So why is it that every time they make a movie about a nerd, the character in question is always white? What’s Hollywood trying to tell us? Caucasians have a corner on the market in failing eyesight, office jobs and undernourished physiques? Or is it legitimately a white thing: How…
Faced with yet another sports movie in which a group of lovably troubled kids triumphs over adversity, it’s easier to scoff and grumble than to feel even partially uplifted. So let’s do it; let’s scoff and grumble, at least for a moment. In Brian Robbins’ Hardball, a degenerate gambler who…
The beautiful little conceit at the heart of Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents is that audiences will sit still once more for the crackpot notion of time travel–and in a movie that’s not science fiction. To his credit, and with an implied bow to Back to the Future and its predecessors,…
A year after Cameron Crowe climbed back aboard the tour bus for one last spin through rock’s golden days of giddy hedonism and phony heroism comes a film set a decade later, in the mid-1980s, when the parties got harder, the music got louder, and the musicians got prettier. The…
In the harsh realm where the smog burns one’s eyes all day and the night streets are disquieting at best, children are stumbling and swooping into adulthood, consequences be damned. Chain Camera delivers a group portrait of several youths from John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, located smack-dab between…
In the early ’90s, during a particularly dark time for the pro wrestling business, perennial jester and one-time Andy Kaufman accomplice Jerry “the King” Lawler proclaimed that he was going to do something that had never been done before: call play-by-play commentary on his own match. Entering the ring armed…
Chalk up another one for George Dubya. Recently, the U.S. Immigration Department refused to allow acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, director of both the Oscar-nominated The White Balloon and the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion-winner The Circle, to change planes in New York on his way from Hong Kong to…
What is it that people get out of Shakespeare’s plays? Is it the stories? The flowery dialogue? The author’s ability to capture a time and place that is foreign to us, yet familiar via the emotions of the protagonists? It probably isn’t the stories. The fact is, Shakespeare often used…
“I never saw her first step,” laments the transplanted Margit (Nastassja Kinski) to her ambitious husband, Peter (Tony Goldwyn), regarding the infant daughter they left behind in Hungary during their perilous escape from the Stalin regime. That daughter–called Suzanne, wonderfully portrayed as a glowing old-country tot by Bori Keresztri and…
There is perhaps no explanation for why the soundtrack to Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, crammed full of bluegrass standards, chain-gang echoes and lullaby melodies, has sold almost 2 million copies and sat near the top of the country charts for months. The disc has received…
Beware the filmmaker who looks through the camera’s lens and sees only himself on the other side, blowing kisses. He’s the fool who confuses “personal vision” with “jacking off,” and he’ll try every time to convince you there’s something meaningful and imaginative in the shallow and hackneyed. He is so…
After nearly a decade’s absence from the big screen, Suture auteurs Scott McGehee and David Siegel finally deliver a second feature with The Deep End, an exciting, sharply realized melodramatic film noir, based on Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s novel The Blank Wall, which was also the source for the 1949 Max…
Woody Allen’s latest romp through Old New York combines (among other things) a skirt-chasing insurance investigator with the charm of a rodent, a wisecracking Vassar grad who takes no guff and a nightclub hypnotist in a sequined turban who doubles as a major jewel thief. The year is 1940. The…
Festering somewhere between an after-school special and kiddie porn lies this frank but heinously melodramatic open wound from veteran Canadian director Léa Pool (Emporte-moi). Adapted by screenwriter Judith Thompson from the novel The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan, Lost and Delirious is about girl joy and girl sorrow, girl…
Not unlike Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich–who, with ridiculously expensive spectaculars like Independence Day and Godzilla, transformed B-movie nostalgia into crass adventures in budget-busting–John Carpenter has a thing for the fanciful yet almost lurid trappings of the Saturday afternoon sci-fi flick. Fortunately for us, the veteran director also knows better…
Cuddly outsider #63178D, please step forward. Well, my goodness, look at you! You are so alternative, so fringe, so punk! So artsy and alienated! So utterly aimless and oozing with angst! Tell us, girl, what ought we to call you? Edwina Scissorhands? That’s one easily justified reaction a viewer may…
The social lessons of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, all of them suitable for framing in just about any dorm room, are these: War is bad. Love is good. The Italians love to sing, even when they’re supposed to be at war. The Greeks are freedom fighters. And whatever you do, don’t…
There is one joke in Rat Race, aka Cannonball Run IV, so stunning–most of all, because it’s the one joke in the film that actually works–it bears repeating here, if only to spare you the misery of actually witnessing this crime. Jon Lovitz, playing a character who might as well…
On the lips of many moviegoers, the name Joel Schumacher is tantamount to blasphemy. Visions of a blue-skinned Arnold Schwarzenegger and a head-bobbing George Clooney in rubber nipples instantly come to mind, inducing shudders of revulsion and indicating an oft-held view that Mr. Schumacher epitomizes the worst American directing can…
During this cinematic Summer of Dumb, it would be all too easy to celebrate half-assed clever as a virtue, especially when proffered by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who elevated the gross-out to an Art Form (or, more likely, Fart Form) in Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary. Osmosis Jones, one…
There is something fairly amusing about this title, Apocalypse Now Redux. Think about it: Prophetic Disclosure Presently Shows Up Again Newfangled. Of course, in the 10 years since the release of the documentary Hearts of Darkness, we’ve been taught to revere the legend of Francis Ford Coppola walking the line…
For a few moments, American Pie 2 tastes every bit as stale as junk food left out on the countertop for two years. “Just like old times,” says one actor to another as they amble through settings borrowed from the first installment of 1999’s Last American Virgin revisit: Jim’s bedroom,…
