Late in Jason X one of the actresses utters the line, “This sucks on so many levels,” making it perhaps cinema’s first self-critiquing movie. I was hoping that Jason X would be the stirring biopic of a machete-wielding, hockey-mask-wearing civil-rights activist, but no. After the first few minutes of wholesale mayhem, when the big guy […]
As crass, vulgar, irreverent, raunchy, and iconoclastic as a movie can get, Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is also the savviest, cleverest and funniest movie to hit theater screens in a while — and it’s the first truly daring and subversive “shock” comedy in a year that has boasted more than its […]
As someone who’s spent large chunks of his life writing about horror movies in books and magazines, I know full well it’s a genre that, critically speaking, is the Rodney Dangerfield of cinema. It comes as a bit of a surprise, then, to see that Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers is on the receiving end of […]
I knew it was going to be bad, but it was worse than I imagined. The trailer clued the wary viewer in on the fact that Joe Dirt was going to be less than brilliant. Conceived and originally marketed as The Adventures of Joe Dirt, yet abbreviated at the last moment to merely Joe Dirt, […]
Heavy-handed, embarrassingly manipulative, plotted like a bad TV movie, John Q ought to have been called Dog Day Heart Transplant. No pun intended, but this movie’s heart is in the right place, even if nothing much else is. Do we need an indictment of the health-care system in this country and outrage over the fact […]
Tony Goldwyn as Jesus? Giancarlo Giannini as the Pope? What’s going on here? What’s going on is, of course, another “faith-based” drama of the sort that gets booked directly into theaters without benefit of a traditional releasing company (though Paramount is somehow involved with this one). These films usually aren’t very good, and tend to […]
Yes, it’s silly and even rather goofy. And Josie and the Pussycats has a central problem in that the girls — even with post-recording sweetening and Kay Hanley (Letters to Cleo) doing Josie’s actual vocalizing — can’t sing very well, a significant drawback for a musical. The film’s not anywhere near as funny as it […]
B-picture thrills with a vengeance are to be had in John Dahl’s Joy Ride, an efficient and stylish exercise in cinematic mayhem. True, it has a pair of central characters — Fuller (Steve Zahn) and Lewis Thomas (Paul Walker) — brothers who are neither very bright nor especially likable. Lewis is basically just a bit […]
All in all, Jurassic Park III isn’t a bad film … if plot, characterization, believability and originality don’t count. If you can think of the film as an extended amusement-park ride (actually, it often seems to have been inspired by the Dinosaur Encounter at Epcot, except you don’t get sprayed with mist — that’ll happen […]
Oh, dear, it’s the film industry’s annual January White Sale — the cinematic equivalent of the bargain table of remaindered books at Barnes and Noble. The only difference is that the movies being hastily dumped into theaters are rarely a bargain. Just Married is certainly no exception, and it’s only distinction lies in the fact […]
Juwanna spend 91 minutes watching Miguel A. Nunez Jr. (a supporting and bit-part actor, suddenly — and ill-advisedly — promoted to star status here) learn about the value of teamwork by dressing up as a woman? Juwanna see a lame, unfunny re-hash of Tootsie. played out on a basketball court? Juwanna movie with absolutely no […]
“I sound more like Boris Badenov than you do!” “No, I sound more like him than you do!” That at least is what I like to think Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson argued about while watching the dailies on this soggy submarine story. Having been subjected to their fluctuating accents in the trailer for K-19: […]
Though cursed with possibly the worst title in the history of film, threatening to smother in its own high-mindedness, and never getting anywhere near the level of profundity to which it aspires, K-Pax is at least a thoughtful, beautifully acted film with its heart in the right place — most of the time. Anyone who […]
A complete and almost wholly successful change of pace for director-co-writer James Mangold and the film that might finally transport Hugh Jackman (Swordfish) to the ranks of full-fledged movie star, Kate and Leopold provides the third truly worthy romantic comedy to come out this year. And if it’s not quite in the same league as […]
The worst thing that can be said about Kingdom Come — that it is a nice, well-intentioned little movie — is unfortunately also the best thing that can be said about it. There’s nothing horribly wrong with the film, yet almost everything about it just feels wrong. Why, for example, take an intimate source play […]
“Martial arts and cinema action superstar Jet Li and visionary filmmaker Luc Besson (The Professional, The Fifth Element) join forces on Kiss of the Dragon,” trumpets the press kit for Kiss of the Dragon — and in a sense, that’s true. Besson did co-produce and co-write the screenplay. However, the direction of the film was […]
It’s not a perfect movie. It’s not even as good as much of what has been said about it. It can’t seem to decide exactly what it wants to be. It trades too heavily on certain conventions of its genre. And it has an ending that it’s hard not to feel is a cop-out. But […]
Five minutes into the deplorable Knockaround Guys you know why it sat on the shelf for a couple of years. The movie opens with mobster Teddy Deserve (an embarrassing John Malkovich) trying to force 12-year-old Matty Demeret (Andrew Francis) to shoot the man who — according to Deserve — betrayed the boy’s father. When the […]
Apparently jealous over the fact that Paramount’s Pootie Tang beat out their Freddy Got Fingered as the worst comedy of 2001, 20th Century Fox makes an early bid for that honor in 2002 with Kung Pow: Enter the Fist — and they have done themselves proud. This may not only be 2002’s worst comedy, but […]
Admirers of Ray Lawrence’s Bliss (and I confess to being a major admirer) may be somewhat startled by his second film, Lantana (named for the pesky, invasive shrub), which arrives a mere 16 years after his debut work. (Prolific the man isn’t.) Less stylish, less playful and certainly a lot less fantasticated, Lantana seems at […]
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider seems to be a movie designed first and foremost to prove to the skeptical that there are far worse things awaiting the summer moviegoer than The Mummy Returns. The Mummy Returns was no great shakes, I grant you, but it emerges as the Citizen Kane of summer blockbusters by comparison. It […]
