Andrew Niccol keeps making the same movie over and over again and dressing it in slightly different clothes: the sleek charcoal Hugo Boss grays of Gattaca, the crisp Crayola hues of The Truman Show and, now, the silk-and-satin Hollywood resplendence of Simone. Niccol, writer and director, is obsessed with a…
Sometimes when a director shoots at a barn, the satisfaction comes in simply watching him hit it dead center. So it is with The Good Girl, wherein Miguel Arteta (Star Maps) targets Middle American ennui with wit, compassion and no shortage of ornery malaise. Like Arteta’s second feature, Chuck &…
Robert Evans wrote his autobiography in 1994 as much out of desperation as hubris; it cried out, “Damn it, look at me…please?” He’d produced one film during the past 10 years, The Cotton Club, which was such a colossal failure it rendered Evans a moot point in Hollywood, a position…
Director Neil LaBute (Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty) seems the unlikeliest candidate to direct the film version of British author A.S. Byatt’s Booker Award-winning best seller Possession. (OK, that’s an exaggeration: There’s always Michael Bay.) LaBute’s earlier films were resolutely tied to American culture, and Byatt’s book couldn’t be…
Up to a certain point, Paul Marino’s story is a familiar one, especially to any single guy in his 20s who likes playing with his joystick. Four years ago, Marino and his pals would leave their offices on a Friday night and go to another friend’s workplace, where they’d play…
How incredible it is to feel like you’re really there. Away from the consumers, the McDonald’s, the lattes…face to face with enormous stone constructions and things as delicate as blades of grass, as gritty as roof shingles. What’s more amazing is that this art is breathtaking on its own, not…
Just returned from the San Diego Comic Convention, the annual gathering of dork knights and wonder women (as in, “I wonder why women go to comic conventions”), the five men who founded and front Ghostwerks Comics are psyched. First of all, they paid top dollar to get their booth–“not just…
Nothing’s more disappointing than the sequel that feels forced rather than organic. It was inevitable Spy Kids, so good Miramax’s Dimension division released it twice last year (once, in a special “long-form” version containing a handful of added scenes), would spawn a sibling; that movie, as neon-bright as the latest…
In case you didn’t happen to read the tagline on the ubiquitous poster, Xander Cage, also known as XXX because he’s tattooed his first initial three times on the back of his neck, is “a new breed of secret agent.” The old breed, we learn pretty quickly, is Bond, James…
Blood Work, Clint Eastwood’s 23rd film as director, is another crime thriller in the vein of, but better than, True Crime (1998) and Absolute Power (’96). And it bears a striking resemblance to 1993’s In the Line of Fire, the Eastwood vehicle directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Or maybe it resembles…
Hearing that her writer boyfriend (Tristán Ulloa) has been killed in an accident, a Madrid waitress (Paz Vega) named Lucia takes off for an island that figures more centrally in his past than she realized. As in his 1998 masterpiece Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Spanish writer/director Julio Medem here…
Friendship is almost as complicated and compelling as love. It’s romance without the sex, whether between members of the same or opposite genders. Marina (Anna Friel)–pretty, vivacious and rebellious on the outside but insecure and empty on the inside–and Holly (Michelle Williams)–shy, intellectual, also insecure–have been best friends since childhood…
A story of a somewhat troubled young man, who, heavily closeted and socially awkward, took to picking up younger males, drugging them, killing them, then fucking the corpses, chopping them up and sometimes eating them. Cutting back and forth in time between Jeffrey Dahmer’s life of crime and his late…
After endless failed relationships, a middle-aged exterminator and jazz musician (Jeffrey Tambor) begins to think that maybe he’s gay. On his first attempt to pick someone up at a gay bar, however, he meets a beautiful divorcee (Jill Clayburgh), whose recent love life has been equally unsatisfying. The two leap…
A press pass, reporter-turned-novelist Gregory McDonald once said, is good for one thing: It allows the journalist to ask very smart people very stupid questions. Certainly, that’s how it feels after this 45-minute drive from downtown Dallas to the Allen home of Stan Liebowitz, professor of economics at the University…
The danger in writing a witty contemporary play filled with topical references and satirical jabs at public figures is that, over time, the references grow whiskers and the public figures fade into obscurity. That’s what’s happened with George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1939 comedy The Man Who Came to…
Good morning, agent. Your mission–should you choose to accept it–is to infiltrate the ranks of the Sacred Order of Brides. It is your task to learn what drives a frugal woman–a woman who clips coupons and only shops sales–to purchase a $7,000 dress that she will wear for three hours…
When Light Crust Doughboys bassist Art Greenhaw curses today’s commercial radio broadcasting industry as “a marketing scheme, a revenue-driven format, a way around payola,” why, as a member of the world’s longest-running Western swing band, doesn’t he craftily refer to an inspiring tale of better airwave days to sharpen his…
This time around, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan puts the surprise at the beginning of his film, and it’s a subtle, shimmering clue–one easily missed and, frankly, one that might not even be there at all. Such are the temptations offered by the maker of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable: Even…
Like George Clooney says in Ocean’s Eleven, do the math: four Canon XL1 digital cameras, one dual 800 MHz Power Mac G4, a copy of editing software Final Cut Pro 3, 18 shooting days, a 2-million-buck budget, one Oscar-winning Best Director and nine high-profile actors (among them: Julia Roberts, Brad…
If nothing else, give French actor Yvan Attal credit for his faith in domestic bliss. At a time when matrimony has a shorter life span than mayonnaise, Attal has sought to mingle the joys and traumas of his own marriage (to actress Charlotte Gainsbourg) with his piquant views on the…
It’s not exactly a good sign when a movie starring Tim Allen, Christian Slater and Richard Dreyfuss gets dumped into one or two art-house theaters after a couple of years on the shelf. Even if none of them is a guaranteed box-office draw, you’d think all three should be enough…
