The opening moments of The Door in the Floor are not promising. A little girl stands on a chair in a hallway of photos, pointing at the images and speaking about them. Soon, she is joined by a middle-aged man, probably her father, who takes her on a tour through…
“Memory is a wonderful thing, if you don’t have to deal with the past,” declares French Celine (Julie Delpy) to her erstwhile American one-night-stand Jesse (Ethan Hawke) in Before Sunset, the meandering but reasonably charming follow-up to the duo’s 1995 Euromance, Before Sunrise. In the movies as in life, nearly…
Not one of this city’s countless film festivals is as much an extension of its founder, and programmer, as the Dallas Video Festival. To see but a handful of entries in this year’s fest is to know the two sides of Bart Weiss–the political animal who gnaws on movies constructed…
Anchorman, co-written by its star Will Ferrell, plays like a series of outtakes strung together more or less in random sequence. There’s a vague plot, about the fall and rise of a San Diego newsman whose polyester suits are brighter than he is, but this doesn’t propel the movie forward…
All you need to know about Spider-Man 2 is revealed in the opening credits, in which comic-book artist Alex Ross recaps the 2002 original in lovingly, lavishly painted panels. Spidey and Mary Jane Watson are once again entangled in that now-iconic upside-down kiss; nutty Norman Osborn, out of Green Goblin…
Samurai have never been strangers to film; in fact, an entire genre has sprung from their legend, with plenty of attendant offshoots, cross-pollinators and beneficiaries (Westerns, slasher films, Star Wars). Lately, the feudal Japanese warriors have enjoyed a particular bounty of screen time: 2003 brought us The Last Samurai, in…
America’s Heart & Soul, the debut feature from commercial director Louis Schwartzberg, is being depicted in some quarters as the antidote to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, mostly because it’s a documentary, being released around the same time, about the USA. For more simplistic minds who equate anti-Bush sentiment with hatred…
A strong toxin requires a strong antidote. In the case of the Bush administration, the cure is being served in significant part by Michael Moore, who previously delivered the rousing documentaries Roger & Me and Bowling for Columbine. This time, however, the exposé feels even more personal, as Moore reveals…
It’s often a challenge to fairly assess a film that, by its very conception, is simply targeted to an entirely different demographic from one’s own. I am not by nature romantic or female; for those who are, it may have to suffice that the mostly double-X-chromosomed crowd watching The Notebook…
It’s charming. It’s hilarious. It is perhaps the most beautifully crafted, lovingly rendered portrait of extreme geekitude ever to grace the screen. It’s Napoleon Dynamite–the first feature film from 24-year-old Brigham Young University student Jared Hess–and, if there is any justice, it’s going to be huge. Remember that kid who…
Perhaps some day in the distant future, film scholars and academics concerned with race relations will devote papers and lectures and even entire books to Keenen Ivory Wayans’ White Chicks, in which two FBI agents, played by Shawn and Marlon Wayans, don Caucasian masks and impersonate white women in order…
You might think that with the technological advances in moviemaking since 1956 that this new version of Around the World in 80 Days would at least look better than its predecessor. You could not be faulted for believing you’d be wowed by the Rube Goldberg gadgets of inventor Phileas Fogg,…
It begins with the roar. That unmistakable sound, like an untuned violin being scraped against a rusty saw blade. Anyone with any exposure at all to global pop culture knows it; even Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin reused it in their otherwise unfaithful Hollywood remake. The credits, in Japanese, unscroll…
Getting stranded at snowbound O’Hare for the night is one thing. You call home, maybe knock down a couple of martinis, then grab a blanket. A century ago, being quarantined at Ellis Island for eight months because you were, say, a part-time anarchist from Campobasso with a big mustache and…
The real Melvin Van Peebles shows up just once in Baadasssss!, a fictionalized account of his making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971, and it’s at the film’s end; he sits silent, grinning, clutching his ever-present cigar. But he’s all over this movie, in which his son Mario plays…
Jehane Noujaim co-directed 2001’s remarkable Startup.com, about two Internet whiz kids who brokered just enough big deals to wind up with broken dreams, and the audience came away understanding how it felt to invest your everything in something eventually worth nothing. The headlines of five years ago came to bittersweet…
Every once in a while, you encounter a person who seems to have been born under an urgent, righteous star–a person who is both a fiery activist lit with the passion of his convictions and a dramatic storyteller who naturally occupies a place in the public eye. When this person…
As much of the civilized world now knows, the latest Harry Potter director is Alfonso Cuaron, best known for the explicit teen sexual awakening movie Y Tu Mamá También. As such, it may come as little surprise that his Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban begins with the teenage…
Ah, the peculiar genius that is Guy Maddin. Who else but the morose Canadian director, born and raised in one of the coldest cities in the world, would marry silent film, 1930s movie musicals, Prohibition, family melodrama, critique of capitalist zeal and monster-movie gore in a surreal montage about sorrow…
It’s a sign that a nation may be losing its collective mind when it grants a nutty hack like Quentin Tarantino an exalted title like officer of arts and letters, but there’s France for ya. Whether Gallic pop culture is rousingly progressive or embarrassingly adolescent is anyone’s call, but few…
Sitting through Raising Helen is an exercise in frustration, because somewhere inside this big heap of Hollywood nothing is a something (someone, actually) worth saving and savoring. Her name is Joan Cusack, always a supporting player but never a star no matter her grace and warmth and charm even in…
The first time through, you might dismiss Coffee and Cigarettes as a filmmaker’s recess, playtime before the serious business of making a real feature. Jim Jarmusch never intended this new movie, a collection of 11 shorts made over the past two decades, to be a movie at all. It began…
