It’s been 20 years since Errol Morris made The Thin Blue Line—a found “noir” that served to free an innocent man convicted of murder. Gathering evidence and dramatizing testimony, Morris’ movie circled around a single, unrepresentable event—the death of a cop on a lonely stretch of Texas highway. The Thin…
A man in a Michael Jackson outfit—red shirt, black jeans, white face mask—rides hunched over the tiny frame of a clown bike. Jutting out to his side, attached by a wire, is a stuffed monkey puppet with angel wings. The background is a nondescript go-cart track lined with brightly colored…
CANNES, France—No need for dreaming here. Each Cannes Film Festival generates its own metaphors for a 10-day regimen of visions in the dark. It’s impossible to forget, let alone transcend, one’s unnatural situation here. The opening film of Cannes’s 2008 edition clobbered participants with a cautionary allegory. Regardez: The civilized…
Here’s your hat, Indy, but, really, what’s your hurry? Because 19 years after the Last Crusade that clearly wasn’t, and 15 years after the old man joined Young Indiana Jones on the small screen to recount his glory days blowing horns with Sidney Bechet, it’s almost unfathomable that this hoary…
Things never happen the same way twice.” Thus boometh Aslan the lion (Liam Neeson), alias the Son of God, popping his computer-generated shaggy head briefly into The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian to pep-talk a bunch of discouraged Brits into fighting the good fight again. As in life, so in…
Before the Rains Directed by Santosh Sivan. Written by Cathy Rabin and Dan Verete. Starring Linus Roache, Nandita Das and Jennifer Ehle. Opens Friday. British plantation owner and colonialist extraordinaire Henry Moores (Linus Roache) fancies himself the cowboy of Kerala, cavorting around the jungle with his Indian mistress, Sajani (Nandita…
Converting a fondly remembered cartoon series—one of the first Japanese animes syndicated on American TV—into a prospective franchise, the Matrix masters, Larry and Andy Wachowski, have taken another step toward the total cyborganization of the cinema. Even more than most summer-season f/x fests, Speed Racer is a live action/animation hybrid…
David Mamet’s Redbelt is a tricky bar brawl—call it the Roundhouse of Games. The writer-director has scarcely abandoned his sense of the movies as an innately duplicitous medium, one best suited to stories that play out as conspiratorial chess matches. But, with his 10th feature—an entertaining tale of high-stakes martial…
No adult has ever been able to codify what separates a good movie from a classic. In kid terms, though—those favored by Son of Rambow, a chipper tribute to the cinema as both supplier and repository of dreams—a good movie merely sends you bounding home from the theater. A great…
Chalk it up to personal preference, but I’ve always been fonder of those comic-book heroes who emerge by intent rather than happenstance. I mean the ones, like Batman’s Bruce Wayne, whose transformation from average Joe into masked crusader is an act of will instead of the unintended result of a…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A lonely dwarf, a wisecracking Cuban-American and a grieving mother walk into each other’s lives, laugh together, cry together, grow, change and heal each other’s emotional wounds. Cue Sundance prizes, Miramax pickup, torrent of glowing reviews and a surprisingly robust indie box-office…
In Made of Honor, Patrick Dempsey plays a conveniently rich and willfully single serial “fornicator” slowly but surely domesticated by his unspoken love for longtime BFF Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), who’s on her way to Scotland to marry Mr. Right Now since Mr. Right’s too chickenshit to say boo before her…
Could have sworn I’ve seen this episode of Baby Mama before—like sometime in January 2007, when it was originally titled “The Baby Show” and aired on the other prime-time series starring Tina Fey, 30 Rock. (Wait a minute—you say Baby Mama’s a movie and not a TV show? Seriously? Coulda…
Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg wrote Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle with the novel idea: What if you made a John Hughes movie, but instead of writing garishly caricatured bit players with names like Long Duk Dong, you cast an Asian actor as the smart, handsome, upwardly mobile…
Jason Segel is responsible for two of the most cringe-inducing, hands-in-front-of-your-face moments in the recent history of television, both of which occurred during the sole season of NBC’s Freaks and Geeks, on which Segel played bright-eyed burnout Nick Andopolis. On the episode “I’m With the Band,” Nick imagined himself an…
Morgan Spurlock, the daredevil documentarian who lived on Big Macs for a month and turned this exercise in “body art” into the 2004 hit Super Size Me, returns—this time expanding his horizons rather than his girth. Paraphrasing the title of a venerable computer game, Where in the World Is Osama…
Smart People got no reason to live—and, sure, that’s not quite how Randy Newman sang it, but the point still stands. Because in Noam Murro’s directorial bow—one of those Sundance premieres starring famous people slumming it in dingy Indieland—the smart people ain’t doing much l-i-v-i-n’ at all. They’re just drifting…
For a movie built around questions of failed ethics and duplicitous behavior, Street Kings is just as dishonest as its characters. Though conceived as yet another sobering frontline report on law enforcement’s ever-expanding gray area, director David Ayer’s grim police thriller mostly plays as one long dick-measuring competition. You sense…
When Time recently featured George Clooney on its cover accompanied by the headline “The Last Movie Star”—note not even a question mark at the end—you didn’t have to read the article to know where it was coming from. After all, stars of the postpubescent variety are an increasingly rare commodity…
Mick Jagger’s most essential physical feature, according to Martin Scorsese: his bellystache. On the poster for Shine a Light, the big-shot director’s Rolling Stones concert film, Sir Mick is frozen in mid-song aerobics, his back arched, his half-shirt raised, that yawning navel and faint hairline more prominently showcased than his…
Ben Mezrich’s 2002 best-seller Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas For Millions was a smart narrative about…well, you did see the subtitle, right? Mezrich more or less recounted a fantastic tale spun by an old acquaintance from Boston, an M.I.T. grad named…
Considering that the war in Iraq has proven to be Washington’s shot-by-shot remake of Vietnam, it’s only natural that Hollywood has followed suit, giving us a series of Iraq-themed films that can be set neatly alongside their Vietnam-era counterparts. Just as the initial wave of angry anti-Vietnam documentaries (In the…
