At first look, the cloud of gloom that envelops Lucrecia Martel’s strangely affecting first feature, La Cienaga (The Swamp), seems to have no specific origin and no particular provocation. An alcoholic matriarch, Mecha (Graciela Borges), lolls beside a filthy swimming pool at a decrepit South American villa, sloshing glasses of…
The lights go down, and the puzzlement begins. Ensemble cast of superstars? Check. Loose remake of amusing curiosity? Check. Built-in, prefab sense of cool? Check. A little something for wistful fans of Dino and Sammy? Check. So…wait a minute. Is this The Cannonball Run Redux? With his ambitious but unnecessary…
Written and directed by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (Jeanne and the Perfect Guy), the disarmingly inventive road movie Adventures of Felix follows the idiosyncratic path of a sweet-natured, gay, half-French/half-Arab youth (Sami Bouajila) who, on being laid off from his jobs, decides to hitchhike across France to Marseilles, where…
Though Behind Enemy Lines, set in Bosnia, was originally due for release next year, already it feels antiquated; that conflict is already a distant memory, a ghost lost in the shadow of the war on terrorism. The film tested so well 20th Century Fox pushed up its release date, and…
Ever endure a friend stuck in a deep depression who refused to lighten up but delighted in spewing ugliness to bring you down? Such is the method of The American Astronaut, a thematically inventive but woefully crude science-fiction jaunt that’s less engaging entertainment for us than perverse psychotherapy for writer-director-star…
A poem, written by an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, ends thusly: “If the Nazis have my penis–who has my arm?” Another begins, “Who rise to adversity, I shit on you.” Another, titled “The Hopping Poem,” reads, in its entirety, “Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck That Hurt, Fuck Fuck.” And another, called “Is…
This is the true story of seven people (Tommy! Annie! Ashley! Maria! Griffin! Carpo! And Benjamin!) picked to live in a city and have their lives changed. Find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start being real. The Real World–Sidewalks of New York. If you came across…
“From Academy Award-nominated director Griffin Dunne…” Wait a minute. Hold the phone. That guy who co-starred with Madonna in Who’s That Girl? The guy who directed the Sandra Bullock witch movie Practical Magic and the Meg Ryan stalker movie Addicted to Love? That Griffin Dunne? Yep, he’s Oscar-nominated. In the…
The pitch for this one must have seemed sensational: “It’s called Spy Game, right, and it’s about this old spy who recounts, via flashbacks, how he mentored this young spy, only now the young spy is captured and about to be killed, so the old spy spends his last day…
Lovely magic, this. An enchanting family classic. If you believe in magic, you’ll love Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. And if you don’t, you will, and you will. True, the hype has been a bit much. And, yes, a mad, desperate world choked with reproduction and reprobation could hardly…
It takes a nimble mind to mix light and dark, to wed humor with treachery, and in Novocaine newcomer David Atkins is not always up to the task. Neither is Steve Martin, who wants to be taken seriously while reserving the right to produce the occasional sick yuk. If you…
Tape, a film by Richard Linklater, isn’t. It’s high time for some cinematic clarification: If a project is shot on celluloid, with light searing images onto emulsion, then it’s a film. If it’s recorded with magnetic frequencies or digital code (as is the case here), then it’s a video. Of…
Two years ago, a colleague of Michael Cain’s asked the founder and director of the Deep Ellum Film Festival just why the hell he named his fledgling fest after a part of town in which there were, ahem, no movie theaters. “There will be,” Cain insisted, like a W.P. Kinsella…
The heroine of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s bold and bracing new comedy, Amlie, is Amélie Poulain, a doe-eyed crusader with the face of a porcelain doll and a sleek helmet of jet-black hair. From her high perch in Montmartre, where she works as a cafe waitress, Amélie secretly resolves to emancipate all…
It is difficult to imagine a more timely film than Focus; certainly, its message about intolerance resonates in a post-September 11 world in ways the filmmakers never anticipated. Adapted from Arthur Miller’s little-known 1945 novel of the same title, Focus looks at what happens to a society when basically decent…
It doesn’t take much probing beneath the thin surface to see Shallow Hal as an apologia of sorts from Bobby and Peter Farrelly. The brothers are known for making movies full of jokes about midgets, retarded people, albinos, the handicapped and so on, but always with the caveat that the…
After venting his spleen in theater and film for a quarter century, it seems like David Mamet would be ready to divulge something human about humanity. Sure, his fervid fans may point to his Pulitzer and leap about singing hosannas to frothing hucksters and sexual miscreants, but after all the…
If there’s one man on the planet who knows how to market rustic charms to the masses, it’s Paddy Maloney. As the mercurial leader of Ireland’s phenomenal traditional ensemble, the Chieftains, he’s outdistanced countless Celtic contemporaries, trotting his group’s unmistakable sound around the globe. Who better, then, to provide the…
As the year winds down, breathlessly and apprehensively, the most anxiously awaited releases left on the schedule offer nothing less than whimsy and reveries. We’ve had enough of the real world for now, so we look forward to leaving it behind and joining the merry company of Harry Potter, Frodo…
Joel and Ethan Coen’s periodic genuflections to classic Hollywood are inevitably accompanied by a knowing wink from one brother and a wry smile from the other. These devoted movie buffs’ versions of vintage gangster pictures (Miller’s Crossing) or the populist comedies of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges (The Hudsucker Proxy)…
In Domestic Disturbance, John Travolta provides a rare recent performance worthy of his fame, and it arrives bereft of laughable facial hair, flaccid special effects and overwrought speechifying that too often renders him paunchy parody. As Frank Morrison, a builder of expensive wooden ships at a time when they’ve been…
At 73, Jacques Rivette is one of the oldest of the original French New Wave directors–older by a few years than the 70-year-old Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut (who would have been 69), younger only than 79-year-old Alain Resnais and 81-year-old Eric Rohmer. And, like his remaining compatriots, he has…
