No, the Virgin Mary doesn’t get high on aerosol fumes, and Joseph doesn’t ride in on a skateboard, but in most other respects, The Nativity Story is less of a departure for Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown director Catherine Hardwicke than one would have imagined. From our first glimpse of…
Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (Warner Bros.) At long last, Richard Donner’s much-whispered-about “original version” of Superman II sees the light of day, and it quickly joins the ranks of the reconstructed Touch of Evil, Apocalypse Now, and Blade Runner as films made superior in the recutting and retelling…
Solemn, flashy and flabbergasting, The Fountain—adapted by Darren Aronofsky from his own graphic novel—should really be called “The Shpritz.” The premise is lachrymose, the sets are clammy and the metaphysics all wet. The screen is awash in spiraling nebulae and misty points of light, with the soundtrack supplying appropriately moist…
The first few minutes of Tenacious D in ¨The Pick of Destiny¨ are something to behold: a four-minute rock opera cranked to 11. A doughy young boy with dirty-mop locks (Nacho Libre’s Troy Gentile, once more playing li’l Jack Black) laments his tragic plight: He’s stuck in Kickapoo with “a…
An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount) This isn’t exactly the kind of DVD you buy to watch again and again; the ending doesn’t get happier, and there are no twists to decipher with repeated viewings. The producers hope instead that you buy it and share it; it’s less movie, after all, than…
By all rights, 2002’s Die Another Day should have been and could have been the final James Bond film. It was packaged like a cynical, weary best-of concert coughed up by an aging dinosaur, offering copious nods to the franchise’s past without bothering to offer any new material of consequence…
For Your Consideration pulls off the neat trick of skewering the movie industry while remaking it in its own image. The latest ensemble comedy by Christopher Guest and company may take place in Los Angeles, but its imaginative provenance lies somewhere between the la-la lands of Entourage and Mulholland Dr…
Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater from Eric Schlosser’s 2001 best-selling exposé of the McDonald’s conspiracy, is an anti-commercial. It’s designed to kill desire and deprogram the viewer’s appetite. Linklater—who, along with Steven Soderbergh and Gus Van Sant, has staked out a particular outpost on the indie-studio border—here takes…
Forbidden Planet (Warner Bros.) Long available as faded discount product, Fred McLeod Wilcox’s 1956 masterpiece–the movie without which Star Trek, Star Wars, 2001, and, oh, Lost in Space wouldn’t exist–at last gets its proper due; this double-disc collection comes with everything but stardust and rocket fuel. The tale of a…
Once an actor gets big enough to take whatever kind of role he wants, it makes sense that the biggest stretch imaginable, given his current situation, is the part of a powerless man with no control over the world around him. Call it a “nice” movie—a vehicle designed to tone…
Pity Max Skinner, emasculated over his lamb chops. On a gray afternoon, at London’s hot spot du jour, his gloating superior unveils a plot to poach his most lucrative client, divesting him of a six-figure bonus (pounds sterling) in the process. Fuck it. The bummed-out bond trader hands in a…
The Junky’s Christmas (Koch) They just aren’t cranking out claymation Christmas specials like they used to, which makes this a welcome one. Nicer still, it’s got heroin! A mixture of stop motion with a little puppetry and live-action shots of William Burroughs (who may himself have been a Muppet), this…
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is funnier than its malapropic title—the audience with whom I saw the movie wasn’t laughing so much as howling—and even more difficult to parse. Eyes wide, face fixed in an avid grin, Sacha Baron Cohen’s ersatz Kazakh TV…
Time perhaps scrambling it’s for Alejandro González Iñárritu to stop his narratives. After making an exciting debut in 2000 with Amores Perros—a movie whose gimmicky Tarantino-esque tinkering with structure seemed fresher en Español and grounded in gritty Mexico City location shooting—González Iñárritu apparently decided to devote his feature-film career to…
Mission: Impossible III: Special Edition (Paramount) On the commentary track, director J.J. Abrams and star Tom Cruise sound like they’ve fallen in love; you might say they complete each other’s sentences, except that’s just Cruise interrupting the Alias creator, who rescued a franchise by streamlining it, lightening it, brightening it,…
“I guess it doesn’t matter where I begin,” reasons the adult narrator of Running With Scissors, the inevitable Oscar contender adapted from Augusten Burroughs’ wacky memoir of coming out as a gay teen in his adoptive guru’s carnivalesque commune. “No one is gonna believe me anyway.” No one? In fact,…
there’s a scene about halfway through Catch a Fire during which freedom fighters—men and women, each boasting such nicknames as “Pete My Baby” and “Hot Stuff”—are being trained at an African National Congress safe house in Mozambique. Their ranks consist of South Africans who’ve been politicized by cruel life under…
Of all the hundreds of pedophile priests to be flushed out of the woodwork in recent Catholic Church history, Father Oliver O’Grady has to be one of the most harmless-looking and the most sinister. Wispy, unremarkable and accommodating, with an ingratiating half-smile playing permanently about his thin lips, Father Ollie,…
Reservoir Dogs: 15th Anniversary (Lions Gate) Quentin Tarantino’s first film shows its age these days, mostly because we’ve seen all its tricks done far better by now. From the nonlinear storytelling to the pop-culture gabfests to the shameless cribbing from obscure films, everything that once seemed so shockingly fresh has…
Drop-dead hip or cluelessly clueless? Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, a candy-colored portrait of France’s infamous teen queen is a graceful, charming and sometimes witty confection–at least for its first hour. The famously shy Coppola may be an inscrutable personality, but her bold exposé of backstage royalty opens with a big…
he Queen is more fun than any movie about the violent death of a 36-year-old woman has a right to be. It’s also as exotic an English-language picture as the season is likely to bring. Directed by Stephen Frears from Peter Morgan’s script, The Queen is set in the peculiar…
American Dreamz (Universal) Till this, Paul Weitz had a stellar filmography, a career in ascension: American Pie (good), About a Boy (great), In Good Company (absolutely perfect). But this, er, satire about a dumb American president (Dennis Quaid, channeling whassisname) trying to get smart, a cynical wannabe singer trying to…
