The blood disease porphyria sparked madness in England’s King George III, so its impact on manic Margot (Nicole Garcia) and her hapless daughter Betty (cucumber-cool Sandrine Kiberlain) is about as shocking as a Hoosier mom beating her kid on camera–and as scarring. What’s wonderful about director Claude Miller’s adaptation of…
The 10th Trek film, ostensibly the last featuring the Next Generation crew (or any other, c’mon), plays like a greatest-hits remix; like Die Another Day, it’s bent on resurrecting a moribund franchise by recalling all the things you used to love about it till you grew into big-boy pants. And…
Rob Schneider’s latest look-at-me-I’m-so-cute comedy features the star bumbling around half-clad in Christina Aguilera’s Goodwill donations. He plays a revolting petty thief who magically swaps bodies with a petulant high school cheerleader (Rachel McAdams), sparking roughly a bazillion gags about how funny it is to have a penis. To counterbalance,…
Robert De Niro loves an acting challenge, but lately those tests have been less along the lines of, “Can I convincingly play a boxer?” and more like, “Can I alone be good enough to make this formulaic mess worth watching?” Yes, it was impressive that he played a half-paralyzed stroke…
Transcribed verbatim from the DVD commentary track of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, here’s an informative sci-fi concept from director George Lucas: “As we go through the movie, there’s all little funny moments like Jango bumping his head, because in Star Wars one of the Stormtroopers bumps…
Here’s an original idea for a movie: a low-budget, digital video look at the search for love in New York City, in which person A wants to connect with person B, who’s only looking at person C, who’s in pursuit of person D, and so forth, until it all comes…
As heroes go, the two just-released mental patients struggling to make a new life in Peter Næss’ touching social comedy Elling are notably short on glamour. When we meet him, the shy, middle-aged title character, portrayed by an exquisitely subtle actor named Per Christian Ellefsen, is a quivering bundle of…
The smart sci-fi fan knows that, technically speaking, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris is not a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film at all, but rather a newly filmed interpretation of a Polish novel penned by Stanislaw Lem. Nonetheless, the new film stands in a mighty big shadow. If someone attempted to make…
It’s doubtful Robert Louis Stevenson imagined his Treasure Island populated by cyborgs and scored to Goo Goo Dolls outtakes; and one has to wonder what the author would have made of his characters being turned into talking and walking dogs and cats that, gulp, copulate and reproduce mangy hybrids. Far…
Being of the minority who did not worship Schindler’s List (vital message, tedious movie), it’s easy to feel skeptical of the preachy delivery of Ararat, which concerns not the Jewish holocaust but the Armenian one, its genocidal forebear of 1915-1918. Armenian-Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan (The Adjuster, The Sweet Hereafter) has–like…
At the University of Texas at Austin, this was the first offering screened in introductory film classes; if the professor, a man whose knowledge of cinema history was surpassed only by his willingness to share it with everybody all the time anyplace without any prompting whatsoever, didn’t consider it the…
Small-town stud Tully (Anson Mount) works the family farm with his younger brother Earl (Glenn Fitzgerald) and their inexpressive, unsmiling widower dad (Bob Burrus). The sudden possibility that they might lose the farm opens up a trove of disturbing family secrets, challenging Tully’s heretofore shallow nature. Hilary Birmingham–who co-produced (with…
Taking its cue from Christopher Hitchens’ excoriating, similarly titled book (minus the “s” in “Trials”), this terse and compelling documentary presents the case that former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger deserves to be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, under the standards applied to…
Through a strange chain of events, a likable young pianist (Anna Mouglalis) becomes an interloper in the household of an internationally renowned musician (Jacques Dutronc), whom she believes might be her father. He’s sure he’s not, but her appearance proves disturbing to both his son (Rodolphe Pauly) and even more…
The tragedy is that even those who should have known better didn’t know at all; how could they? The names they sought weren’t listed, their contributions weren’t cited, their influences weren’t credited, so even those who spent hours and days and forevers wearing out the grooves in search of holy-mother-of-God…
Ah, Halle’s berries. Don’t care much for them personally, as they’re components of an actress (bane of the thinking man), but those golden globes are shifting loads of Hollywood product these days, the latest dose being Die Another Day, the 20th official entry in the 40-year-old James Bond franchise. As…
Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Hello, Mr. Hundert. If we can judge by the new Kevin Kline vehicle, The Emperor’s Club, the notions remain alive (if not particularly well) that a self-sacrificing boarding-school teacher can enrich the lives of his students while subsisting in relative emotional misery himself–and that the terrible furies…
When Neil Burger’s debut as feature-film writer and director, Interview with the Assassin, was being shopped around last fall, it had many intrigued but few interested enough to buy it for distribution. The theory goes that some distributors, among them Miramax, thought its subject matter felt a bit off post-September…
The advantage to making a Christmas movie is that, no matter how mediocre your final product is, it’s all but guaranteed to show up on at least one TV station, at least once a year, in perpetuity; even such woeful losers as the Nicolas Cage-Dana Carvey comedy Trapped in Paradise,…
Rarely does a theme unify a film festival; such gatherings, for the most part, are glued together only by movies few have seen and movies few will ever see, the unwanted or misunderstood offspring of would-be artists and could-be visionaries, kooky veterans who long ago ditched the mainstream for the…
So, you wish to know if Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is as good as the first Harry Potter movie. Is it as charming, visually gratifying, faithful to filthy-rich author J.K. Rowling’s inescapable books? Well, that’d be yep times four, as it’s definitely an enchanting spectacular for Potter…
Writer-director Todd Haynes’ loving re-creation of a 1950s-style Hollywood melodrama (think Douglas Sirk) is a puzzling affair. Watching Far from Heaven is like taking a trip back in time–not to the real world of 1957 but, rather, to the reel 50s, as personified by such classic “women’s films” as All…
