It begins with a very literal cliffhanger. Five snowboarders–the best in their field, we’re told–are dropped via helicopter atop an Alaskan mountain called 7601, imaginatively named for its height above sea level. Swooping aerial shots around the peak convince us that it’s steep, high and dangerous. All they have are…
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Fox) The pairing of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, both in real life and on celluloid, is so obvious as to be almost cartoonish. So even though both are better actors than they need to be, they perfectly belong in this goofy, explosiony world. Married assassins,…
Punishment Park (New Yorker Video) This 1971 movie from director Peter Watkins could have been made yesterday, which is no doubt why it finally sees video release long after accruing cult status. Born out of the filmmaker’s outrage over the Kent State killings, the war in Vietnam and other abominations…
A few weeks ago, Harold Ramis was sitting in a hotel conference room discussing the subtext of The Ice Harvest, his new film based on the novel by Scott Phillips and adapted by Robert Benton and Richard Russo. Ramis explained he took the project, which Benton (Nobody’s Fool, The Human…
There are two audiences for the movie New York Doll: those who know the lyrics to such songs as “Vietnamese Baby” and “Pills” (and probably formed a band or two after memorizing them), and those who know David Johansen only as the brassy retro showman Buster Poindexter (if that). The…
For those of us who dug Rob McKittrick’s recent comedy Waiting… , Just Friends offers up some good news: Ryan Reynolds and Anna Faris are together again as a dysfunctional couple. He’s a slick music executive named Chris Brander, still traumatized at having gotten the “Let’s just be friends” speech…
Ever since its Broadway debut in 1996, Rent has generated a loyal, almost cult-like following. Showered with praise, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical touched a nerve among the young, artistic, gay, urban and alternatively dressed people who identified as outsiders and wondered how they would make their way in the world…
The press notes for Pulse would have you believe that it predates many of the recent Japanese horror films that have been remade for American audiences, but that doesn’t seem to be true. It predates the U.S. remakes, yes; but according to the Internet Movie Database, Pulse came out in…
Most movies intend to entertain or inform us, or maybe take our minds momentarily off personal problems–that bullet-riddled body in the trunk, say, or Aunt Edna’s arrest for shoplifting doughnuts. Presumably, no picture really means to make an airtight case against children. But after sitting through the witless, terminally irritating…
Deception, betrayal and revenge. In his film directorial debut, acclaimed playwright/screenwriter/theater director Craig Lucas is done in by his own script, which becomes so excessively icy and cruel that it breaks, rather than solidifies, any bond it could hope to establish with its audience. A modern-day Greek tragedy–complete with an…
Born to Run: 30th Anniversary Edition (Columbia Home Video) The centerpiece of this three-disc boxed set isn’t the classic 1975 album, but the two DVDs that come with it. On one, shot in London in 1975, Bruce and the band tear through most of Born to Run and its two…
The part with the dragon is really cool. Might as well cut to the chase, right? It’s not as though you need anybody to tell you the basic premise of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; if you somehow missed the last three, this won’t likely be the one…
It seems like so much nitpicking, but why is the Johnny Cash biopic called Walk the Line when a far better name would have been Ring of Fire? Surely James Mangold, co-writer and director, would insist he chose the former because of its lyrics dealing with the temptations that crop…
Richard Gere? That’s the first thought that came to mind upon learning that Mr. Salt-and-Pepper-Sexy-Buddhist-Wasp had been cast as Saul Naumann in Bee Season, the film version of Myla Goldberg’s best-selling novel. In the book, Saul is an oppressive and learned Jewish patriarch, a cantor and student of mysticism whose…
Keira Knightley, who is all of 20 but has the grace and gravitas of someone a good decade older, probably considers herself the luckiest lass in all the world at present. Just as Pride & Prejudice begins filling the cineplex with dewy, hopeless romantics who can’t get enough of Jane…
As a screenwriter, Shane Black has built a reputation on action movies featuring mismatched partners. Crazy Mel Gibson and aging Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon; sassy Samuel L. Jackson and amnesiac hit-woman-housewife Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight; burnout detective Bruce Willis and football player Damon Wayans in The…
Pay attention, Disney: This is how you do a family film right. Neither pandering nor dull, Zathura plays exactly like a no-limits replica of the kind of space adventure that imaginative kids left to their own devices might enact. Assuming there’s no Xbox to distract them, naturally. Loosely based on…
Moviegoers with a taste for nasty villains will get all they can handle from the heavy in Swedish director Mikael Håfstrom’s Derailed. Philippe LaRoche–played with obvious relish by a craggy-faced Vincent Cassel–is not the kind of effete Frenchman you find reading poetry in the corner bistro while he sips a…
Beavis and Butt-head: The Mike Judge Collection, Volume One (Paramount) This three-disc, 40-episode volume chronicling Beavis and Butt-head’s early years will come as a relief to anyone who was stuck in a teenage wasteland when the MTV series first hit the air; turns out, we weren’t just stoned — this…
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (Lucasfilm Ltd.) The final installment of the Star Wars saga actually plays better at home: You can watch it, then pop in the original trilogy and chart the evolution of Anakin, and have it all actually make sense. Though it’s still a…
If Jarhead, director Sam Mendes and writer William Broyles Jr.’s adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s 2003 Gulf War memoir, seems at all familiar–like, say, a DJ’s mash-up of Full Metal Jacket and Three Kings–there’s good reason for it. Swofford, 20 years old during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, writes in his…
Does Steve Martin have multiple personality disorder, or is he just brilliantly in tune with some things and wildly out of touch with others? Shopgirl, the movie based on Martin’s novella of the same name, is one of the most schizoid films in recent memory. It opens with crystalline originality,…
