Once in a while a film comes along that is as sound, smart, sweet and significant as can be, and Whale Rider is such a film. Fault the project on various counts if you like (I’ll try), but ultimately the tale is beyond reproach, a bane to cynics and a…
As the Columbia Pictures logo looms large in frame till its torch becomes the focal point, we find ourselves in what appears to be a tent full of sweaty medieval warriors forging axes, and have to wonder: Did they already make another Scorpion King movie and not tell us? No,…
There is one truly striking shock in the new made-in-Hong-Kong-by-Thai-directors horror flick The Eye, but unfortunately, directors Danny and Oxide (yes, Oxide) Pang saved the best for first. If the film’s opening moments don’t grab you, nothing will; the Pang brothers cut their teeth on commercials, and the first few…
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and it’s all PETA’s fault. Oh, we humored those wacky vegan extremists when they threw paint at rich bitches in hideously overpriced fur coats. We laughed when they’d come on conservative talk radio shows every Thanksgiving to get mocked for…
Once in a while a film comes along that is as sound, smart, sweet and significant as can be, and Whale Rider is such a film. Fault the project on various counts if you like (I’ll try), but ultimately the tale is beyond reproach, a bane to cynics and a…
He’s 12 feet tall. He’s ripped. He’s quick as a tiger and fierce as a dragon. Lit by his fury to a dull green glow, the guy is sheer, boundless power. Any NFL team you can think of would love to start him at middle linebacker. But, as art house…
I purposely avoided reading anything about Capturing the Friedmans till seeing the film, which has been no easy task. Andrew Jarecki’s documentary, about a Great Neck, New York, family torn asunder in the late 1980s by allegations of kiddie-porn possession and the horrific sexual abuse of numerous children, has been…
The number of boring, uninspired studio pictures hitting today’s multiplexes is getting depressing. To add insult to injury, many of these mind-numbing creations come from formerly–and presumably still–talented writers, directors and actors. Last week saw Hollywood Homicide, a tired–and what’s worse, lazy–buddy-buddy/cop/action comedy, written and directed by Ron Shelton, the…
Having seemingly exhausted all permutations of the sports comedy formula (Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump, et al.), Ron Shelton has now moved on to another obsession: the Los Angeles Police Department. Earlier this year, we got the uncharacteristically somber Dark Blue, a “what if” tale of the alternately corrupt…
The hero of Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen is an isolated teen-ager mired in a gray Scottish slum with only a vague dream of family life to sustain him. Like previous Loach heroes–the impoverished boy who finds hope training a falcon in Kes, say, or the downtrodden working stiff struggling to…
The first question on the minds of most potential viewers of Owning Mahowny is probably something along the lines of “What’s up with that spelling? Who spells ‘Mahoney’ with a ‘w’?” Do the marketing people think we somehow won’t get that it rhymes with “owning” if there isn’t a “w”…
Here’s another stranger-in-a-strange-land yarn, but Matt Dillon in his feature directorial debut delivers loads of atmosphere to tart up the threadbare paradigm. Playing a slick nobody insurance broker on the lam from the FBI, Dillon journeys from Big Apple ennui to Cambodian exotica in search of his mentor, the typically…
Whenever the stars of the adolescent street-racing fantasy 2 Fast 2 Furious were feeling balky or temperamental on the set, as movie stars are wont to do, the cure was probably easy–an oil change and a tune-up. John Singleton’s adrenaline-spiked sequel to the surprise summer hit of 2001, The Fast…
Credit the quality of a superior educational system. Or the native wit of two quick thinkers with a gift for understanding the human animal. Or the power of happy collaboration. In any event, Lawless Heart, the second feature co-written and co-directed by the young Brits Neil Hunter and Tom Hunsinger,…
If we can glean any trend so far in the feature films of Icelandic actor-turned-director Baltasar Kormákur, it would be his ability to offer up utterly unsympathetic characters who are difficult to identify with, while somehow managing to keep us interested in their fates regardless. His feature directorial debut, 101…
If you’re reading this paper, chances are you’re more literate than the average American. If you’re reading the film reviews, it’s also likely that you’ve become familiar with words like “bravura” and “eponymous,” which seem to exist only in the vocabularies of professional movie assessors. But what if you were…
Another week, another remake–summer, that season of air-conditioned originality, must be upon us. Only unlike The In-Laws, which creaked into theaters last week, this latest updating of a decades-old action-comedy has two things going for it: Its forebear is a veddy British caper film little-seen in the United States, which…
If grown-ups were meant to watch Walt Disney cartoons, God would have kept us all in the third grade for two or three decades. Still, somebody has to drive the SUV every time the Disneyfolk decide to lure the little ones down to the multiplex, and as long as the…
Many moviegoers see hyperactive Jim Carrey as the second coming of Jerry Lewis, but no one’s ever mistaken him for God. Clearly, he’d like to change that–at least for now, at least at the box office. Hey, you’d feel the same way if your last movie were The Majestic. In…
Occasionally I can be convinced it’s the singer, not the song. I’ve no love for Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time,” but can’t get enough of Brit band Travis’ laconic redo of said iconic single, which squeezes out the then-teen temptress’ toxic sugar till it’s just a bittersweet lament. On…
French putz Xavier (Romain Duris) is depressed. The poor guy lives in Paris, has Amélie’s Audrey Tautou as a girlfriend, eats gourmet vegan dinners prepared for him by his free-spirited mother and is being set up for a graduate degree in economics by a friend of his father’s. “I don’t…
Talk about tough acts to follow: The original 1999 Matrix, a critical and commercial smash, came almost as a revelation out of nowhere–if the combination of Joel Silver, Warner Bros. and roughly 60 million bucks qualifies as “nowhere.” After more than four years, The Matrix Reloaded–the first of two sequels…
