The Girl Next Door (Anchor Bay) If the horror of Saw was a poblano pepper, this here is the habañero. Derived from Jack Ketchum’s infamous novel, sometimes word-for-word, The Girl Next Door — based on a true story — is a sort of Hostel meets Stand By Me: A group…
There are comedies of discomfort, and then there’s Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach’s scalding follow-up to The Squid and the Whale. An immersion in sibling malice and simmering resentment, with one of the most infuriating characters in recent movies holding us under, Margot tramples the commandment that only the…
Casting Nicole Kidman as The Golden Compass’ glacial, intractably smooth megalomaniac Mrs. Coulter is no less inspired for being obvious. Indeed, she was the first and only choice for director Chris Weitz, who adapted this first installment of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy. Despite the book’s description of the…
Hot Rod (Paramount) Andy Samberg, best known for stuffing his dick in a box on Saturday Night Live, is Rod Kimble, a wannabe stuntman with very little “man” in him. He lives with his mom (Sissy Spacek, not kidding) and a stepdad (Ian McShane), who needs a new heart at…
Though we first met back in 1991, when the NEA-funded homoeroticism of his first aboveground feature, Poison, was rattling the halls of Congress, Todd Haynes and I bonded in April of 1995, when we served as jurors for the short-film competition at the USA Film Festival in Dallas. On our…
This version is the “final cut” only because Warner Bros., director Ridley Scott and the producers have run out of cuts to peddle 25 years after its initial release. By most estimations, the latest offering—in which the biggest change is the revelation that Harrison Ford’s 21st-century Bogie is really a…
John Turturro’s third and loopiest film is prime film-studies fodder, perhaps best suited to the tail end of a musicals seminar, along with Dancer in the Dark and other “postmodern” song-and-dancers. A Coen brothers production with a cast as unlikely as it is impressive (including Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, James…
Hearts of Darkness:A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (Paramount) At last available on DVD, Eleanor Coppola’s 1991 documentary about her husband’s tumultuous trek downriver remains, easily, the best film ever about the making of a movie and unmaking of a man. Francis Ford Coppola thought he was going to spend 16 weeks in…
Something about that movie though, well I just can’t get it out of my head/But I can’t remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play. —Bob Dylan, “Brownsville Girl” Literally speaking, Bob Dylan isn’t “there” in Todd Haynes’ staggering mix-tape biopic I’m Not There…
Hard to believe that it’s been 20 years since the release of The Princess Bride, if only because it hasn’t aged a day. Bereft of the pop-culture gags that curdle the Shrek movies and absent the cynicism of most other kids’ films used solely to peddle fast food and impulse…
As one of what novelist Stephen King calls his Constant Readers, I was as jazzed as every other monster-lovin’ geek when word came that filmmaker Frank Darabont was making a movie of King’s classic novella, The Mist. Cynics suggested that after tanking big time with his Frank Capra homage, The…
I’m Not There is the movie of the year — but to whom does Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan biopic actually belong, and when was it really made? The great attention-grabber of last month’s New York Film Festival, I’m Not There is as notable for its stunt casting as its elusive…
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is less Sidney Lumet’s comeback than his resurrection. Three years after being presented a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, the 83-year-old director comes forth with a violent family melodrama that is his strongest movie in at least two decades. Robustly directed from Kelly Masterson’s bear-trap screenplay…
Midway through the amiable children’s movie Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, there comes a speech that I’ll wager writer-director Zach Helm has been saving for future use ever since he discovered the Bard. As pop philosophy goes, it’s bracing stuff: Paraphrasing King Lear, Mr. Magorium (Dustin Hoffman), a 243-year-old “toy impresario”…
The Princess Bride: 20th Anniversary Edition (MGM) As far as anniversary-edition DVDs go, The Princess Bride is crushingly disappointing: no Rob Reiner commentary track, no outtakes, no making-of doc, no nothing, save for a lousy game and a few short interviews with Robin Wright Penn, Mandy Patinkin, Christopher Guest, and…
A doom-ridden pulp cabalist with a dark sense of purpose as well as humor, Richard Kelly shoots the moon with his rich, strange and very funny sci-fi social satire, Southland Tales. Kelly’s debut, Donnie Darko, was the first post-millennial cult hit; his second feature, Southland Tales, achieved film maudit status…
Sesame Street: Old School Volume 2 (Genius) On the heels of the Electric Company boxed sets, which were at once educational and groovy as all get-out, comes the latest in greatest hits from Sesame Street before the neighborhood was gentrified for Elmo’s protection. Chief among the copious highlights in this…
Although he plays a college professor in his latest film, Robert Redford was, by his own admission, never much of a student, consistently more interested in what was going on outside the classroom window than inside. But there’s one moment from Redford’s academic past that burns brightly in his memory…
“Hold still”—it’s what the hunters say to the hunted in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. The first time we hear it, it’s the out-of-work Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) whispering optimistically to the antelope he spies through his rifle sight while perched on the crest of…
Less a war drama than a set of dueling position papers, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs may be the gabbiest movie ever made about American foreign policy—and it wasn’t even written by Aaron Sorkin. Hot young screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan is fresh off his alpha-male script for The Kingdom, which…
Banking on the career choices of Vince Vaughn garners increasingly erratic returns, which is ironic, given that he has finally settled on (or surrendered to) a consistent onscreen persona: his own bad self. Uneasy from the beginning, Vaughn avoided the superstardom that seemed within reach after Swingers by trying on…
Named for the spot in Christian fundamentalist hell where sinners are condemned to spend eternity, Tony Kaye’s Lake of Fire is a provocatively beautiful movie on the hottest hot-button issue in American life: a woman’s right to an abortion. The British-born Kaye, an enormously successful maker of deluxe TV commercials,…
