“Will you leave your kingdom to a heretic?” That was the question posed to a dying Queen Mary in 1998’s Elizabeth, director Shekhar Kapur’s grim and dingy film now viewed in retrospect as the origin story of a superhero: The Armored Virgin Queen, faster than a speeding lead pellet, more…
Caligula: Imperial Edition (Penthouse) (Spoiler alert: Fisting!) One day back in the swingin’ ’70s, somebody mentioned how “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and then Bob Guccione, Gore Vidal, Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren and Peter O’Toole said, “Let’s make a big-budget movie about that, with come shots.” And Caligula was born. Actually,…
Calling all pundits. It’s a baffling caprice of the zeitgeist to have two studio Westerns released in the same month, 30-odd years after the genre basically gave up the ghost. James Mangold’s better-than-competent and highly crowd-pleasing 3:10 to Yuma has provided a harmonica fanfare for something more ambitious and polarizing…
It will no doubt be said time and again of Michael Clayton: best John Grisham adaptation ever. Only, of course, it did not spring from the billion-dollar mind of the attorney-turned-franchise, but from Tony Gilroy, who made his big-screen bow 15 years ago as the screenwriter of the ice-skating melodrama…
“Beautiful” and “cruel”: That’s how director Ang Lee describes Eileen Chang’s 1979 short story about obsessive love and effortless betrayal in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, a tale upon which Lee has based his epic-length Lust, Caution. Writing in the afterword to a recently republished version of the 54-page story, which took Chang…
To some, the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, the 24-year-old Emory University graduate who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992, will never be anything more than a case of a spoiled bourgeois brat with half-cocked survivalist fantasies (and possible suicidal tendencies) who ran away…
The Kingdom is the first film from Peter Berg since the actor-turned-director’s Friday Night Lights, which spawned an acclaimed, if struggling, franchise for NBC. There will be no small-screen spin-off of The Kingdom—there are too many corpses lying around to populate a sequel, much less a series. Besides, it would…
Knocked Up (Universal)Apparently, as Judd Apatow was making Knocked Up he was also prepping for its DVD release, as most of the bonuses here were shot during breaks on location. And they’re no small treats, either. Finally, here’s a “collector’s edition” worthy of the moniker. Chief among the bounty affixed…
Director Robert Benton, best known for his zeitgeisty divorce drama Kramer vs. Kramer, has tapped into more than a few current trends in Feast of Love. There are the interlocking mini-stories, à la Crash; the different color filters for different scenes (happy moments in yellow, sad ones in blue), à…
“Killer timing! Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), Jason Kohn’s vivid, lean-and-hungry documentary about São Paulo’s fatalistic food chain of extreme poverty, violence, unmitigated corruption and overwhelming wealth arrives just as Vanity Fair’s “Viva Brazil!!” issue hits the stands. Can’t we find a new country to fetishize? Trading once again on…
Saturday Night Fever: 30th Anniversary Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount) For all its camp-classic status as the ultimate disco-fever dream, John Badham’s movie truly is remarkable—a foul-mouthed, mean-streets masterpiece that just happens to feature a Bee Gees score that spreads like melted cheese 30 years later. And, of course, it contains…
After Hair, Hairspray and the mass marketing of tie-dye, can the ’60s be shrunk to fit any further? Yes, indeed, here comes Julie Taymor to run the revolutions of sex, class and race through the PG-13 sieve. Not that one turns to musicals for deep thought, but John Waters at…
Even the most adamantly anti-war movies about American soldiers returning from Vietnam—Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978) and Oliver Stone’s Born on the 4th of July (1989)—redeemed their mangled, embittered grunts through the love of good women, devoted parents, political resistance or all of the above. You can’t pin that kind…
In one of those karmic quirks of the film releasing calendar, actor-turned-director Griffin Dunne’s Fierce People finally staggers into theaters (more than two years after its premiere in the Tribeca Film Festival) barely a fortnight after The Nanny Diaries, that other cautionary tale about a proletariat pea that works its…
The Graduate: 40th Anniversary Edition (MGM) Fifteen years after its last home-video commemorative edition (extras from which appear here), The Graduate once more gets the bonus-laden makeover—and if ever a movie deserved its kudos, it’s Mike Nichols’ masterwork. That said, the movie is its own bonus; not since its release…
Until 2005, Richard Shepard’s was a lamentable direct-to-prop-plane filmography populated with such forgettable titles as Cool Blue, Oxygen, Mexico City and The Linguini Incident, the latter of which was a heist film most notable for pairing David Bowie and Buck Henry—and that’s not even a punch line. For a while…
I’ve said it before and hope to again: David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original and consistently excellent North American director of his generation. From Videodrome (1983) through A History of Violence (2005), neither Scorsese nor Spielberg, and not even David Lynch, has enjoyed a comparable run. A rhapsodic movie…
In the new Neil Jordan movie, Jodie Foster plays New York talk radio DJ Erica Bain, who survives a vicious Central Park mugging and becomes an urban crusader devoted to cleaning up the city—with a Glock instead of a broom. Yes, The Brave One is that movie: the one with…
Late at night, alone in the woods, a group of film students at work on a no-budget horror film called The Death of Death are interrupted by — the death of death. Reports of animated corpses feeding on human flesh come over the radio and are met with nervous skepticism;…
The exemplary achievements of the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival succeeded by two means: either narrowing the gap between author and subject in pursuit of intimate effects, or else working distance into the material and profiting from the vantage. Contemporary neorealism at its most confident and alert, Chop Shop finds…
Huffing and puffing to resuscitate a long-moribund genre, James Mangold manages to imbue a 50-year-old Western with the semblance of life. Mangold’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma isn’t as startling a resurrection job as his Johnny Cash biopic, but it does send a saddlebag full of Western tropes skittering into…
There have already been critical rumblings about the extreme violence in Shoot ‘Em Up, but it’s hard to get too worked up about a film whose very title announces its maker’s intent and which opens by raking the New Line Cinema corporate logo with machine gun fire (a gesture long…
