Even on those occasions when it doesn’t work — and on those occasions when it aims for an emotional response that isn’t there — Bryan Barber’s Idlewild is a fascinating work. It’s perhaps the single most fascinating work of 2006 to date. It’s also one of the most downright peculiar ones. At the end of […]
At one point in Don Mancini’s Seed of Chucky (2004), Jennifer Tilly’s personal assistant warns her that she’ll go to hell if she sleeps with a director to get a part, whereupon Miss Tilly counters, “Hell would be ending up on Celebrity Fear Factor in a worm-eating contest with Anna Nicole Smith.” Bob Dolman’s How […]
I tend to be a hard sell on social-conscience-driven documentaries, even while I recognize the often noble intentions behind them. Perhaps it’s because I see too many of them over the course of the year. By the time I finish watching the collected films for the Amnesty International Film Festival, the sensory overload sometimes makes […]
The good news is Beerfest is a little better than comedy troupe Broken Lizard’s Super Troopers (2001), considerably better than their Club Dread (2004), and about a million times better than their work-for-hire participation on The Dukes of Hazzard (2005). The bad news is it’s still pretty dreadful. There are a handful of moments so […]
“Adobo” is the national Filipino dish made of pork, chicken, garlic and olive oil. And that should be enough to tell you that this is another one of those films where a series of stories are linked to the act of eating and getting together — this time with a group of disparate friends who […]
Like its titular hero, Vance ambles along in a wayward fashion that becomes ever more unsettling — and that’s both the problem and the strength of this home-grown production. What starts out as a slightly too-full-of-itself quirky comedy (of sorts) evolves into a sober examination of an alienated and disaffected college student. Even while looking […]
An almost textbook example of how to use a personal story to tell and illuminate a much larger one (are you listening, Oliver Stone?), The Official Story (1985) snagged an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and propelled director and co-writer Luis Puenzo to a brief (one film, Old Gringo) Hollywood career. The story is […]
Clever and undeniably peculiar, Strangers with Candy suffers from both a complete lack of focus and a terminal case of self-satisfaction. I’ve never seen the Comedy Central series on which it’s based, but I suspect that the overall concept works better in 30-minute doses than it does here. At feature length, the concept of Amy […]
Can a bad movie that deliberately sets out to be a bad movie rightly be called a good movie? If that movie is the much anticipated Snakes on a Plane, then I’m going to say that the answer is yes. It’s become impossible to separate the fabricated hype and Internet buzz that surrounds the film […]
Much like the southern migration of geese, Material Girls has joined what seems to have become an annual occurrence (after 2005’s The Perfect Man and 2004’s Raise Your Voice): the push to turn former teen sensation Hilary Duff into a honest-to-goodness adult actress (not that kind, get your mind out of the gutter). And while […]
I suppose the worst thing that can be said about Accepted is that it’s thoroughly inconsequential. That’s also the best thing that can be said about it. Yes, Justin Long (Jeepers Creepers) is an agreeable screen presence (even if he’s a pretty unlikely high school senior at the age of 28) and you want to […]
There’s only one thing worse than being a period piece, and that’s being an out-of-period piece. No, that’s not entirely true, but after 93 minutes of Wildean epigrams — both genuine and ersatz — I seem to have become inflicted with arch-speak, or at least more so than usual. Taking Oscar Wilde’s 1892 play, Lady […]
Zoom is a bad movie. I know it’s a bad movie. It’s badly written, badly directed, badly acted, badly edited, badly scored and beyond badly overdubbed. On nearly every level it’s one of the worst movies I’ve seen this year. And yet it’s strangely not unlikable — something I’m hard-pressed to understand. All I can […]
I have never been a fan of Oliver Stone. His films have always seemed like bombastic attacks lacking in focus and suffused with anger at everything in general and nothing in particular. This dates back at least to his cheesy horror film The Hand (1981), a silly movie about, yes, a crawling hand (“It lives. […]
Few films are as deeply flawed yet so essential to a great director’s filmography as John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). I suppose Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman (1935) runs a close second, and for a lot of the same reasons. Both films contain all the trademarks of their […]
There’s gotta be something right about a movie when half the audience dances up the theater aisles when it’s over. They aren’t complaining that Step Up is a generic, paint-by-number teen dance movie. They weren’t around when Fame (1980) and Flashdance (1983) created the mold a generation ago. Nor do they care that Step Up […]
The day after I saw Pulse someone came up to me and announced he’d just received bad news, and though he never told me what the news was, he complained that it hadn’t been delivered in person or even by a call. Instead it had come to him in the form of a coldly impersonal […]
Additional Comments: August 16, 2006 In many ways this genial fantasy can be seen as the film where Tim Burton grew up. Yes, its utterly fantastic storyline — adapted from a not terribly good novel by Daniel Wallace — is no different from the bulk of Burton’s work. It can even be seen as a […]
Flawed though it is in many respects, Patrick Stettner’s film version of Armistead Maupin’s novel The Night Listener is far and away the most interesting film to open this week. That’s not necessarily a major accomplishment up against Will Ferrell as a NASCAR driver, a group of spelunkers getting eaten by blind albino cave dwellers […]
If he’s remembered at all today, James Clavell is primarily thought of as a novelist (most especially Shogun), with a few people perhaps remembering his screenwriting on films as diverse as The Fly (1958) and The Great Escape (1963) — but he also made a few movies. The most famous (perhaps because of the theme […]
The Descent is this year’s (or maybe this season’s) “new face of horror” candidate. As near as I can determine, this whole “new face of horror” started in 1987 when Stephen King raved about Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. And that was a pretty good movie — at least so far as movies about haunted Rubik’s cubes […]
