...
The Sweetest Thing
The plot of "The Sweetest Thing" is as follows: A woman meets a man whom she dismisses, then wonders, "What if?" On a romantic whim, she acts on what little information she has about him and attempts to track him down.
It is possible this sounds ...
30 Years to Life
Thirty years to life is approximately how long it takes to watch "30 Years to Life," an embarrassingly amateurish and cloying comedy about a group of urban blacks coming to terms with being grown-ups.
Rarely have so many bad ideas been sloshed to...
Paradox Lake
"Paradox Lake" combines the "it's real, so it doesn't have to be interesting" attitude of bad documentaries with the oversimplified plots and stock characters of bad fiction. It's the worst of both worlds, together in one stupefyingly dull and preten...
Kissing Jessica Stein
While "Kissing Jessica Stein" will be viewed by some as a "lesbian" movie, that unfairly narrows its scope. It addresses issues of sexuality, yes, but it's also an extremely funny story about dating in the modern world, the pressure to conform to soc...
Big Trouble
One of the most pleasant things about "Big Trouble," which is a very pleasant movie, is that it has no exposition. We leap right into the action, and the narrator gets us up-to-speed as we go. The movie drives up next to us, screeches to a halt, pull...
High Crimes
The people in "High Crimes" keep making the point that military courts don't follow the same rules as civilian ones. Unfortunately, movies about either topic follow the same rules, with the same cliches and fake-outs. This is a lazy, perfunctory movi...
National Lampoon’s Van Wilder
"National Lampoon's Van Wilder" belongs to the genre of movies in which someone ingests something not meant to be ingested, usually a bodily fluid of some kind. (In this case, I will tell you only that it came from a dog.)
It is also the kind of m...
Time Out (French)
Vincent is a man who grew up but didn't acquire the sense of responsibility that comes with adulthood. His parents live nearby and dote on him, his dad willing to lend him large sums of money almost without discussion. Vincent is more interested in b...
The Piano Teacher (French)
The only way to discuss "The Piano Teacher" is in terms of one's own reaction to it. Matters of camera angles, acting styles and story structure are almost irrelevant when your protagonist uses a razor blade to cut herself in very personal places. Se...
Clockstoppers
Who hasn't wished they could stop time? Just think: You could leave your house 30 seconds before you were supposed to be at work, stop time, drive to the office, and then start time again. It would be great!
Another use would be if you've just be...
Death to Smoochy
Give "Death to Smoochy" 20 minutes or so to get its wheels on the tracks, and then sit back and enjoy as the proceedings turn dark, macabre and hilarious (if you can bring yourself to laugh at such things as murder and revenge, anyway).
It is the...
Panic Room
David Fincher is four for four. His three previous films, "Seven," "The Game" and "Fight Club," were brilliantly plotted, ingeniously realized suspense-thrillers; his new "Panic Room" is right up there with them. It's possible that as a director, Fin...
The Rookie
"The Rookie" is an unabashedly sentimental film in which a gruff father tells his son, "There are more important things in life than baseball," and then the rest of the movie is devoted to proving that statement false.
The son is Jimmy Morris, an...
Son of the Bride (Spanish)
A character in "Son of the Bride," a movie from Argentina, says he never watches Argentine films. Even in its homeland, Argentine cinema gets no respect.
That may be difficult to understand for those of us whose only exposure to films from that c...
Stolen Summer
"Stolen Summer" has already attracted attention through the HBO series "Project Greenlight," which documents the making of the film. Viewing the TV show, one gets the impression the film will turn out awful. It's like watching the planning sessions f...
Blade II
"Blade II" opens at a blood bank in Prague, where evil forces begin making premature withdrawals and liquidating the assets.
Of course, it wouldn't be a vampire movie without blood. And it wouldn't be a post-1990s vampire movie without buckets of...
Sorority Boys
There is so much to hate about "Sorority Boys" that I scarcely know where to begin. I'm at sixes and sevens anyway, because despite the film's many, many flaws, I also laughed quite a bit during it. Except during the times when I was silently awestru...
The Execution of Wanda Jean (documentary)
"Exciting" is not a word normally attributed to documentaries, but darned if "The Execution of Wanda Jean" isn't just that. Even if you already know the outcome, the manner in which everything unfolds is thrilling. We've seen fictional movies -- wher...
Ice Age
"Ice Age" is a mild, well-intentioned movie. You want to like it simply because it obviously is trying so hard to be liked. It doesn't have all the necessary tools to be up there with its computer-animated brethren "Toy Story" or "Shrek," but if earn...
Resident Evil
No one has conversations in "Resident Evil." They make declarations -- "We have to get out of here!" -- and they issue commands -- "Pull me back inside!" -- but they never listen to each other or exchange information. It is based on a video game, and...
Showtime
At some point, "Showtime" stops being a parody of generic buddy-cop movies and starts being a generic buddy-cop movie. Once things get difficult, it retreats hastily to the safety of familiarity.
While the good times last, they are good indeed, a...
Pauline and Paulette (Flemish/French)
What I like most about "Pauline and Paulette" is that the retarded character is not played for pathos or cheap sympathy, as is usually the case when retarded characters appear in American films. You don't get the sense that Dora van der Groen, the Be...
Sin Destino (Spanish)
Mexican filmmaker Leopoldo Laborde says his "Sin Destino" ("Without Destiny") was inspired by Luis Buñuel's 1950 Neorealist classic "Los Olvidados." While I haven't seen Buñuel's film, I know enough about it to see the similarities between it and "Si...
The Laramie Project
The film version of "The Laramie Project" sidesteps the same pitfalls the play also managed to avoid. It does not come off as preachy or self-righteous, instead letting its extraordinary story speak for itself.
It's a complicated project. The fil...
All About the Benjamins
It's billed as an "action/comedy," but "All About the Benjamins" suffers from the worst of those two genres: action sequences that are dull and familiar, and comedy bits that are strained and unfunny.
Not helping the situation any are the film's ...
The Time Machine
The space-time continuum is tweaked considerably in "The Time Machine," as two or three minutes of exciting action are stretched out over an hour and a half. How did those science wizards pull off such a feat?!
Actually, there's very little scien...
40 Days and 40 Nights
For the 40 days of Lent, a young single guy decides to give up sex and everything like unto it. It's a struggle that no one thinks he can win, and indeed, it proves to be enormously difficult.
Can you imagine this movie being made in the 1950s, o...
We Were Soldiers
If "We Were Soldiers" were the first war movie ever made, it would be a great one. All those men from different walks of life, thrown together in an inhuman war, while their wives wait for them back home -- such drama and pathos!
If the two men w...
Dragonfly
I'm not sure which half of "Dragonfly" is worse: The part where nothing's happening, or the part where something's happening, but it's stupid.
Kevin Costner, proving again that his good performances in the early '90s were the exceptions and not t...
Queen of the Damned
Are Anne Rice's novels as dull and weird as they appear on screen, or does something get lost in the translation?
"Interview with the Vampire" may have had Tom Cruise to blame, for being such a bland bloodsucker, and "Queen of the Damned" allevia...
Big Bad Love
The protagonist in "Big Bad Love" is clearly one of those characters we're supposed to love in spite of his faults, and that love propels our enjoyment of the film. What's odd is that his faults are so numerous that it's hard to even like him, let al...
Scratch (documentary)
Doug Pray's "Scratch" is a documentary with about a million interviews and several interesting insights. After that, it's a wonderland for fans of DJs and their fancy turntable-scratching acrobatics; it will no doubt quickly lose appeal for casual ob...
Crossroads
"Crossroads" begins with Britney Spears dancing around in her underwear. Later, she sings some songs. What more review do you want?
Not that any non-Britney fans were considering seeing this anyway, but it's not as awful as it might have been. A ...
Hart’s War
"Hart's War" boasts solid performances against a bricolage of ideas, of which the more interesting are underused and the less interesting are overused.
It's an unusual logical paradox that one of the best threads in the film is one in which the h...
John Q
One man against an H.M.O! Ooh, the evil bureaucrats! Ooh, all that paperwork!
"John Q" is the latest re-tread of "Dog Day Afternoon," but this time it's a heavy-handed tract from the anti-H.M.O. missionaries. It provides more unintentional laughs...
Out of Step
The first moments may scare you. That cheesy music, that enlightened-sounding voice-over: This is a church video! It's "Together Forever" or "Our Heavenly Father's Plan," or something! What are we in for?
Fortunately, two or three minutes into "Ou...
Return to Never Land
The Walt Disney company has mined several of its classic films for direct-to-video sequels, including follow-ups to "Beauty and the Beast," "Lady and the Tramp" and "The Little Mermaid." "Toy Story 2," famously, was also to be direct-to-video, until ...
Super Troopers
The comedy troupe Broken Lizard may not be Monty Python, but they're just as amused by the sight of each other naked, and their delight in the absurd and juvenile is almost as fine-tuned.
"Super Troopers," written, directed and performed by the fi...
Scotland, Pa.
It's tempting to say "Scotland, Pa.," Billy Morrissette's retelling of "Macbeth," is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing." But in fact, Morrissette is clearly not an idiot, there's not a lot of sound and fury about...
Charlotte Gray
It's rare that using the protagonist's name for the movie's title is the best choice. Usually, it just seems like a cop-out, like you were too lazy to come up with a title that actually describes the movie. With "Charlotte Gray," however, it works pe...
Big Fat Liar
Even when you factor in the shameless cross-promotion for Universal Studios that permeates every frame of "Big Fat Liar," it's still a pretty decent kid-pleasing, tolerable-to-adults lark of a movie.
14-year-old Jason Shepherd (Frankie Muniz, of ...
Rollerball
It's a good thing "Rollerball" was pushed back from its original summer 2001 release date. If it had come out then, it would have been lost in a sea of bad movies, indistinguishable from its peers. Coming out now, though, it earns a distinction: The ...
Collateral Damage
Except for one little twist near the end, "Collateral Damage" offers no surprises. It is the quintessential Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick, right down to the last cliché. It reads like a "Simpsons" parody of an action movie, rather than an actua...
Birthday Girl
Nicole Kidman is riding high off her successes in "Moulin Rouge" and "The Others," but "Birthday Girl" is liable to suck some of the wind out of her sails. It's a fast-moving, original film for the first 45 minutes, and a deathly tedious one for the ...
The Singles Ward
If you got your Family Home Evening group together one Monday night and made a little "movie," except you got dozens of your friends to help out, found some editing and sound equipment, and made the thing last 102 minutes, you'd have "The Singles War...
Slackers
"Slackers" is sometimes almost surrealistically crude. It's as if filmmakers have stopped trying to out-sex each other and have opted for out-weirding each other instead. I think that's a step in the right direction; at least weirdness is occasionall...
Maelstrom (French)
Denis Villeneuve's French-Canadian "Maelstrom" is narrated by a fish. Why? Why not!
Actually, it sort of makes sense. The sly, understated morality play about guilt and the value of human life frequently comes back to water as a symbol, and the d...
Storytelling
"Storytelling" is not a departure for Todd Solondz. If you liked his previous works, "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Happiness," both of which were nearly brilliant and at times nearly unbearable to watch, then you will like this one.
It is not o...
The Count of Monte Cristo
"The Count of Monte Cristo" is a dazzling, old-fashioned adventure story that brings the Alexandre Dumas novel roaringly to life. For an hour or so, that is. Then it turns into dull Hollywood hokum.
It is directed by Kevin Reynolds, the man behin...
The Mothman Prophecies
As movies with supernatural themes go, "The Mothman Prophecies" is all over the place. There are unexplained occurrences, strange visions, and prophetic hallucinations -- all of which usually get their own movies, without being forced to share space ...
A Walk to Remember
The title "A Walk to Remember" refers to the fact that the movie is based on a book called "A Walk to Remember." Other than that, it has no relevance, because there's not much walking in the movie. There might be some in the theater, though, as peopl...
Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
"Kung Pow: Enter the Fist" has a marvelous premise but fails completely due to some fundamental misunderstandings of the ways of comedy.
The idea is that Steve Oedekerk got a hold of a long-forgotten 1976 martial-arts film called "Tiger & Cran...
Beijing Bicycle (Chinese)
It is a repetitive plot that does the most damage to "Beijing Bicycle," an otherwise very promising film that examines the class struggles of the Chinese people.
This is something Chinese filmmakers have not often examined until recently, and for...
Snow Dogs
For some reason, Disney keeps making really, really crappy live-action films. Someone must be encouraging them. Oh, that's right: It's YOU. You morons, you Americans, who keep paying money to see things like "102 Dalmatians" and "Inspector Gadget." "...
Italian for Beginners (Danish)
There is death all around in "Italian for Beginners." It's at the periphery, mostly -- main characters' parents or spouses die, not the main characters themselves -- but it's there, affecting everyone, influencing their behavior, changing their attit...
Orange County
You can tell "Orange County" is from MTV Films because the rock soundtrack barely stops for a minute, there's a lot of drinking and drug use among the teen-age characters, and someone inadvertently almost ingests a cup of urine. The MTV Films affilia...
Brotherhood of the Wolf (French)
If you combined "Jaws" with "Dangerous Liaisons," threw in a dash of "JFK," and filtered the whole thing through "The Matrix," you'd have something like "Brotherhood of the Wolf," a horror/period/conspiracy/action flick that is at once altogether ori...
Bark
It is said that if you think you're crazy, you're probably not. People who actually are insane don't usually realize it. "Bark" adheres strikingly well to this theorem. It is good when it allows its characters to be themselves, and bad when it demons...
Rain
Katherine Lindberg's "Rain" is about people who act in passion, and then must deal with the consequences. It takes place in a small Iowa town cursed with bleak, flat landscapes and moody cinematography, not to mention a lot of small-town people who h...
Lola
"Lola" is about a woman's journey to find out who she really is. You can tell this because about 20 minutes into the film, someone says to her, "Who are you Lola? What do you do?" Next thing you know, she's off trying to find herself. It reminds me o...
Soft for Digging
"Soft for Digging" is a tense, compelling horror film for 45 minutes or so. And then you realize it's not going to be anything more than a very basic campfire story, and the disappointment settles in. What a waste of perfectly good atmosphere! What a...
Taboo
"Taboo" should be watched on video with a group of friends who enjoy a good bad movie. It goes on the same list as recent self-serious cheese-fests like "Gossip," "The In Crowd" and "The Skulls" in that it's utterly worthless as an actual film, but q...
Killing Time
There is a lot of pointlessness in life, but it's still kinda swell just to be alive. That's the message in Anthony Jaswinski's slacker comedy "Killing Time," a movie that, while full of pointlessness, is still kinda swell just to watch.
The plot...
Devil’s Playground (documentary)
Those unfamiliar with the inner workings of the Amish people -- and that would be most of us, I think; if you're Amish and you're reading this on the Internet, you're in BIG TROUBLE -- will find "Devil's Playground" an utterly fascinating documentary...
Run Ronnie Run
The sublimely offensive fellows behind HBO's "Mr. Show" have expanded their considerable talents into movie form with "Run Ronnie Run," which is by turns hilarious and amateurish, but which is mostly very entertaining.
If you were unfortunate eno...
Soft Shell Man (French)
The title character in "Soft Shell Man," a light French-Canadian comedy, is Alex (David La Haye), a Montreal photographer who, like all men, wants desperately for everyone to like him.
This is an insight from writer/director André Turpin, who pai...
The Slaughter Rule
In the six-man football league that exists in the rural Montana of this film, the "slaughter rule" is that if a team ever comes to be trailing by more than 45 points, the game will be called -- a mercy killing, as it were.
But the point of "The S...
Impostor
A title card at the beginning of "Impostor" tells us that it's based on a story by "legendary futurist" Philip K. Dick, and that he wrote it in 1953. This is supposed to impress us, I think, because we're supposed to marvel at how chillingly accurate...
Beauty and the Beast (IMAX)
Walt Disney Pictures re-released "Beauty and the Beast" to theaters on New Year's Day, but not just to any theaters. The 1991 classic, cleaned up, remastered and with a new sequence added, is playing only on IMAX and other large-format screens. Take ...
Black Hawk Down
Watching "Black Hawk Down," I was gripped by the onscreen events and found the 2 1/2 hours of running time to feel like a lot less. It is a great in-the-moment movie, one that completely wraps you up in itself.
Afterward, a feeling began to sink ...
I Am Sam
Some movies melt your heart. "I Am Sam" microwaves it. Rather than go the long way around to your emotions -- you know, with sympathetic characters and good writing -- it uses movie shortcuts like retarded people and cute kids. Put those in a movie, ...
Gosford Park
Robert Altman's penchant for huge casts, slowly panning cameras and subtle satire are brought to bear in his delicious new film, the whodunit social commentary "Gosford Park."
It is 1932, and Sir William (Michael Gambon) and his wife Lady Sylvia ...
Monster’s Ball
"Monster's Ball" is about very different strangers brought together by fate, though that time-worn plot device doesn't begin to do justice to the complexity of this emotionally rich film.
In fact, none of what the film is "about" can adequately be...
Kate & Leopold
Meg Ryan has carved out a niche that should be named after her, where she plays perky career women who find love in New York City, often with Tom Hanks.
In "Kate & Leopold," her character is named Kate McKay (not to be confused with "You've G...
The Shipping News
Director Lasse Hallstrom's last two films, "The Cider House Rules" and "Chocolat," were glossy, pretty-looking pictures about gentle people with gentle souls. "The Shipping News" is no different in that respect.
It also perpetuates Hallstrom's te...
Ali
Michael Mann should be honored for his talent at sleight-of-hand. In 1999's "The Insider," the writer/director took a dry subject (ethics in journalism) and made it riveting. In his new film, "Ali," he takes an interesting topic (Muhammad Ali's caree...
The Majestic
Jim Carrey makes another desperate grab at an Oscar nomination with "The Majestic," a lovely movie from Frank Darabont, the heart-tugging director of "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile."
For Carrey, desperately grabbing at an Oscar no...
Sidewalks of New York
Edward Burns' "Sidewalks of New York" is about love among urbanites, but it's also about a more platonic kind of affection: the love people have for their city.
Of course, everyone loves New York these days, but writer/director/actor Ed Burns has...
A Beautiful Mind
Ron Howard has had trouble earning respect as a director, but that may be changing soon. Most of the people who only remember him as Opie must be dead by now, and even those of us who think of him as Richie Cunningham are getting on in years. Soon, a...
Joe Somebody
Tell me if this sounds familiar: A well-meaning but weak man is embarrassed by a bully in front of his family, vows to get revenge by fighting the guy, and in the process of preparing, his family gains new respect for him, he becomes a better person,...
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
The first part of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, "The Fellowship of the Ring," is the most thrilling adventure movie in at least a decade, and one of the most visceral, emotional films of the year. When it's not stopping your heart, it's breaking i...
Not Another Teen Movie
The dictionary says a "parody" is "a literary or artistic work that broadly mimics an author's style AND holds it up to ridicule" (emphasis mine).
"Not Another Teen Movie" does a fine job mimicking the common plot devices and stock characters of t...
The Other Side of Heaven
"The Other Side of Heaven" is an account of Mormon general authority John H. Groberg's missionary experiences in Tonga in the 1950s, based on his book, "In the Eye of the Storm." It is mildly uplifting and reasonably enjoyable, but lacks the emotiona...
The Royal Tenenbaums
The people in "The Royal Tenenbaums" are deadpan, matter-of-fact and not given to histrionics. They, like the movie -- which presents itself with little camera movement and a lot of straight-on, non-angular shots -- are quietly, unobtrusively insane....
Vanilla Sky
Cameron Crowe wrote and directed "Say Anything," "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous," which earns him a lot of leeway. (That's the rule: You write and direct three great movies, you can do whatever you want after that.)
He'll need that leeway wit...
Lantana
"Lantana" opens in that most intriguing of fashions, with the camera panning through thick underbrush to reveal a woman's dead body. As the film gets underway, we are left to assume the corpse was a vision of what's to come, and that one of our femal...
Iris
In "Iris," the British novelist Iris Murdoch herself says that education and freedom of the mind are the most important things. Later, when asked about her love for words, she says, "If one doesn't have words how does one think?"
These are tragic...
Kandahar (Farsi)
Prior to Sept. 11, the Iranian film "Kandahar" was hardly known outside a few film festival circles. The unfortunate familiarity we now have with the Afghanistan city of the title has made it a more distributable film, and that is good: It's a good m...
Piñero
Movies about artists almost always do them a disservice by making them look crazy and/or pretentious, which in truth only about 75 percent of them are. "Piñero" does not escape that trap, but it does feature a bravura performance by Benjamin Bratt as...
The Business of Strangers
First-time director/screenwriter Patrick Stettner must have been absolutely thrilled to get Julia Stiles and Stockard Channing to star in his movie, the very theatrical and dialoguish "Business of Strangers." Stiles and Channing must have likewise be...
Ocean’s Eleven
I'm a sucker for movies with big, all-star casts. It's the same reason I like the Academy Awards: All those big-shots together in the same room! I wonder what they talk about? My silly dream is to make a movie where EVERYONE is a celebrity, including...
No Man’s Land (Bosnian)
The title of "No Man's Land" refers to the strip of dirt that lies Serbian and Bosnian lines, where the bulk of the film takes place. But it also refers to everyone's passivity regarding that war, a war no one will accept responsibility for and which...
Baran (Farsi)
"Baran" puts a human face on a statistic we Americans are only vaguely aware of: 1.5 million Afghan refugees live in Iran, where they are not allowed to work without special permission.
The specific human face is that of Lateef (Hossein Abedini),...
Texas Rangers
As old-fashioned shoot-'em-up Westerns go, "Texas Rangers" is not bad. Aside from being in color and starring James Van Der Beek, it is hardly different at from the dusty old flicks that starred the likes of John Wayne or Lee Marvin. No one in "Texas...
Behind Enemy Lines
"Behind Enemy Lines" is typical of war movies in that its action scenes are fantastic, and its talking scenes are embarrassing.
It's almost sitcom-like, in fact, the way things get moving: Fun-loving fighter pilot Chris Burnett (Owen Wilson), bor...
