It’s the cover-up, stupid! It doomed Nixon during Watergate, got Clinton impeached, inspired outrage against the Catholic Church and apparently it’s just part of the day-to-day operations at places like Enron and Tyco. The initial crime is bad enough, but the conspiracy to hide it always ends up hurting more…
Is there anything more tedious than the guy who complains and complains about something he knows nothing about? Danish cinema auteur Lars von Trier has never been to the United States because he’s afraid of flying, yet he seems determined to keep making movies about how horrible this country is…
Its always hard to pan an earnest film, especially one by a first-time director. And The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, a plucky striver if there ever was one, cant find a single cynical note on the scale. Essentially a hagiography in praise of Evelyn Ryan (Julianne Moore), a woman…
Her name is Domino Harvey, and she is a bounty hunter. If you’ve seen even one TV spot or theatrical trailer for Domino, you’ve heard that message ground into your brain like an annoying jingle. What you may not know is that Domino Harvey was a real person, daughter of…
Ah, Wallace and Gromit. Who doesn’t get a little lift at the sound of those names? Who doesn’t feel the edges of her mouth begin to tickle toward a smile, her heart grow warmer with images of the love between a (plasticine) man and his (plasticine) dog? Perhaps you’re not…
Elijah Wood is not a believable tough guy. Probably this comes as no great revelation to you. There’s a reason that the Lord of the Rings video games tend to focus on Aragorn, Legolas and Gandalf–Wood’s Frodo is a wuss, and everybody knows it. So any movie that’s about him…
All the publicity for Waiting… has focused on the scene in which an annoying customer at the fictional chain restaurant ShenaniganZ sends her food back to the kitchen, where it meets with all sorts of nasty modifications, courtesy of some dandruff, pubic hair and mucus. The teaser posters depicted similarly…
One of the strongest–and sure to be controversial–films of the year, The War Within goes places that other films wouldn’t dare go. Thoughtfully written and nicely acted, it follows an Islamic suicide bomber who comes to New York City with a deadly plan. The film in no way endorses the…
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection (Universal Studios) Alfred Hitchcock may be the best pop filmmaker in our history, and this gorgeous 14-film set is certainly worthy of the master. Licensing issues kept it from being as “definitive” as the box claims–missing, most notably, are Hitchcock’s classic Cary Grant collaborations To…
Director Curtis Hanson, a journeyman only recently bestowed the title of Great Director, has already made his horror movie (1973’s The Arousers), his kiddie action comedy (1980’s The Little Dragons), his teen sex romp (1983’s Losin’ It ), his handful of Hitchcock riffs (1987’s The Bedroom Window, 1990’s Bad Influence…
In 2001, Jonathan Safran Foer made an astounding literary debut. “A Very Rigid Search,” published by The New Yorker, was his hilarious, heartbreaking account of an attempt by a young American man (named, cheekily, Jonathan Safran Foer) to find a Ukrainian woman who had saved his grandfather from the Nazis…
Robots (Fox) The story of a small-town ‘bot (voiced by Ewan McGregor) who bolts for the big city, Robots is the first non-Pixar film to compete with that studio’s razzle and dazzle. The thing’s stunning to look at–and, frankly, it’s better to stare at than listen to, since listening entails…
Serenity, Joss Whedon’s big-screen spinoff of the 2002 TV show Firefly, which didn’t even last a dozen episodes, is already a cult phenom well before its opening. The show’s DVD boxed set lines the shelves of every fanboy who dreamed of gunslinging in space alongside preachers and prostitutes, and already…
To the knowledgeable comic book fan, all one need say about MirrorMask is that it was scripted by Neil Gaiman and directed by Dave McKean, with a final product that, while less plot-heavy than most of Gaiman’s writing, faithfully adapts McKean’s unique drawing/collage style into three dimensions. Since those who…
Into the Blue offers precisely what one would expect from the director of Blue Crush and the writer of Torque: beautiful stupidity. Its every frame dripping from a noxious recipe of suntan oil, summertime sweat and salt water, this heist movie (or whatever it is, which isn’t much) delivers a…
It’s almost impossible to watch Roman Polanski’s rendition of Oliver Twist without drawing parallels between the deprivations endured by the book’s young protagonist and the director’s own brutal boyhood. A Jew raised in Nazi-occupied Poland, Polanski first tackled the Holocaust head-on in his 2002 film The Pianist, but Oliver Twist,…
About once a year–twice, if we’re lucky–a first-time director shows up with something original, electrifying and humane, a film that shows us a new way to see, that presents complex and memorable people in whom we recognize ourselves. Last year, it was Joshua Marston and Maria Full of Grace. This…
Anyone vaguely familiar with the rules of golf knows that you may not improve your lie, ground your club in a sand trap, or–most grievous of all–subtract strokes from your score. This last one apparently never occurred to the makers of a new movie with the grandiose title The Greatest…
Desperate Housewives: The Complete First Season (Buena Vista) ABC’s juggernaut drama is made up mostly of elements that have trickled down from HBO: black humor, self-awareness, the radical notion that women over 30 can arouse the national libido. The bonus deleted scenes don’t add much to the story, and behind-the-scenes…
By conservative estimate, Tim Burton stands to rake in half a billion dollars at the box office this year, thanks to a childlike chocolate maker in mauve rubber gloves and, now, to a lively dead girl with marriage on her mind and the timid schlub who falls under her spell…
Anything can be anything to anybody, particularly in the case of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. If you want to believe that his new film, a loose adaptation of a little-known graphic novel, is a work of damning criticism aimed at the hypocrisy of Americans who believe violence is…
Andrew Niccol’s first two films as writer-director, 1997’s Gattaca and 2002’s S1m0ne, were hollow, sterile sci-fi masquerading as earnest satire: The former told of a near future in which parents could genetically engineer perfect children; the latter proffered an actress who became the most famous and beloved movie star in…
