The Old West has vanished, John Wayne is dead, and–this just in–the two most famous ranch hands in America are gay. But there would be no point in telling any of that to Harlan Fairfax Carruthers, the deceptively charming protagonist of Down in the Valley. Like the anachronistic cowboy Kirk…
At this late date, it’s hard to tell one digitally rendered talking animal from another. Madagascar blends into Ice Age looks like A Shark’s Tale sounds like Shrek might as well be A Bug’s Life turns into Antz feels like Chicken Little could be Over the Hedge, which is really…
You know it’s hard out here for a screenwriter. You’ve got a surefire hit on your hands–an adaptation of the runaway best-seller The Da Vinci Code–and yet it’s all about talking and solving cryptic riddles, which isn’t exactly suited to the visual medium. It’s also a book that depends on…
Art School Confidential is very much like every movie pilfered from the Saturday Night Live playbook, in which the slight giggles of a four-minute sketch are wrung into two-hour yawns. The work upon which it’s based is a four-page excerpt from a 14-year-old comic book called Eightball, written and drawn…
Our anemic movie industry recycles so relentlessly that even our complaints about such plasticized repackaging comes off as recycled product of its own, offered primarily to draw the line between concerned aging cinephiles and the target consumers who don’t care a whit. But still, we’ve become a culture not merely…
Fateless (THINKFilm) I’ve no patience for the Holocaust docudrama — didn’t even see Schindler’s List till years after its 1993 release, to my parents’ everlasting shame. And so it was I avoided Lajos Koltai’s acclaimed adaptation of Imre Kertész’ Nobel Prize-winning autobiographic novel; are we not already gorged on the…
Let’s say you’re a teenage boy dying of cancer. A well-known charity dedicated to helping people like you offers to make your fondest wish come true–so long as it’s something realistic, as opposed to, say, finding a cure for cancer. Would you choose a VIP pass to Disneyland…or a visit…
Coming closer even than Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers to resembling the Chinese cover art for an Iron Butterfly album, Chen Kaige’s The Promise is psychedelia extremis. Hardly a minute of it passes without a concentrated dose of digital frou-frou and lavish cartoon-poetic imagery: floating ocean goddesses, flying swordsmen,…
The most important thing to know about the new movie Hoot, adapted from the children’s book by Carl Hiaasen, is that it’s co-produced by Jimmy Buffett, who also appears in a small role and provides new music for the soundtrack. Middle-aged drunks and boat owners might possibly rejoice at the…
Mission: Impossible III finds Tom Cruise downplaying the world’s single greatest piece of action music in deference to an Age of Fear vibe that’s a lot more grueling than rousing. Seems Lalo Schifrin’s adrenaline-pumping “dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum” is now as dated as the Cold War from which it sprang; maybe the star-producer…
Tennessee Williams Film Collection (Warner Bros.) All that’s missing from this boxed set — six movies, one doc, eight discs — is a jar of sweat; even Williams is here, in a 1973 documentary. Then there’s Brando, Beatty, Newman, Taylor, Burton, Gardner, Leigh, Malden, Huston, Kazan — the last of…
United 93–which uses the hijacking of one plane on September 11, 2001, to tell the story of what happened to all four aircraft seized that morning–may be the most wrenching, profound and perfectly made movie nobody wants to see. There is no reason to think that multiplex hordes anxiously await…
The Darwinian theory that schlocksploitation must tighten its twist of the nuts with each new release will be tested strenuously for years–or at least several weeks–by Hard Candy. A pointedly s(l)ick cross between Oleanna and I Spit on Your Grave, thrown like raw meat to Lions Gate for $4 million…
Every year, when ESPN broadcasts the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a tiny flutter of hope rises in anyone who cherishes the life of the mind. Spelling is a sport? Sweet Jesus! For the duration of the competition, the brainy kid who gets his glasses stomped by knuckle-draggers on the playground…
Aeon Flux (Paramount) Many things about this surreal sci-fi flick defy explanation, but nothing more so than the mystery of how it got made in the first place. On paper, it’s an archetypal setup for a bomb: a mostly forgotten cartoon, notable for its visual style and incomprehensibility, revived as…
Wanna knock the prez? Let’s make a show… preferably on television. Paul Weitz’s new satire American Dreamz imagines the Bush regime as an episode in the history of American entertainment and American Idol as the quintessence of U.S. democracy. So what else is new? The vision of America as a…
in the Hole
Countless are the creative souls who struggled with mental illness, as are the novels and films dedicated to them. Again and again, we’ve encountered artists both inspired and undermined by their madness, whose torment and tumult produce works of beauty and depth. So can a documentary about a singer-songwriter and…
If you can tell a society by its smut, America in the 1950s couldn’t have been just a Frigidaire of repressive hysteria. Hidden somewhere in the closets of Pleasantville and Peyton Place, after all, was a stack of fetish mags bearing the face and hourglass figure of Bettie Page and…
Americano (MTI) Before he is due to take a high-powered corporate job, college graduate Chris (Joshua Jackson) heads off with two friends (Timm Sharp and Ruthanna Hopper) to Europe, where they end up in Pamplona for the running of the bulls. There, he encounters one of those saucy Latinas (Blade…
In Nicole Holofcener’s first feature, 1996’s Walking and Talking, the writer-director warmly portrayed an adult female friendship, nudging at emotional issues without resorting to shtick or melodrama. Five years later, Holofcener’s Lovely and Amazing attempted to do the same for a family of women but with wildly different results: Virtually…
For most of January 2005, Michael Keaton was on the road pimping White Noise, the psychological thriller in which he stared at TV screens and pretended to be scared of static. Little wonder, then, that Keaton spent most of that couch time selling not his big-studio comeback but his tiny-budgeted…
Ellie Parker (Strand) This extremely raw portrait of an actress trying — and failing — to make it in Hollywood showcases Naomi Watts in a wrenching and sympathetic performance. Writer-director Scott Coffey shot the movie over nearly six years, beginning in 1999, before Watts was a household name. Though they…
