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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Great grief! A highly-touted, highly-hyped independent film that actually deserves all the praise and the push? Do such things exist? Little Miss Sunshine proves that they do! Whether or not that’s one of the signs of the apocalypse, I don’t know. It certainly could be, but regardless, this isn’t one of those mystifyingly praised indies […]
Though I’ll be immediately branded a Philistine (not for the first or probably last time), I have to admit that Mozart is far from my favorite composer, and I suspect that it would take someone keener on his music than I am to get the good out of this 1955 Austrian biopic that was rechristened […]
Nothing — and I mean nothing — that you have heard or read can fully prepare you for Peter Watkins’ 1965 faux documentary on the aftermath of a nuclear attack on Great Britain. Forget Hollywoodized features like On the Beach (1959) or even the well-intentioned U.S. TV film The Day After (1983). This is as […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Awarding three and a half stars to Bride of the Monster (1955) deserves some explanation, since by any rational critical approach, it’s the sort of thing that ought to get one and half stars or maybe two on a good day. First of all, it’s a film — using the term rather loosely — that […]
In the penultimate scene of Annie Hall, Woody Allen excuses the happy ending in his play about his relationship with the title character, noting, “You know how you’re always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it’s real difficult in life.” That’s as good a summation as possible for what Tim […]
