While I could never make a case for Night at the Museum as a good film, it deserves some kind of recognition for the amazing demographic range it aims to snare. It’s an effects-centered fantasy with an ambulatory T. Rex skeleton for the kids. It has the Ben Stiller appeal for the Generation X audience […]

It’s difficult not to admire the attempt of The Good Shepherd. It’s even difficult — at least in my case — not to want to like it. I certainly have no quibble with its politics or with the intentions behind it. Similarly, the fragmented nature of the presentation is adroitly handled and adds to the […]

With Eragon, visual-effects wizard Stefen Fangmeier turns director and proves himself the logical successor to Uwe Boll. Not since Dr. Boll’s idiot masterpiece BloodRayne (2005) have so many good actors been so utterly subjected to this degree of humiliation in search of a paycheck. Oh, sure, the actors have only themselves to blame (can it […]

I should confess straight off that somehow or other E.B. White’s 1952 book Charlotte’s Web is not a part of my childhood, though I’m certainly from exactly the right era. I don’t really know why. Maybe I thought it was a “girl’s book.” Well, OK, I preferred Nancy Drew to the Hardy Boys (wanna make […]

I’ll admit it upfront — I am not an admirer of Frank Capra’s Christmas perennial It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). No, I’m inclined to agree with the critics who savaged it at the time of its original release and the audiences who stayed away from it en masse. It’s one of those movies that only […]

In the opening scenes of Mark Waters’ Mean Girls (2004), there’s a clip where we see what are described as “weirdly religious” home-schooled children with one of the kids telling us, “And on the third day, God created the Remington bolt-action rifle, so that man could protect himself against the dinosaurs — and the homosexuals.” […]

I put as much time between seeing Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe (2004) and writing about it as I could. I even slept on it. I still don’t quite know what to make of it. Except for the fact that I’m hardly an expert on Thai Cinema (having seen The Protector probably isn’t […]

Not content with the usual “based on real events” approach, McG’s (I can’t help the name, that’s how he signs his films) We Are Marshall opens by boldly proclaiming, “This is a true story.” I have no doubt that the essential facts in the case are true. And I have no doubt that the resulting […]

So here it is — Mel Gibson’s supposedly visionary Apocalypto, and, truth to tell, it’s about as visionary as a 1940s Republic Pictures serial with the glossy sheen of an Indiana Jones picture lacquered over it. (In fact, with a little script doctoring, it might have been serviceable as Indiana Jones and the Temple of […]

Breathless (1960) marks the start of French New Wave cinema, and regardless of how one feels about Jean-Luc Godard’s later, less accessible works, it would be hard to find a more audacious debut feature. The problem with it today is that so much of what was fresh and revolutionary in 1960 has been assimilated into […]

Saying that Nancy Meyers’ The Holiday is the best of the year’s Christmas movies to date isn’t saying very much, since the competition so far consists of The Santa Clause 3, Deck the Halls, The Nativity Story and Christmas at Maxwell’s. It doesn’t take much to beat those. The problem is that what it’s really […]

The biggest problem with Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond — apart from getting used to Leonardo DiCaprio’s accent — is that it’s an Edward Zwick film. Zwick’s penchant for wanting to make “important” films keeps threatening to bog down an otherwise entertaining adventure story with messages that often seem slightly at odds with the material. Zwick […]

There’s a reason why Christmas pageants tend to clock in at about 20 minutes — a reason that Catherine Hardwicke’s 100-minute The Nativity Story demonstrates with tedious tenacity. The problem is simple: There’s just not all that much story, plus the story is so well known and has been told so often that a straightforward […]

After being subjected to both Christmas at Maxwell’s and The Nativity Story, I figured that a movie where a bunch of pretty B-list actors get carved up by a mad — or at least extremely annoyed — surgeon might be a nice break. I hadn’t reckoned on the incompetence of director John Stockwell. Having spent […]

The first thing you notice about Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly (2004) is how much more technically accomplished it is than most films we see from this part of the world. The colors are bright and vivid, the images are sharp and detailed, the compositions are elegant and striking, the camerawork as slick […]

If Emilio Estevez had made this film under the name Fred Smith, I suspect it would be receiving a much fairer shake at the hands of a lot of critics than it is. But because Estevez was a member of the “Brat Pack,” starred in some dubious movies (one he made himself), and is the […]

Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) was such a phenomenon at the box office that it became the first foreign language film to make over $100 million in the U.S. — a rare instance where box office receipts and artistic merit do go hand in hand. The film has so many different elements that […]

There’s a rumor I’ve heard whispered that at some point in its creation, Deck the Halls contained at least one original idea. However, the producers were so outraged by this affront to their commercial sensibilities that the idea was surgically excised and the perpetrator summarily executed. That’s probably not true, if only because any original […]

While — believe it or not — I go into every film hoping it will be good, the prospect of finding merit in just about anything signed by Tony Scott (Spy Game (2001) and The Hunger (1983) to one side) seemed sufficiently remote to warrant something approaching cinematic dread when settling in for Deja Vu. […]

If you’re a fan of Christopher Guest’s particular brand of humor, you may want to knock the star rating on For Your Consideration up a notch, though probably not much more. I freely confess to finding Guest’s “mockumentaries” too much of the one-joke variety, so I’m not the most sympathetic viewer in the house. Still, […]