Calling Rian Johnson’s teen indie drama Brick a piece of stunt work might seem tantamount to hitting it with a pie, but it’s a high-speed wheelie of a strangely daring variety. Try this thumbnail definition on for size: a high school noir, complete with a Dashiell Hammett-derived plot line and…
You may not yet have lost your ardor and respect for the pressure-point hammer blow Quentin Tarantino executed on American movies, but it’s difficult at this late date not to view him as an imperative inoculation with unfortunate side effects: gas, bloating, dizziness, delusions of cleverness. Imitators flock when coolness…
We’ve all done it–killed an afternoon drinking in a pleasantly grungy roadhouse somewhere, boozily enjoying the illusion of having fallen off the grid, playing semi-forgotten blues songs on an outdated jukebox, and thinking aloud See, I should capture this feeling. This should be a movie. Sobered up, we don’t make…
We all want to believe that in even the most dangerous or frightening of situations we would have the courage to stand up for our convictions–that we would not name names, that we would not betray our friends or our ideals. Thank God, most of us will never have the…
Amid brutal competition from A History of Violence, Caché (Hidden) and Last Days, the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival went to L’Enfant (The Child), a Belgian drama about a 20-year-old hustler who sells his infant son like a bag of weed. The makers of this provocative movie,…
The Mel Brooks Collection (Fox) Talk about taking the good with the bad; how else to describe a boxed set containing Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (Brooks’ silly masterpieces), and Robin Hood: Men in Tights and History of the World, Part 1 (both overrated, even by people who can’t stand…
At the opening of Lonesome Jim, a terrific new film directed by Steve Buscemi, a country song plays behind scenes of small-town desolation. “Good times’r comin’,” it promises, in the movie’s first joke. Nothing about these initial scenes–not the stark Midwestern landscape, not the sole figure running with luggage, and…
“You want an easy job, go join the Red Cross,” someone says well into Thank You for Smoking, a gleeful farce about capitalist mendacity based on Christopher Buckley’s 1994 bestseller. The implication, made drummingly plain in the film’s every bon mot, is that our ethical barometers skew lazily toward goodness…
If French writer André Malraux was correct when he claimed that “all art is a revolt against man’s fate,” the most horrific events in human history can give rise, incongruously, to images of soul-searing beauty. How else to explain the stunning black-and-white images that fill Fateless, the story of a…
We are in the middle of a B-movie renaissance, if you haven’t noticed. For years now, the politics of the multiplex have forced films to be either big-budget, Burger King-cup blockbusters or tiny “indie” projects about college-educated Caucasians with emotional problems (and viewed by college-educated Caucasians with emotional problems). But…
If you’re craving an antidote to the sanctity of repressed gay cowboys, you could do worse than Adam & Steve. This good-natured comedy from writer-director Craig Chester uses gently sly wit to poke fun at neurotic gay singles, coming of age in the 1980s and dating in the era of…
Wonder Showzen: Season One (MTV) On the surface, the way this MTV2 puppetfest explores adult concepts through a kiddie-show format seems fresh as a Nantucket limerick. But Wonder Showzen’s execution is so bold and frankly hilarious that it feels wholly new. Whether it’s exploring diversity with a forbidden homosexual love…
The brain is a beguiling thing. One evening, you’re talking to a friend on the phone. Sometime later, you find yourself in a subway car, passing through an urban landscape. You don’t recognize the buildings, the neighborhood or the city. Don’t know why you’re on the train. Don’t even know…
Given Inside Man’s bullpen (director Spike Lee, stars Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster), moment in political history and advertising, you could be forgiven for anticipating some kind of socially relevant, perhaps even politically volatile dramatic smash-up–something with teeth, ambition, a functioning cerebrum and a lusty relationship with reality. But those…
As scientific advances have made forensic DNA matching a reality, a new field has emerged in criminal justice: exoneration. In cases where relevant biological evidence has been preserved, innocent inmates who’ve been serving time for decades suddenly have cause for hope. If a prisoner can manage to get legal help,…
There probably aren’t that many movie stars capable of retaining their charisma after a stroke has rendered them nigh-incoherent. But based on Illusion, Kirk Douglas doesn’t seem to have lost a step. He still has that intensity he always had, and even though he’s at the stage of his career…
It can’t be easy making films about war. It’s so inherently dramatic that, as a setting for art, it’s overdetermined; it drips with meaning even before the first scenes are set. And so much has been said already: War is hell. War is noble. War is surreal. War is absurd,…
The posters for V for Vendetta read “An uncompromising vision of the future from the creators of The Matrix trilogy.” Uncompromising? It simply isn’t possible to translate Alan Moore’s multilayered comic-book masterpiece into a two-hour movie without making cuts that oversimplify, and it’s certainly not feasible to expect producer Joel…
John Fante’s novel Ask the Dust, published in 1939 and all but forgotten till its 1980 reissue with a Charles Bukowski foreword, is very much a work of thinly veiled autobiography; only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Its protagonist, a struggling writer named Arturo Bandini, shared…
A gritty portrait of ghetto life in contemporary South Africa, Tsotsi packs an unexpected emotional wallop. Gavin Hood’s film tells a story of violence and redemption that’s even more remarkable when you consider that neither of the lead performers had ever acted in a movie previously. It’s little wonder that…
Hollywood’s a sucker for cross-dressing. When the American Film Institute chose the 100 greatest comedies of all time, a pair of drag films–Some Like It Hot and Tootsie–earned the top two slots. From Operation Petticoat to White Chicks, slapping falsies on a dude is the fast road to Chuckletown. Women…
The Boys of Baraka, a fine documentary about a group of inner-city, at-risk boys who travel to Kenya to attend a special school, comes very close to greatness. For over an hour, the film is a sharp and blazing account of how boys with multiple challenges and little hope for…
