I can’t say that I was surprised to find myself enjoying Mean Girls; the re-teaming of the Freaky Friday team of director Mark Waters and star Lindsay Lohan alone suggested something worth watching. I was surprised, though, by how much I enjoyed it — to the degree that I want to see it again, and […]

This is a rare chance to take in some of the Oscar-nominated short films — those little movies that most of us never see. There was a time, of course, when short films were better known than they are today. They were once part and parcel of the movie-going bill of fare, often consisting of […]

The Black Pirate is far and away the most purely “fun” of all Douglas Fairbanks’ “mature” films. While lacking the scope and sweep of the more elaborate Thief of Baghdad, it also lacks that film’s lumbering, elephantine bloat. Fairbanks started out as a kind of overly athletic, light leading-man in a remarkably engaging series of […]

This short documentary (62 minutes) on painter, poet, sculptor, writer, philosopher and visionary M.C. Richards is of local interest because of Richards’ connections to Black Mountain College — that bygone experimental school that she preferred to a tenured position at the University of Chicago. Her coming to BMC was a bold move; as M.C. Richards: […]

That Tony Scott has directed thousands of TV commercials perhaps explains why the interminable 147 minutes that comprise Man on Fire are a nonstop barrage of aggressive effects. Still, this does nothing to excuse Scott’s having ended up with a movie that looks like it was shot by a cat having a fit in a […]

Winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film this year, writer/director Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions is both easy to admire and easy to love. Even so, it’s not especially creative as moviemaking goes — though that’s perhaps entirely because it is the work of Arcand (such that I’m not even sure that’s a […]

Sure, on the surface 13 Going on 30 is not a whole lot more than Big with boobs, but the new film has an agreeable charm and considerably more emotional resonance than its obvious inspiration (not to mention that star Jennifer Garner’s actions seem more believable than those of Tom Hanks in Big). Where Big […]

Yes, it’s My Big Fat Greek Drag Queen — even if Connie and Carla might more appropriately be better dubbed Some Like It Hot Meets Victor/Victoria. No matter how you slice it, though, this is yet another vanity project for Nia Vardolos — aided and abetted by producers Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks (who loses […]

Finally, Kill Bill Vol. 2 has invaded our cinematic lives. And it was worth the wait, even if this second half of Quentin Tarantino’s elephantine movie-geek wet dream does some major gear shifting away from the explosive cinematic flurry of Vol. 1. Where that first film was cinematically playful, Vol. 2 relies much more on […]

My lowest-of-low expectations for this latest comic-book-to-film opus weren’t helped by having to see it at the time I was really hoping to catch Kill Bill Vol. 2. So I couldn’t have been more surprised to find myself liking The Punisher much more than not (and I freely concede that part of the movie’s appeal […]

Ella Enchanted is one of those movies that comes just near enough to working that it’s all the more infuriating that it finally doesn’t. This is further aggravated because parts of the film are quite charming and you just know that a few million bucks in improved special effects and some work on the script […]

Cedric the Entertainer is a funny guy. He added a lot to the original Barbershop, walked away with Barbershop 2 and has enlivened flat-footed movies like Kingdom Come and Serving Sarah. But he’s locked in a losing battle with Johnson Family Vacation, which scores high marks as one of the worst-crafted films I’ve ever encountered. […]

It started life as a supposedly gritty R-rated project to be helmed by Ron Howard, with Russell Crowe cast as Davy Crockett. But Howard and Crowe walked (though the former is still listed as producer), whereupon the project inherited John Lee Hancock as director and Billy Bob Thornton as Crockett, and was stripped of some […]

Before tackling the actual merits of The Girl Next Door, I’d like to pose a question: Who, exactly, is the target audience here? It’s not so much the material itself that makes me ask, but the movie’s pop-rock soundtrack. Presumably, this film is aimed at audiences just barely old enough to qualify for admittance to […]

Armed with a cult-favorite comic book, just the right actor to play the title character, and the kind of budget he couldn’t have imagined when making movies like Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone, Guillermo del Toro ought to have had a great film right at his fingertips with Hellboy. And maybe he did, but if […]

Yes, everything you’ve heard about the sexual frankness in The Dreamers is true. Not only is there a good bit of skin, but it’s surprisingly — and literally — in your face. And there’s also a good bit of sex — explicit sex. And since the film deals with both incest and sublimated homosexuality, it’s […]

Julia Stiles exudes intelligence. Luke Mably (in his first major role) possesses charm and poise. Ben Miller nicely dishes up a sense of bemused superiority. James Fox is a tower of dignity. Miranda Richardson has style, intelligence and regal bitchery to spare. Director Martha Coolidge knows just how to pour on the romance with the […]

The only reason I ever saw Phil Karlson’s 1973 film Walking Tall was that I was a projectionist at a drive-in — backed up to, aptly enough, a cow pasture — that was showing this fluke exploitation hit. I was frankly morally opposed to what I knew of its shoot-first-ask-questions-later brand of “justice,” and nothing […]

In one of Kevin Smith’s deliriously subversive Jay and Silent Bob movies, Jay (Jason Mewes) complains that he can’t watch Pretty in Pink with Silent Bob (Smith), because “this tubby bitch cries like a little girl.” Who would have guessed that this was probably not a joke after all, but a very real assessment of […]