Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, based on reporter Mark Bowden’s factual account of a 1993 U.S. Army operation gone dreadfully awry in Somalia, doesn’t just kick your ass. It pummels your entire body; it leaves you trembling. Once the premise and setting are established, this brutal combat adventure doesn’t catch…
It would be easy, and tempting, to hail Kandahar as a masterpiece without even seeing it: It’s a foreign film, it takes on social issues, it’s directed by Iranian master Mohsen Makhmalbaf, it speaks to the causes of our war on terror and first hit on U.S. shores right as…
Who would have guessed that 31 years after M*A*S*H, the film that made Robert Altman’s reputation, he still would be turning out movies as good as his latest release, Gosford Park? Full of the director’s usual energy, powered by the sense of controlled chaos that marks all of his ensemble…
Attended by a rather sexy air of intrigue, the hit French film Brotherhood of the Wolf (Le Pacte des Loups) arrives upon our shores, and, refreshingly, it’s left up to us to figure out just what the hell it is. Monster movie? Costume drama? Martial-arts extravaganza? To say the least,…
Cate Blanchett can do no wrong, but even she can’t save Charlotte Gray, a World War II drama that never rises above the level of a 1950s-era adolescent romance novel. The Australian-born actress, who should have won an Academy Award for her performance in 1998’s Elizabeth, plays the titular character,…
Bangkok Dangerous, by twin brothers Danny and Oxide Pang, is an aggressively commercial genre piece that, like some recent Korean releases, has been clearly influenced by the Asian gangster genre once dominated by the now-ailing Hong Kong industry. And if the Pang brothers’ goal is to demonstrate to the world…
It’s almost easier to pick the year’s worst than its finest. Leading the pack is I Am Sam, in which Sean Penn does his Rainman dance for Oscar only to watch it horribly misfire, followed closely by Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Nic Cage, who, given recent choices, might be mentally challenged),…
Had anyone asked me back in September how 2001 was looking, I would have been tempted to rate it as even worse than the dismal 2000 (which suffered further from proximity to the wondrous 1999). But my assessment shifted during the final quarter of the year–half because of some fine…
Appropriately, A Beautiful Mind does not offer a literal translation of the life of John Forbes Nash Jr., the mathematician whose work on game theories won him a Nobel Prize in 1994. The film leaves out significant events, people and places; it amalgamates central figures, disguises prominent locations and hides…
Had The Royal Tenenbaums been made by a first-time filmmaker unburdened by acclaim or expectation, it could be heralded–and then, just as easily, dismissed–as a light, literary exercise in filmmaking that’s as pleasant as it is frustrating. Its tale of a dysfunctional family of geniuses torn asunder then brought back…
It took Andre Dubus all of 18 pages to communicate the grief that fills every frame of Todd Field’s two-plus-hours In the Bedroom, a wrenching bit of filmmaking based on Dubus’ short tale “Killings.” Both story and film tell the same tale in the same solemn and gripping tone, with…
The most daunting thing for an actor is to portray a god, and when that god comes equipped with a tangle of myths and the quickest left jab in history, the actor’s job can soon verge into guesswork. To Will Smith’s credit, he has managed to get, at least partway,…
Love him or not love him, Lasse Hallström has done it again: the human frailty, the sorrowful past, the hopeful future, the triumph of love and family over crushing despair. Ever since he broke out in 1985 with his Swedish feature Mitt Liv Som Hund (My Life as a Dog),…
The tricked-up charms of James Mangold’s Kate & Leopold may be precisely what the moment demands–if you accept the existence of chivalry, the possibility of time travel and the stream of bubbles emanating from Meg Ryan. Skeptics need not apply. Having toured the psychiatric ward in Girl, Interrupted and slogged…
Since the horrors of dominator culture–destruction, devastation, dumb-assness–do not appear to be receding of their own accord, there’s great poignancy to the new cinematic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The film succeeds as massive, astonishing entertainment; enthralling us is its chief…
Having given us The Shawshank Redemption in 1994 and The Green Mile five years later, director Frank Darabont finally busts his way out of prison with his third feature, The Majestic (which, incidentally, has the worst ad art since Green Mile). Working from a script by Michael Sloane–no Stephen King…
Ever since his debut film Cronos, Spanish director Guillermo del Toro has been the focus of much undue adulation among critics and the Internet community of self-professed horror geeks. The problem is that del Toro’s work thus far simply doesn’t measure up to this kind of talk. Cronos’ biggest novelty…
If you can get past the fact that the central characters of Nickelodeon’s computer-animated feature Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius–the precocious, Chris Isaak-coiffed hero of the title (voiced by Debi Derryberry), his square suburban parents (Mark DeCarlo and Megan Cavanagh) and token, demographic-spanning friends–look like the kind of generic, Mexican-made bootleg…
Novice screenwriter John Scott Shepherd was obviously paying attention in 1999. He no doubt noticed the massive mainstream and critical success of American Beauty and the cult followings of Fight Club and Office Space, and surely said to himself, “Hmmm, this whole thing about cubicle workers being full of pent-up…
Ignore, if you can, the awful trailer for Dinner Rush, now playing in theaters and apparently struck from a grainy work print. Ignore also the simplistic analogies already being made to Big Night and The Sopranos, which prove only that critical quote-hustlers given to hyperbole have noticed the movie contains…
Beneath the hazy, mystifying layers of Vanilla Sky lies a remarkable Tom Cruise performance–one that, to a large extent, takes place beneath a makeup artist’s piled-on scars and a costumer’s blank “prosthetic” mask. As David Aames, hipster publisher of Maxim-like magazines, Cruise plays a lothario so vain he plucks out…
The combatants in Patrick Stettner’s compelling first feature, The Business of Strangers, are a middle-aged software executive (Stockard Channing) wearing a steel-blue suit and an air of professional hauteur; the executive’s mysterious new assistant (Julia Stiles), fresh out of Dartmouth and full of self-righteous aggression; and a cocky “headhunter” (Frederick…
