Our anemic movie industry recycles so relentlessly that even our complaints about such plasticized repackaging comes off as recycled product of its own, offered primarily to draw the line between concerned aging cinephiles and the target consumers who don’t care a whit. But still, we’ve become a culture not merely…

Coming closer even than Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers to resembling the Chinese cover art for an Iron Butterfly album, Chen Kaige’s The Promise is psychedelia extremis. Hardly a minute of it passes without a concentrated dose of digital frou-frou and lavish cartoon-poetic imagery: floating ocean goddesses, flying swordsmen,…

We’ve all done it–killed an afternoon drinking in a pleasantly grungy roadhouse somewhere, boozily enjoying the illusion of having fallen off the grid, playing semi-forgotten blues songs on an outdated jukebox, and thinking aloud See, I should capture this feeling. This should be a movie. Sobered up, we don’t make…

You may not yet have lost your ardor and respect for the pressure-point hammer blow Quentin Tarantino executed on American movies, but it’s difficult at this late date not to view him as an imperative inoculation with unfortunate side effects: gas, bloating, dizziness, delusions of cleverness. Imitators flock when coolness…

Calling Rian Johnson’s teen indie drama Brick a piece of stunt work might seem tantamount to hitting it with a pie, but it’s a high-speed wheelie of a strangely daring variety. Try this thumbnail definition on for size: a high school noir, complete with a Dashiell Hammett-derived plot line and…

“You want an easy job, go join the Red Cross,” someone says well into Thank You for Smoking, a gleeful farce about capitalist mendacity based on Christopher Buckley’s 1994 bestseller. The implication, made drummingly plain in the film’s every bon mot, is that our ethical barometers skew lazily toward goodness…

Given Inside Man’s bullpen (director Spike Lee, stars Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster), moment in political history and advertising, you could be forgiven for anticipating some kind of socially relevant, perhaps even politically volatile dramatic smash-up–something with teeth, ambition, a functioning cerebrum and a lusty relationship with reality. But those…

Anyone who remembers the 1977 Wes Craven film The Hills Have Eyes, which was and remains a piece of Milwaukee-beer shit, remembers it because A) they had a memorable fuck-or-puke night at the aging neighborhood drive-in; B) Michael Berryman’s uniquely hairless mug, which glared from the video store horror sections…

The Tenants (Sony) Fifteen seconds into the video for “Nuthin but a G Thang,” it was obvious that Snoop Dogg had charisma to spare. More than a decade later, with his performance as ’70s-era radical author Willie Spearmint, it’s official: The man can act. Snoop’s shambling, searing performance is just…

Walk the Line (Fox) No matter what a junkie does with his spare time — say, redefine country music, or forge one of history’s most enduring personas — movies about junkies are a drag to watch. So it’s too bad this Johnny Cash biopic is a by-the-numbers fall-and-redemption tale. A…

Didn’t Richard Donner retire? A 1980s star-director name, among many, that should now send bolts of discouraging dread down your spine, Richard Donner may well be seeing his filmmaking skills peak with 16 Blocks–even if saying it’s his best, least flatulent, most efficient film is tantamount to saying that the…