So does Orlando Bloom really wear a chest toupee in Kingdom of Heaven? Beats me — since it appears that most of his much-discussed shirtless scenes fell to the cutting room floor before the film made it to theaters. According to press reports, director Ridley Scott found Bloom’s bedroom scenes with Eva Green (The Dreamers) […]
Before someone decides to lambaste me for giving this fairly by-the-numbers comedy a four-star rating, I’d like to point out that there’s a basic shortcoming to the whole star rating system: It doesn’t take into account the necessity of a sliding scale based on the type of film and the intentions behind it. Someone once […]
I have a kind of love-hate relationship with this film version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and no, my feelings about it aren’t grounded in any special fondness for the source material, since I only heard a couple episodes of the radio series and saw a few minutes of the BBC-TV film, and […]
I expected to dislike this admittedly ungainly first-time bout of auterism from David Duchovny more than I did. Maybe the fact that reading that Robin Williams plays a mentally challenged character in the movie had simply prepared me for something far, far worse than The House of D. No, it’s not a good movie, and […]
“You’re the new ‘Triple X,’” Agent Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson) informs Darius Stone (Ice Cube) after arranging the hotheaded Stone’s jailbreak. “Sounds like a porno star,” sneers Stone. If that level of witty repartee — rarely heard since the demise of Oscar Wilde — convulses you with laughter, then xXx: State of the Union […]
A Lot Like Love is a lot like a lot of other utterly disposable movies — only more annoying. Working from the concept of two people with bad timing, first-time offender Colin Patrick Lynch has taken this bewhiskered plot device and somehow stretched it out to a feature length script. It’s not a bad plot […]
Inventive, entertaining and sometimes enlightening, Inside Deep Throat ultimately falls short of the film it might have been, because it tries too hard to paint Deep Throat, Gerard Damiano’s 1972 porn “classic” about a woman with an anatomically misplaced clitoris, as some kind of stand-alone work without taking into account the far more mainstream films […]
I have but one piece of sage advice concerning this movie. To paraphrase a friend of mine, spurn King’s Ransom as you would spurn a rabid weasel. This witless concoction is a shoo-in for a place on many “10 worst” lists, come the end of 2005. It’s an amazingly unfunny and mean-spirited film variant on […]
To call Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle silly and/or ridiculous is to miss the whole point. The film’s not only supposed to be silly and ridiculous, it revels in the fact that it is — and it provides the most sheer fun you’re likely to find at the movies these days. The 41-year-old Chow has […]
Legendary architect Louis I. Kahn dropped dead in the men’s room at Penn Station at the age of 73. Having just returned from a trip to India, he was facing bankruptcy at the time, and was probably the most honored and simultaneously underemployed architect of his era. His obituary said that he was survived by […]
Thirty years ago, Sydney Pollack made a critical and commercial hit with Three Days of the Condor, a tight adaptation of James Grady’s novel Six Days of the Condor (so tight, you see, that they had to shave off three days). This political thriller worked because Pollack remembered that it was a thriller first and […]
For all of you who are avoiding the movie with the tag line, “Bollywood Meets Hollywood… and it’s a Perfect Match,” out of fear that you might have to read subtitles (and you know who you are), set aside that fear. The film is almost entirely in English, with little more than a couple of […]
Famous — or perhaps infamous – for being the movie that made Jack Nicholson consider retiring (if this was the sort of thing people wanted, he reasoned, then movies were no place for him), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is really a largely inoffensive little comedy. It just happened to catch on as part of the […]
Not since Ken Russell followed up his X-rated The Devils with his G-rated musical, The Boy Friend, has a filmmaker so thrown critics and audiences off-balance with such a seeming about-face. What is the director of Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and 28 Days Later… doing making a charming fantasy about a little boy who sees and […]
For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, filmmaker Bahman Farmanara is thought of in some circles as the Iranian Woody Allen. Assuming that such a credential can even be imagined, the comparison seems to rest entirely on this one semi-autobiographical film, which is, if anything, even more obsessed with death than Allen is when in full […]
Saying that the new version of The Amityville Horror is better than the old version is not, in itself, a recommendation. I will give the film this: It’s shorter and better acted (which speaks volumes about the acting in the original), and it isn’t bogged down with the type of nonsense that asks us to […]
No, we’re not talking about that blasphemous remake with Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley from a few years ago. We’re talking about Stanley Donen’s echt-’60s film that best captured the comic genius of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore at the height of their powers — in a film they wrote (and for which Moore provided […]
It’s hard not to like a movie that manages to work Hurricane Smith’s obscure but classic ’70s pop song, “Oh, Babe, What Would You Say?”, into its soundtrack, so it’s a relief to report that there are a lot of other things about Fever Pitch that are hard not to like. When compared to Shallow […]
In the pretty much evenly split reviews of Woody Allen’s latest film, those who admire Melinda and Melinda tend to call it either Woody’s best film in ages or a return to form — suggesting that his last few films have been significantly wanting. That’s not a bandwagon I choose to clamber aboard. While his […]
Well, now we really know what that excited credit — “Directed by Breck Eisner!” — at the end of the trailer for Sahara meant. Not much. There’s nothing all that wrong with Eisner’s direction of Sahara, apart from his tendency to shoot action scenes in so close that you can’t tell what’s happening to which […]
Spin-offs are common in the sitcom world — December Bride begat Pete and Gladys, All in the Family begat Maude and The Jeffersons, The Mary Tyler Moore Show begat Phyllis and Rhoda, etc. But the concept is a bit more unusual in the movies. Spin-off films usually seem reserved for disastrous comic-book movies like Catwoman […]
