It’s easy to presume About Schmidt isn’t much of a movie, since its protagonist, Warren Schmidt, isn’t much of anything. He’s portrayed by Jack Nicholson, but the actor is actually someone who looks like he used to be Jack Nicholson. This Warren, this rinky-dink actuary banished to the wasteland of…
Adaptation is the most overrated movie of the year (of all time?) by people who should know better. Film critics have been suckered in by its gimmick (Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman can’t adapt a book for the big screen and winds up writing himself into his screenplay, genius!),…
People in show-biz do very weird things to prove their credibility. Starlets pose for skin mags, actors start rock bands, rockers become sit-coms, rappers become tombstones, and now, in a heartwarming feature called Evelyn, James Bond wants us to believe he’s an Everyman. The lovely thing is, it works. As…
It had to happen eventually: the adorably scattered Sandra Bullock and the self-deprecatingly charming Hugh Grant paired in a romantic comedy. As predictable as Miss Congeniality and almost as broad, Two Weeks Notice is an undemanding, by-the-numbers romance that is made bearable only by the presence of its two ingratiating…
Maid in Manhattan, in which Jennifer Lopez goes from pauper to princess, comes not from a screenplay but from a handful of self-help books and fairy tales and fashion magazines cut and pasted together in a glossy montage committed to celluloid. Characters, made from the highest-grade cardboard and resplendent in…
Each of the beautifully made vignettes that make up Rebecca Miller’s Personal Velocity glimpses a young woman caught at a crossroads, faced with an important decision and about to experience one of those rare dilations of vision that can change an entire life. Now, this is a common ploy in…
Consider life’s unbreakable rules. Send Mom flowers on her birthday. Keep your fastball down. Never order lasagna in Des Moines. Don’t go sailing with people you can’t stand. Violation of this last rule has yielded some pretty fair books and movies over the years–Moby Dick and The Caine Mutiny come…
Like the similar, funnier Bring It On, Drumline is intent on proving that marching band participants are genuine athletes. Fair enough: The boot camp-style physical training they go through onscreen will come as an eye-opener to some. Also similar to its cinematic cheerleader predecessor is the notion that at this…
The blood disease porphyria sparked madness in England’s King George III, so its impact on manic Margot (Nicole Garcia) and her hapless daughter Betty (cucumber-cool Sandrine Kiberlain) is about as shocking as a Hoosier mom beating her kid on camera–and as scarring. What’s wonderful about director Claude Miller’s adaptation of…
The 10th Trek film, ostensibly the last featuring the Next Generation crew (or any other, c’mon), plays like a greatest-hits remix; like Die Another Day, it’s bent on resurrecting a moribund franchise by recalling all the things you used to love about it till you grew into big-boy pants. And…
Rob Schneider’s latest look-at-me-I’m-so-cute comedy features the star bumbling around half-clad in Christina Aguilera’s Goodwill donations. He plays a revolting petty thief who magically swaps bodies with a petulant high school cheerleader (Rachel McAdams), sparking roughly a bazillion gags about how funny it is to have a penis. To counterbalance,…
Robert De Niro loves an acting challenge, but lately those tests have been less along the lines of, “Can I convincingly play a boxer?” and more like, “Can I alone be good enough to make this formulaic mess worth watching?” Yes, it was impressive that he played a half-paralyzed stroke…
Transcribed verbatim from the DVD commentary track of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, here’s an informative sci-fi concept from director George Lucas: “As we go through the movie, there’s all little funny moments like Jango bumping his head, because in Star Wars one of the Stormtroopers bumps…
Here’s an original idea for a movie: a low-budget, digital video look at the search for love in New York City, in which person A wants to connect with person B, who’s only looking at person C, who’s in pursuit of person D, and so forth, until it all comes…
As heroes go, the two just-released mental patients struggling to make a new life in Peter Næss’ touching social comedy Elling are notably short on glamour. When we meet him, the shy, middle-aged title character, portrayed by an exquisitely subtle actor named Per Christian Ellefsen, is a quivering bundle of…
The smart sci-fi fan knows that, technically speaking, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris is not a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film at all, but rather a newly filmed interpretation of a Polish novel penned by Stanislaw Lem. Nonetheless, the new film stands in a mighty big shadow. If someone attempted to make…
It’s doubtful Robert Louis Stevenson imagined his Treasure Island populated by cyborgs and scored to Goo Goo Dolls outtakes; and one has to wonder what the author would have made of his characters being turned into talking and walking dogs and cats that, gulp, copulate and reproduce mangy hybrids. Far…
Being of the minority who did not worship Schindler’s List (vital message, tedious movie), it’s easy to feel skeptical of the preachy delivery of Ararat, which concerns not the Jewish holocaust but the Armenian one, its genocidal forebear of 1915-1918. Armenian-Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan (The Adjuster, The Sweet Hereafter) has–like…
At the University of Texas at Austin, this was the first offering screened in introductory film classes; if the professor, a man whose knowledge of cinema history was surpassed only by his willingness to share it with everybody all the time anyplace without any prompting whatsoever, didn’t consider it the…
Small-town stud Tully (Anson Mount) works the family farm with his younger brother Earl (Glenn Fitzgerald) and their inexpressive, unsmiling widower dad (Bob Burrus). The sudden possibility that they might lose the farm opens up a trove of disturbing family secrets, challenging Tully’s heretofore shallow nature. Hilary Birmingham–who co-produced (with…
Taking its cue from Christopher Hitchens’ excoriating, similarly titled book (minus the “s” in “Trials”), this terse and compelling documentary presents the case that former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger deserves to be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, under the standards applied to…
Through a strange chain of events, a likable young pianist (Anna Mouglalis) becomes an interloper in the household of an internationally renowned musician (Jacques Dutronc), whom she believes might be her father. He’s sure he’s not, but her appearance proves disturbing to both his son (Rodolphe Pauly) and even more…
