On an early December afternoon at the offices of Malpaso Productions, Clint Eastwood’s four Academy Awards have been placed into thick velvet carrying bags, while that famous poncho—the one Eastwood donned for the entirety of Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy—is being carefully loaded into a large shipping box. But that doesn’t…
It is said that a great actor or actress can “bring down the house,” but before I saw (and heard) the 25-year-old American Idol finalist Jennifer Hudson in the film version of the 1981 Broadway musical Dreamgirls, I can’t recall the last time I truly feared for the architectural stability…
From its wink-wink, nudge-nudge movie-within-a-movie opening through to its bold-faced quoting of such classic Hollywood farces as The Lady Eve and His Girl Friday, Nancy Meyers’ The Holiday wants us to know that it’s different from the kind of rom-com pabulum that fills the multiplexes these days. And it is…
No, the Virgin Mary doesn’t get high on aerosol fumes, and Joseph doesn’t ride in on a skateboard, but in most other respects, The Nativity Story is less of a departure for Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown director Catherine Hardwicke than one would have imagined. From our first glimpse of…
Michael Mann’s Miami Vice is like a car that’s been stripped of everything but its two bucket seats and rebuilt from the ground up. The protagonists are a pair of detectives named Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) and a cover of Phil Collins’ “In the Air…
Owen Wilson has moved up in the world: He’s gone from crashing weddings to crashing entire marriages. In the listless farce You, Me and Dupree, his eponymous ne’er-do-well shows up on the doorstep of his childhood friend Carl (Matt Dillon), having lost his job and been evicted from his apartment…
