A number of pregnant mysteries arise with the new remake of Robin Hardy’s 1973 cult-remembered genre work–namely, what’s in this kind of malarkey for gender combat provocateur Neil LaBute, and why was such a high-profile film tossed into theaters last Friday without letting critics see it first? The two simple…
United 93 (Universal) A suggestion to those who’ve put off watching the year’s most wrenching and essential film: Before rolling the feature, first watch the documentary in which the families of those who died on the plane give the filmmakers their blessing, without reservation. If the mother, father, and sister…
By the time Trust the Man opens this weekend, it will have been nearly a year since it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was picked up for distribution by Fox Searchlight. Forget that it’s a year old; this thing tastes a good decade past its expiration…
Another Gay Movie Directed by Todd Stephens. Screenplay by Stephens, based on a story by Stephens and Tim Kaltenecker. Starring Michael Carbonaro, Jonah Blechman, Jonathan Chase and Mitch Morris. Opens Friday. A blow-by-blow remake of American Pie, albeit with more gerbil sex play, Todd Stephens’ Another Gay Movie follows four…
Arrested Development: Season Three (Fox) The final collection of Arrested Development discs feels sadly incomplete: only 13 episodes this time, the result of Fox’s inability to attract viewers to one of TV’s greatest comedies and the network’s unwillingness to give it a full farewell. But none of that diminishes the…
Low, which is to say no, expectations can be a wonderful thing; expect nothing, and maybe you’ll get that little outta-nowhere sumpin’-sumpin’ that turns an otherwise unfulfilling occurrence into a vaguely rewarding experience. It’s not like Invincible boasts the most promising of credentials: a first-time filmmaker (Ericson Core, the cinematographer…
One of the weakest and most ridiculous aspects of popular culture is its narcissistic now-ness. There’s often no then or later, and without past experience or the messy knowledge of life, modern entertainment media often seems poached in a neurotic teenage brainpan, entranced with its own ignorant tunnel vision. A…
Jason Lethcoe’s book Amazing Adventures From Zoom’s Academy doesn’t particularly wow the reader with its prose, but the concept is solid–basically, Harry Potter with superheroes rather than wizards. The heroine, Summer Jones, is an awkward 13-year-old tomboy with a goofy father named Jasper who likes to tinker with home appliances…
Veronica Mars: The Complete Second Season (Warner Bros.) Any concept along the lines of “high school hottie solves crimes” is bound to make for watchable TV, but who would have expected this? Equal parts 90210 teen soap, murder mystery, and comedy, Veronica Mars pulls you in with its sharp writing,…
If, at this remove, we can imagine Vienna in the late 1890s, we behold a great imperial capital in ferment. Gustav Mahler is not only reinventing the harmonic structure of serious music, he is getting his head seriously shrunk by Sigmund Freud. Arnold Schoenberg takes painting lessons from the eroticist…
Awinning tale of sex, real estate and more or less immaculate conception, Quinceañera, as you might expect from a white-made drama about Latino life in Los Angeles’ Echo Park, threatens at first blush to be all about a pregnant teenager and a prodigal cholo in the ‘hood. Yet this saucy,…
Snakes on a Plane represents the ideal of contemporary major-studio filmmaking–which is to say, major-studio marketing. Who needs word-of-mouth screenings or critics when you can sell the four-word pitch as written on a napkin? It points to a future that takes all the guesswork out of movie-going. A major-studio release…
Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier (Paramount) It’s all here, more or less: the 1979 theatrical cut of Francis Ford Coppola’s harrowing and still-hypnotic Joseph Conrad-in-Vietnam adaptation, the 49-minutes-longer-but-feels-24-minutes-shorter 2001 Redux edition, Marlon Brando’s entire 17-minute “The Hollow Men” monologue, even more “lost” and deleted scenes (including a spooky-shocking one, in…
Like the shambling VW van its hapless characters steer from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach, Little Miss Sunshine is a rickety vehicle that travels mostly downhill. How this antic extended sitcom from first-time feature makers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris left Sundance with an eight-figure deal and reams of enthralled press…
Bart Weiss figures that the Dallas Video Festival, of which he’s founder and director, has screened close to 3,000 offerings during the past 18 years, among them everything from giddy compendiums of global TV advertisements to conventional narratives to avant-garde animation to agit-prop docs. It is the veritable hodgepodge, a…
So you know how Parker Posey nearly always plays sarcastic, uptight smokers? In The Oh in Ohio, she finally stretches a bit: Here, she’s a sarcastic, uptight career woman…who doesn’t smoke! Also, she wears her hair down, whereas it’s usually pulled back into some kind of tightly wound style more…
Brick (Universal) Rian Johnson’s feature debut as writer-director will wind up as one of the year’s best films. A film noir set in a modern-day high school, it’s Sam Spade roaming Ridgemont High; kids get doped up and knocked up and even rubbed out while speaking pulp-novel slang, but the…
World Trade Center is about just that–the attacks on and the collapse of the twin towers on September 11, 2001. But 45 minutes in, a viewer might easily forget the movie is set during that nightmarish day. There is little talk of terrorism and scant suggestion that a mighty nation…
There is no modern-day antecedent to the movies Will Ferrell makes with writer-director Adam McKay, with whom Ferrell collaborated during their tenure at Saturday Night Live only a few years ago. To compare their offerings, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and the new Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky…
What’s the difference between a good liar and a good storyteller? The answer, or the lack of an answer, is a mystery at the heart of The Night Listener, a muted psychological thriller adapted from the Armistead Maupin novel. A writer’s elaborate what-if scenario extrapolated from an anecdote, it’s presented…
Just in time for its U.S. release, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecrossí fierce docudrama The Road to Guantanamo received a giant shot of free publicity in early June with the news that three Arab inmates at the infamous detention center in Cuba–none of whom had officially been charged with any…
Monster’s Ball producer Lee Daniels makes his directorial debut with Shadowboxer, and it couldn’t be clearer that he’s trying to follow his previous formula for success. Oscar-caliber actors? Check. Interracial sex? Plenty. A violent demise or two, all in the service of character development? Oh yes. But Daniels maybe could…
