Watching Hollywood’s endless stream of John Grisham adaptations–The Firm, The Chamber, A Time to Kill, etc. –it would be easy to assume that Grisham is the worst sort of hack writer, with simplistic morals that usually overwhelm logic and come close to contravening the very law the author is supposed…
When it made the rounds of the gay and lesbian film festivals last year, Km. 0 (Kilometer Zero) found itself the winner of several audience awards–prizes voted on by festivalgoers themselves for the film they happened to enjoy the most. Now finally opening in Dallas after wide release this summer,…
Veronica Guerin isn’t at all a bad movie, and some kind things will be said about it here. But cynical appraisal also has its place, so we’ll cover that aspect as well. Even before that, a significant disclaimer: Since this review is being written for several New Times publications, which…
A humorous and touching tale about unexpected friendship, The Station Agent marks the auspicious writing and directorial debut of actor Tom McCarthy. It concerns three people who have absolutely nothing in common except the solitary life that each leads. For Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage) and Olivia Harris (Patricia Clarkson), being…
Dave, a man who’s barely there, lulls his son to sleep with stories of a boy lost in the woods who escapes from wolves; it’s a thrilling bedtime story for the child, a tale that never loses its excitement. Dave, played by Tim Robbins like some ghost who can’t quite…
The opening credits insist Kill Bill: Volume 1 is “Quentin Tarantino’s 4th film,” when it’s actually his 3.5th; it’s too incomplete to be measured as a whole, half a movie waiting for a proper ending due to arrive in the next volume in February. Till then we’ll have to contemplate…
It’s beginning to look as though the films of George Clooney are less works of fiction than products of documentary crews following around the actor leading his enviable life. In film after film he’s seen dining with beautiful actresses in gorgeous surroundings perfectly lit for an evening’s seduction: Jennifer Lopez…
Whatever you think Demonlover is, chances are it ain’t. The title conjures up Frazetta/Bisley-like images of muscular monsters deflowering delicate damsels, but while such visions appear for a few seconds on-screen, they aren’t the point. You may have heard that the movie involves anime: It does, but again, it’s almost…
Is it real or is it biochemical? Does love spring from some mysterious, serendipitous, irrational depth or is it a cut-and-dried chemical reaction, a function of pheromones as cold-blooded as a snake? Dopamine, the feature directorial debut of Mark Decena, poses just such a question. The film takes its title…
Director Richard Linklater’s The School of Rock imagines, sort of, what might have become of voluble rock snob Barry the morning after his grand finale in Stephen Frears’ adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity–after his Marvin Gaye impersonation had faded and been forgotten in the daylight hours, after he quit…
Out of Time, in which we’re to believe 48-year-old Denzel Washington and 32-year-old Sanaa Lathan were high school sweethearts, demands its audience ignore all manner of implausibilities. Chief among them is the behavior of Washington’s Matt Whitlock, chief of police in a tiny coastal town just outside of Miami who…
You gotta love John Sayles. No, really–you gotta, or else a mob of indie-minded cineastes will club you into submission. Sometimes it’s easy to comply, as with City of Hope and Sunshine State, both astute portraits of uniquely American class, race and real estate struggles boiling down to the burning…
The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes’ best-selling travel memoir Under the Tuscan Sun is a virtual case study of Hollywood’s irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take. Mayes’ 1996 book is a nicely written, carefully observed meditation on buying a decrepit Italian villa…
Recently, ornithologists in Antarctica made a startling discovery: Female emperor penguins, being forced against their wills to endure stern patriarchal societal norms, tend to practice iffy mating habits. Close scrutiny revealed that most adult females go bonkers struggling to choose between an exciting-but-destructive “bad boy” penguin and a dependable-but-boring “good…
The script for The Rundown has lingered for more than a decade and was originally a Patrick Swayze vehicle, well before those wheels fell off. Universal Studios revived it because the studio knows what it has in Dwayne Johnson: a gold mine made of bulging biceps, a man who was…
It’s no given that audiences will embrace a passionately homosexual, drug-abusing male prostitute-cum-drag-queen, especially if he happens not to be a particularly nice person to boot. The cinematic tale of Madame Satã, however, has two big points in its favor. One–the most obvious one–is a dynamite leading performance by relative…
Visualize Tokyo. Got it? Now add popular favorite Bill Murray doing his “lovable schmoe” shtick. Toss in American Rhapsody’s up-and-comer Scarlett Johansson doing her standard “like, duh” face. Dip them both into emotional torpor in the sleek Park Hyatt, add local color, stir. Et voilà: Lost in Translation. For Sofia…
Secondhand Lions is cornier than the cornfields spread out in front of the dilapidated rural Texas manse inhabited by Robert Duvall and Michael Caine, playing grumpy old brothers with mismatched accents. (Caine, in fact, has accent enough for three actors–one English, another maybe Texan, another perhaps Australian.) There is no…
Never mind the trailers, which advertise Cold Creek Manor as some kind of horror-thriller, complete with the image of a hand emerging from the shadows to quiet (yes!) Sharon Stone. Mike Figgis, most recently a maker of unwatchable art-house fare shot on digital video (Timecode, Hotel) that suggests a fetish…
Woody Allen churns out one movie a year, and “churned out” is an apt description of how his new romantic comedy, Anything Else, feels. “Disappointingly mediocre” would be another. It’s not that the film doesn’t have its humorous moments or memorable lines. It has many, but the jokes and quips…
When Nicolas Cage plays still and sullen–a man possessed by self-loathing and melancholy in Adaptation, say, or the landlocked angel in City of Angels–he comes off as drowsy. He disappears into those roles like a head plopped in a fluffy pillow, and it doesn’t quite suit him. Cage has excelled…
God bless Johnny Depp. For the second time this year, the man has almost single-handedly redeemed an action movie that would otherwise be indistinguishable from the pack. Introduced right up front in Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico, he’s first seen dressed up like Prince in purple glasses…
