Uplifted beyond its merits by a stunning performance from Marion Cotillard, the humdrum biopic of Edith Piaf, La Vie en Rose, jogs obligingly along with Piaf the legend rather than the woman. It’s not hard to do, given the fuzzy borders between Piaf’s undeniably scarred life and her relentless gift…
So lame it’s…cool? Nancy Drew, writer-director Andrew Fleming’s attempt to jump-start a new Warner Bros. franchise, is a movie flaunting a most obvious demographic strategy—a teen flick with a sensibility, or at least sense of humor, that’s most definitely parental. Invented in 1930 by the same Stratemeyer syndicate that gave…
Lowest Common Denominator-ism writ large and engraved in stone like the Ten Commandments according to Cecil B. DeMille, the Hollywood blockbuster is often an allegory for itself. Walt Disney, the notoriously litigious studio that successfully changed the nation’s copyright laws to protect its trademark Mickey Mouse but more recently declared,…
Night Watch, you may recall, told of an ancient feud waged between the forces of Light and Dark. In the interest of maintaining a fragile détente, they organized themselves, as Russian super-combatants are wont to do, into complex bureaucracies, with the Night Watch heroes monitoring the vampiric shenanigans of the…
There is a moment early on in “Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers,” the 14th episode of the brilliant but canceled television series Freaks and Geeks, in which gangly, bespectacled, picked-last-in-gym-class high school freshman Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr) arrives home from school, makes himself a grilled cheese sandwich, and sits down…
“I think the public doesn’t care about reviews,” says Eli Roth, writer-director of Hostel Part II, which — surprise! — isn’t being shown to the press before it opens Friday on more than 2,500 screens. Still, the 35-year-old perpetrator of high-grossing “torture porn” does appreciate critical kindness when he sees…
The Sergio Leone Anthology (MGM) Sergio Leone made westerns like Wagner made ditties. This essential boxed set–four films with four discs of supplemental material, much of it scholarly and insightful–shows the Italian director supplanting the elegiac Monument Valley iconography of John Ford with a darker, ruder, more bleak-humored brand of…
A few friends of mine who’ve adored Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up at early screenings have nonetheless voiced a similar complaint: There’s no way pin-up-pretty Katherine Heigl would end up with soaked-in-bongwater Seth Rogen, not even while drunk on a gallon of Everclear and stoned on a field of your finest…
Mr. Brooks—in which Kevin Costner plays a respectable Seattle businessman who kills for thrills, thanks to the goading of an imaginary friend who looks a lot like William Hurt—is stunningly tepid, neither the clever and poignant metaphor for addiction it strives to be nor the darkly comic Harvey it could…
The most volatile, least easily psychoanalyzed of ’70s auteurs in Peter Biskind’s classic New Hollywood tell-all Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, William Friedkin may have mellowed since unleashing The Exorcist, sliding into box-office hell and marrying a major studio boss. Indeed, the recovering bad-boy movie brat—now 71, believe it or not—has…
There are first films like Citizen Kane or Breathless, which, as radically new and fully achieved as they are, unfairly overshadow an entire oeuvre. And then there are first films, perhaps even more radical, which haunt an artist’s career not through precocious virtuosity but because they have an innocence that…
The idea of “getting axed” is exploited for maximum double-entendre value in Severance, a grisly horror-comedy from the U.K. that has its tongue planted so firmly in its cheek that you half expect it to pop out the other side. Yes, heads (and, in one indelible bit, a severed foot)…
CANNES, France—The world’s preeminent film festival celebrated its 60th birthday party — the opening banquet catered by the world’s hippest, or is that once-hippest? — filmmaker. Hardly the disaster many feared, but far from the triumph others anticipated, Wong Kar-wai’s first English-language feature, My Blueberry Nights — starring Norah Jones…
CANNES, France—The Cannes Film Festival is chiefly revered as a showcase for prolific, careerist auteurs, so the appearance of Savage Grace, the first feature in 15 years by New Queer Cinema co-instigator Tom Kalin (Swoon), was certainly striking — not that a film in which Julianne Moore stars as a…
Cannes, FRANCE — Sometimes the competition is actually competitive. No one disputes that the official section at the 60th Cannes Film Festival has been the strongest in recent memory. The heavy favorites are the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men; Julian Schnabel’s surprisingly restrained and bizarrely chic French-language adaptation…
I never gave much thought to the subject of health insurance until, in October of 2005, an odd swelling in my groin prompted me to make one of my infrequent trips to the doctor’s office. A referral to a urologist and one ultrasound later, the diagnosis was indisputable: testicular cancer…
Cannes, FRANCE —”Whaddya love about it so much?” Abel Ferrara — director of the strip-club-set Go Go Tales, my favorite film at Cannes — is interviewing the interviewer. Well, I say it’s consistent with the Ferrara oeuvre — King of New York, Bad Lieutenant, Dangerous Game, et cetera — in…
Hannibal Rising (Weinstein) Pointless beyond belief, Hannibal Rising serves more as a cautionary tale than horror story. Made for $50 mil, the movie pocketed half that during its U.S. run and likely wound up in the red–an appropriate adios for a franchise starring a peripheral character better served by shadows…
Once, written and directed by John Carney, is a deceptively simple movie—a narrative strung together by pop songs, but without the sheen (or arrogance) of most cinematic musicals. By day, a Dublin busker (Glen Hansard) sings Van Morrison on a street corner for spare change, which, on occasion, is swiped…
And so Disney’s immense, booty-busting, pro-piracy epic has come to an End. I doubt very much that Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is, in fact, the last we’ll be seeing of Captain Jack Sparrow and, you know, all those other people. How could it be? Treasure remains to…
Porky’s: The Ultimate Collection (Fox) When writer-director Bob Clark was killed by a drunk driver in April, the obits trumpeted his holiday classic A Christmas Story…but were somewhat reluctant to mention that, oh, yeah, he also wrote and directed Porky’s. But there’s no question which is the more important movie–and…
The Wendell Baker Story, written by Luke Wilson and directed by Luke and older bro Andrew, bowed in March 2005 at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, where the film had been shot two years earlier. That the movie—which also stars other brother Owen Wilson, Eva Mendes, Eddie…
