This one’s good, but it’s still a disappointment coming from the man who made The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. Those films — especially Unbreakable — were horrific fantasies that used their genre to make a larger point. Unbreakable, apart from some pretty significant issues of faith, was a film about myth and the power of […]
Any movie can be made to look much worse than it really is by a trailer that innacurately suggests the film is a broadly-played non-stop parade of knee-slapping, rib-tickling, belly laughs. Yes, there are some pretty broad scenes in Simone — and some actually as funny as the filmmaker thinks they are — but all […]
There was me — that is, one lone critic — and a tolerant friend sitting in the otherwise empty Sunday matinee of Slackers, trying to make up our minds as to whether anything even remotely positive could be said about the movie. The closest we could come was, “Well, it’s only 87 minutes long.” And, […]
As if to prove to the world that he’s a good bit more than “Mr. Madonna,” writer-director Guy Ritchie has expanded on his low-budget breakthrough film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, with this much larger-budgeted crime caper. The results may not make the bulk of the world start thinking of Madonna as Mrs. Guy […]
If I was 10 years old, I’d probably love this predictable, silly little comedy. Since I’m not 10 years old, my feelings on Snow Dogs are somewhat less enthusiastic. I suppose you could say, “It’s good for what it is,” but even that’s somewhat stretching the truth. It’s more a case of “it’s adequate for […]
I spent a lot of the first 20 minutes or so of Solaris thinking that George Clooney (especially in this era of Sean Penn, Leonardo DiCaprio and Owen Wilson) is what a movie star should be. I also spent a period of time admiring a set of bookshelves behind Clooney in one scene. And as […]
In terms of both concept and execution, it is hard to fault writer-director Paul Morrisson’s debut film, Solomon and Gaenor. Nor can the film be accused of not being daring in a number of areas. That is both its great strength and its central problem, because — as brilliantly made as it is — Solomon […]
After watching this harmless adaptation of Laura Zigman’s novel, Animal Husbandry, all I could think of was Rex Harrison in Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours describing a movie he’s just seen “which questioned the necessity of marriage for eight reels and then concluded it was essential in the ninth.” Someone Like You does much the same […]
Local interest runs high concerning writer-director Maggie Greenwald’s Songcatcher, owing to the fact that it was filmed around here (indeed, the Fine Arts Theatre is scheduling an extra “late” show throughout the week, rather than just Friday and Saturday, as is their usual practice). For that matter, parts of the film were made on the […]
I hated the first 10 to 15 minutes of this movie with the kind of passion I usually reserve for Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis retrospectives. It was stupid, gross, sexist and mean-spirited in the extreme. Then something happened to the film as soon as the boys got themselves all dragged up. The movie became more good-natured […]
In a burst of typical studio wimpdom, Artisan pulled Steve Carpenter’s horror flick, Soul Survivors, back into the studio and recut the once R-rated movie so that it would be easier to book in our PG-13 world. The move may have pleased a few politicians. It may even have made the movie easier to book. […]
When Spirited Away beat out Disney’s Lilo and Stitch for the Oscar as Best Animated Film of 2002, it no doubt came as a terrific shock to people who hadn’t been following all the awards that the limited-release Japanese import had already received. It certainly came as no surprise to the Disney folks, who promptly […]
It’s a pure pleasure of a popcorn movie that could very easily have opted to slide by on the strength of teaming sex-symbol movie stars of different eras: Redford and Pitt. Instead, the film goes the extra distance to be a first-rate vehicle for the duo. Looked at as anything much more than entertainment, it […]
The Saturday matinee audience I saw Spy Kids with at the Beaucatcher actually burst into applause when the film ended — and with complete justification. Writer-director Robert Rodriguez is one of the masters of ultra-stylish filmmaking, but his material has rarely been in the same league with his stylistic panache. Ironically, he seems to have […]
The big question: Is Spy Kids II as good as the unalloyed delight of Spy Kids? No, it probably isn’t, but it’s not far from it, and the comparison may be slightly unfair, since a great deal of the charm of the first film lay in the fact that it was such a surprise. This […]
Star Trek isn’t so much a series of movies or TV shows as it is a pop-culture phenomenon — and one that you either get, or you don’t. If you’re a fan of the series, chances are you’re going to be perfectly happy with this latest entry in the Trek-movie canon. If you’re not, you’re […]
It arrived at local theaters under a veil of secrecy, in cartons bearing a code name (gee, why are they shipping prints of an old Fred Astaire movie?) with the film itself bearing yet another code name! Take that, you would-be film pirates! But then, another label was affixed reading, “SW/EP 2 — ATTACK,” rather […]
The nicest thing that can be said about Stealing Harvard (which might have been called Freddy Gets Molested by a Dog) is that it’s not as obnoxious as Tom Green’s earlier cinematic foray, Freddie Got Fingered. That’s not only faint praise, it’s not entirely praise. While Stealing Harvard isn’t likely to challenge Freddy as “the […]
Saying that Stuart Little 2 is the best movie opening this week is definitely in the damning with faint praise department. It’s simply that it’s not as pompous and overbearing as K-19, nor as wrong-headed as Eight Legged Freaks. But I’d hardly call it a genuinely good movie. It’s slick — maybe too slick — […]
The five-man comedy group known as Broken Lizard, who are responsible for Super Troopers, originally banded together as undergraduates at Colgate University — a fact that shakes one’s faith in higher learning. At the same time, Super Troopers (at least according to the publicity boys) was a surprise hit at the Sundance Film Festival — […]
First off, I need to establish my bonafides concerning my southern status: I was born in Kannapolis, North Carolina, spent most of my life in a couple of small Florida towns, and came to Asheville about two years ago. With that in mind, I’m more than a little intrigued to see the South as it […]
