At this very moment they’re ascending the frostbitten peaks of Park City, Utah: filmmakers and film-breakers, which is to say, in the latter case, movie execs and film critics who will decide what’s hot after spending a week in the bitter cold. Among those making the long trek to the…
In the new Clint Eastwood movie, ordinary young men—husbands and fathers, artisans and aristocrats—are drafted into a war whose motives many of them do not fully understand. There, on an island called Iwo Jima, they fight against an enemy who has been demonized by wartime propaganda—a supposedly brutal oppressor with…
Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth is something alchemical. To an astonishing degree, the 42-year-old Mexican filmmaker best known for his contribution to the Blade and Hellboy franchises has transformed the horror of mid-20th-century European history into a boldly fanciful example of what surrealists would call le…
At face value, Alpha Dog—based on a real-life story that’s still waiting for its ending—plays like an amped-up, drugged-out episode of Dragnet. In 2000, a gang of SoCal kids kidnapped and murdered 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz, a soft-spoken boy from the San Fernando Valley who dreamed of becoming a rabbi and…
Bandidas (Fox) This review is not long enough for a suitable treatment of the beauty of Penélope Cruz and Salma Hayek. The makers of Bandidas would certainly prefer I tried, though, than to discuss this plodding cliché of a western featuring the two. You could write the script right now…
Notes on a Scandal, brilliantly adapted by Patrick Marber from the darkly comic Zoë Heller novel, is a grim piece of work—Fatal Attraction for the art-house crowd, shorn of its predecessor’s fearful misogyny. Set in a dreary London where a gray funk of fog and cigarette smoke hangs over everyone’s…
I am sorry to say that Peter did not feel very well that evening. His mother put him to bed and gave him a dose of chamomile tea. ‘One tablespoon to be taken at bedtime.’ But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper. —Beatrix Potter,…
Robert Wilonsky and Jordan Harper recap their top DVDs of 2006: Eraserhead (Absurda/Subversive): Finally available on DVD, David Lynch’s debut film is as captivating and frustrating as it ever was. The print looks great in its own weird way, and the feature-length doc shows Lynch speaking more clearly about his…
Jackass Number Two: Unrated (Paramount) The sequel to the dumb-ass jamboree makes its predecessor look plain and inoffensive. In short: more puke, more blood, more semen (from a horse, consumed nonetheless), more shit, more piss, more everything till you’d think the Jackasses (Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, etc.) would be…
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…
History repeats itself: 11 Decembers ago, Universal had the season’s strongest movie—a downbeat sci-fi flick freely adapted from a well-known source by a name director. With a bare minimum of advance screenings and a shocking absence of hype, the studio dumped it. This year, they’ve done it again. The 1995…
It took Norman Mailer seven years and 1,282 pages to write 1991’s Harlot’s Ghost: A Novel of the CIA, and if memory serves, it took me 12 years to actually finish it. So director Robert De Niro and screenwriter Eric Roth can be forgiven for taking two hours and 40…
The Good German, directed by Steven Soderbergh from Joseph Kanon’s bestseller, is as much simulation as movie. Specifically, it’s the simulation of a 1940s private eye flick. It’s not just a period film, but one that feigns being shot as it would have been in that period. Filmed for maximum…
Bankrupt and brain-damaged in Rocky V, a bout fought so long ago that the other Bush was still sucker-punching Saddam, Sylvester Stallone’s titular pugilist returns to issue another beating in Rocky Balboa. How much punishment can an audience take? Even 007 gets his license renewed by younger models every decade,…
When the Levees Broke (HBO) Spike Lee’s four-part doc, easily the best non-fiction film of 2006, gets a fifth part on DVD: a 105-minute epilogue that reveals just how little has changed since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in August 2005. Featuring new interviews with the displaced and displeased,…
“T.I.A.,” mutters Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), slouched across a bar in Sierra Leone. It is 1999. As the West obsesses over Clinton’s blowjob, the West African nation is mired in a savage civil war. Our hero, a world-weary soldier of fortune, has struck up a conversation with Maddy Bowen (Jennifer…
About Will Smith’s estimable talents, there is no doubt. Six Degrees of Separation, Ali…um…the “Parents Just Don’t Understand” video—the man’s got skills to pay the bills, yours and mine and his. That he seldom uses them, or their attendant clout, is dispiriting. This is an actor coming off a streak…
Talladega Nights (Columbia) This cut of Will Ferrell’s NASCAR comedy runs 13 minutes longer than the theatrical version, and that doesn’t take into account the deleted and extended scenes, outtakes, phony commercials, public-service announcements, and gag reel. A movie that already seemed to be constructed from deleted scenes is well…
Apocalypto has a faux Greek title and an opening quote from historian Will Durant that ruminates on the decline of imperial Rome. It may seem an odd way to comment on the supposed end of an imaginary, unspeakably barbaric Mayan civilization—but WWJD? Mel Gibson means to be universal. Not just…
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…
Rocky: 2-Disc Collector’s Edition (MGM) An old TV commercial for Rocky included here compares Sylvester Stallone to Pacino, De Niro, and Brando — and though we now know this to be pure madness, it’s easy to see what inspired it. Sure, Stallone (who also wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay) slowly destroyed…
When it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, Bobcat Goldthwait’s Stay, now rebranded as Sleeping Dogs Lie for some inexplicable reason, was the talk of Park City, Utah, before anyone had even seen the movie. Based on pre-screening buzz, most folks figured the movie—shot on digital video, though…
