The pleasures of Be Kind Rewind do not extend far beyond the promise of its premise: Jack Black, magnetized and manic (yawn), erases every single video tape in the rental store where he hangs out and has to reshoot the movies with pal Mos Def. Theirs becomes a ramshackle filmography…
Remember the 1985 movie version of the Parker Brothers whodunit board game Clue, with its pre-DVD-era gimmick of multiple endings? Well, Vantage Point is like that, only instead of multiple endings, it gives us multiple beginnings. Oh, and Vantage Point, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t supposed to be…
Freudians disheartened by the Bearded One’s fall from psychotherapeutic grace may be cheered to learn that ol’ Sigmund lives and prospers at the movies, at least in child-friendly cinema. The Spiderwick Chronicles, an extravagantly oedipal fantasy adventure based on the popular children’s novels by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, comes…
No Reservations (Warner Bros.) From its cheap, mid-’90s-looking package to its woefully scant extras (one pre-chewed Food Network behind-the-scenes, blech) to its wide-screen/full-screen option, this feels like something dropped right into the discount bins; it probably debuts at half off this week. And this soufflé of a romantic comedy deserves…
Sandwiched somewhere between the American Spirit commercials and the Clinton campaigning that make up Definitely, Maybe is a surprisingly rewarding romantic comedy—one worth the effort, because some effort’s actually been put into it. Imagine really old-school Woody Allen starring that shit-eating smirker from Van Wilder, Ryan Reynolds, who’s always been…
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros.) Beautifully shot, masterfully acted, and 19 hours too long, Assassination is an uneven mix of the artful and the arty that never had a shot at bringing in the audience that Brad Pitt’s chiseled melon should’ve delivered. Pitt…
No celebrity hairdresser should ever be allowed near Colin Farrell’s eyebrows with a tweezer. Black, fluffy and gloriously unilateral, they still aren’t the prettiest things about In Bruges—that honor falls to the Belgian city itself, known for its scenic medieval turrets, bourgeois tedium and unfavorable comparisons with Amsterdam. Bruges may…
When a friend recently told me that she’d been confused by the poster for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson fortune-hunting romp Fool’s Gold adorning her local multiplex—that she’d thought for sure this movie had already come and gone—I understood her bewilderment. Even as a professional film critic trained in such nigh-impossible…
The King of Kong (New Line) Seth Gordon’s best-of-2007 documentary about the battle for Donkey Kong supremacy remains a work-in-progress: Billy Mitchell, the longtime titleholder dethroned by Steve Wiebe over the course of this hysterical, thrilling, and occasionally sad little film, recently reclaimed the throne — and Wiebe has vowed…
Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Sugar, which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival (and was inexplicably shut out at the closing-night awards ceremony), gets as much right about baseball as any movie I’ve ever seen. It gets the hum of the electric lights in…
Confessions of a Superhero (Arts Alliance) As one of those quoted on the package (“A more beautiful documentary you’re unlikely to find”), I can only reiterate my earlier praise: Matt Ogens’ doc, about mortals dressed as superheroes trolling Hollywood Boulevard for tourists’ loose change, is stunning to look at —…
Regarding the irrelevance of Untraceable: First of all, torture is so 2007, and just because this drab little thriller with a flashy love of pain imagines itself a “critique of violence” doesn’t make it any less superfluous. Second of all, untraceable? Ha! You wish. While it’s true that the villain…
Persepolis is a small landmark in feature animation. Not because of technical innovation—though it moves fluidly enough, and its drawings have a handcrafted charm forgotten in the era of the cross-promoted-to-saturation CGI-‘toon juggernauts—but because it translates a sensitive, introspective, true-to-life, “adult” comic story into moving pictures. While Robert Crumb only…
Family Guy Presents: Blue Harvest (Fox) As someone with no use for Seth MacFarlane’s potty-mouthed Simpsons rip, I’ll admit to choking out a few giggles during his Star Wars send-up — though, truth be told, it’s slightly less daring than Spaceballs and, sure, Porn Wars. Stunningly faithful to the 30-year-old…
If Diane Keaton were a comer in 2007, she’d likely be stuck in romantic comedies cooked up in movie studio test kitchens. No Godfather for her. No Annie Hall, no Shoot the Moon, no Reds. Filmmakers who now use Katherine Heigl as their go-to girl would be flummoxed by the…
“I do think the writing is pessimistic—all that stuff about life being a tragic experience,” says Angela Stark (played by newcomer Hayley Atwell) early in Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream. An actress talking about the play she’s appearing in at a small London theater, Stark could just as well be describing…
It took nine years for Godzilla to rise up out of the ashes of Hiroshima and wreak his destruction on the good people of Tokyo in 1954. Here in America, it’s taken just over six years for the idea of an escapist disaster movie set on the streets of New…
Joshua (Fox) George Ratliff’s movie, a sort of satirical take on Rosemary’s Baby, came and went upon its release; seems no one got the joke about how parents (Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga, in this case) are scared shitless of their own children — especially the titular Joshua, played by…
Eleven months after winning the screenplay and audience awards at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, writer-director James C. Strouse’s Grace Is Gone has received a musical makeover care of Clint Eastwood, who reportedly screened the film and thought that it could do with a new original score, which he offered…
Having a child destroys your immunity to horror, real or imagined. Before the blessed event, you could laugh off The Exorcist, The Omen or any of a thousand gory shockers with some wide-eyed tyke as either the prey or the spawn of Beelzebub. Afterward you can’t even see the baby…
A great brooding thundercloud of a movie, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood arrives as if from nowhere on a gust of critical acclaim, lowering over a landscape of barren mesas and hot, scrubby hills. Anderson’s epic, no less than his career, is both fearfully grandiose and wonderfully eccentric…
“You don’t meet the book when you meet the writer,” the novelist William Gibson has said. “You meet the place where it lives.” A relatively uncontroversial remark about the people who vent their imaginations on the page — no one should expect Philip Roth to sound exactly like Nathan Zuckerman…
