The Dallas Video Festival folks like to say that when Bart Weiss and Melissa Berry conceived their child in 1986, before the fest even had a name, video was the dominion of pornographers and avant-gardists who were experimenting with the still-burgeoning medium. Video cameras were years away from being the…
Perhaps the most incomprehensible image from Lee Hirsch’s documentary Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony is that of the smiling faces seen throughout. Even under the oppressive rule of the National Party, responsible for making “official” the apartheid laws of segregation and humiliation that defined and defiled South Africa for…
What more can go wrong in suburbia? Director Rose Troche (Go Fish) wants us to know, and to that end she has recruited another army of wounded parents, troubled children and broken dreamers, then marched them all into a whirlpool of dysfunction on the quiet, tree-lined streets just minutes from…
The Hunted pits Tommy Lee Jones against Benicio Del Toro in a battle of hand-to-hand, wit-to-wit fighting skills. Frankly my money would be on Tommy Lee any old day: He may be old, but he’s a tough geezer who looks like he could mop the floor with Benicio. (Also, frankly:…
In nature, living things prey upon each other all the time. Humanity, on the other hand, has a choice. It’s flouting this choice that turns on director Gaspar Noé. In his latest project, Irrversible, he basically swipes Christopher Nolan’s backward-narrative structure from Memento to tell a lurid tale of rape…
Filmmaker Terry Gilliam is no stranger to fiasco. After all, this is the human dynamo who saw 1989’s inventive (if sometimes incoherent) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen through a series of artistic and financial crises that would have landed most people in an asylum. But Gilliam’s encounter with the tale-spinning…
John Shaft went to Africa, so why shouldn’t Die Hard’s John McClane? In the new action romp Tears of the Sun, Bruce Willis undertakes a jungle rescue operation on the Dark Continent, and for his part it’s a McClane adventure in camouflage, minus all the sass and most of the…
You know Internet dating has become totally mainstream when Disney cranks out a bland comedy featuring a randomly selected pair of mismatched stars to take on the subject. Bearing the unwieldy and meaningless title Bringing Down the House, said comedy is predicated on the biggest pitfall of cyber-flirting, the idea…
Emerging from Till Human Voices Wake Us, it was easy to overhear some male viewers striving to put the film’s metaphysical themes in their place, to explain them away, as it were. This is a shame. The source of the story’s mystique is fairly simple and may be obvious to…
Apart from “I Am Fascinating” and/or “My Parents Are Horrid,” the reigning theme of film students’ movies is “Lovers Are Bonkers.” Thus, it comes as no surprise when a director’s first feature contains many elements that’ll be instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever hung around a film school. So it…
Uh…yo. The word on the street is that the ‘Drzej is back at the helm. “Who?” you rightfully ask. Why, cinematographer-turned-director Andrzej Bartkowiak, of course. He’s the…er…”dog” who, under the auspices of producer Joel Silver (Richie Rich, The Matrix), created the hip-hop bang-bang chop-socky flicks Romeo Must Die and Exit…
Dark Blue, it says in the credits, is based on a story by Los Angeles-born author James Ellroy, who pens grisly and guilt-ridden pulp-noir haiku that spread across hundreds of pages. Its screenplay was written by copper caper fetishist David Ayer, a native Angelino with an affinity for Hollywood-dark stories…
Right-wing pundits will be coming out of the woodwork to holler about this one. Bad enough, they’ll say, that The Life of David Gale attacks the death penalty; it also features a caricature governor of Texas with big ears and a familiar, scripture-quoting smirk. There’s a character who notes that…
Someone’s got to say it, so let’s start here: We’ve underestimated Will Ferrell. Honestly, it wasn’t that hard to do. His Saturday Night Live stint was never impressive, as he’d often fall back on the same shtick of yelling his lines with detailed enunciation in a passive-aggressive tone that made…
People engaged in warfare always believe that God endorses their cause and not their opponent’s. The Civil War drama Gods and Generals is filled with so much religious righteousness–endless Bible-readings, urgent recitation of prayer and ardent supplications to the Lord, to say nothing of the heavenly choir that intermittently bursts…
Thanks to the fickleness of pop culture, the French writer Aurore Dupin (1804-1876), a.k.a. George Sand, may well be better known for her relationship to Frederic Chopin than for her novels or her other romances or her generally bold life. Back in 1991, James Lapine’s Impromptu focused on the Sand-Chopin…
It begins in an almost playful mood. In a gallery of ancient art, a handsome, well-dressed man (Andrea Renzi) begins to make a pass at an equally attractive woman (Margherita Buy), who slyly rebuffs him. As we quickly learn, they’re actually husband and wife. Then, just as quickly, the direction…
His is an estimable and enviable filmography–not a bad movie to be found, if you’re willing to overlook Patch Adams, Twister and a few smaller offerings no one saw anyway. But even in the worst of films, and even in drag opposite Robert De Niro, Philip Seymour Hoffman keeps intact…
The fanboy suckled at the teat of comic-book writer-artist Frank Miller, circa 1980-81, will be satisfied, for the most part, with this cinematic Daredevil; if nothing else, the thing’s got enough Marvel Comics in-jokes to amuse ’em down at the comics shop for ages, or at least till Hulk smashes…
While virtually no one in this country foresaw the American disaster in Vietnam, the late British writer Graham Greene glimpsed it with astonishing clarity a decade before the first U.S. “adviser” set foot on Vietnamese soil. Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American, which has now been made into a disturbing…
If nothing else, because there’s nothing else to this movie, Shanghai Knights allows Jackie Chan, he of halting dialogue and poetic movement, to pay direct homage to his idols. He hangs from the arms of Big Ben, dangling off the stories-tall clock like Harold Lloyd in 1923’s Safety First; he…
Astaire & Rogers. Hepburn & Tracy. Heck, Ball & Arnaz, Houston & Washington or Vardalos & Corbett. Over the decades, Hollywood has proven that its romantic comedies needn’t suck. But alas, they often do, as is the case with How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Clearly, bigwig co-producers…
