For a brief period — roughly from this 1972 release till 1978’s The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain — Lina Wertmuller was the darling of the art house crowd. All Screwed Up, Love and Anarchy, Swept Away… by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of […]
It’s rare that I’m at a loss for words, but this particular … whatever-it-is called TV Carnage: A Sore for Sighted Eyes leaves me more than a little perplexed. Oh, I know — broadly speaking — what it is: about 70 minutes of bizarre clips from movies and TV shows and adverts and PSAs and […]
Let me freely confess this: When I pick up the Mountain Xpress on Wednesday, I first check the letters to see if anyone has sent me a … uh … valentine. Then I glance at the movie pages to see how they look. With that out of the way, I settle in to do the […]
By the time this insufferably messy melange of romantic comedy and buddy comedy hit the 30-minute mark, I fully expected the projector to grind to a halt, slink away in embarrassment and do the decent thing by throwing itself off the building onto the pavement below. That, unfortunately, did not happen, though I have it […]
The great Indian director Satyajit Ray chose this charming, small-scale human drama (with decided comedic overtones) as his swan song, and a more fitting end to his career could hardly be imagined. Working from a very simple concept — a great uncle (Utpal Dutt) missing for 35 years returns to visit a niece (Mamata Shankar), […]
This Tim Burton-produced film version of Roald Dahl’s children’s book kicks off a series of free screenings of Burton films at Pack Memorial Library. It’s not quite up to the filmmaker’s usual standard, but it still has much to recommend it as an example of intelligently and creatively bringing a book to the screen. Burton’s […]
There are so many things that are right with Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest that it seems a shame not to be able to rank it as high as his first film (in what will ultimately be a trilogy), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The problem […]
Your fondness for — not to say tolerance of — The Devil and Daniel Johnston will probably depend on how deeply you embrace grunge rock and the concept that all artists are insane. Its subject/hero Daniel Johnston is first seen being introduced at a concert as the “greatest singer-songwriter alive today,” an appellation that filmmaker […]
As Street Fighter should have been to Raul Julia, who died not long after appearing in that 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme opus, this film version of the long-running Broadway play ought to have proven a great lesson to director Michael Ritchie. The lesson? Be careful, you never know what film will be your last. OK, […]
I was too young at 13 for The Graduate when it was released in 1967, and by the time I caught up with it on a 13-inch TV in a 1970s dorm room, in a hideous-looking, pan-and-scan and editedversion, , I was merely baffled by its reputation. Seeing the film as Mike Nichols originally intended, […]
The title of this documentary just about says it all. Davis Guggenheim’s film of Al Gore’s campaign to make the problem of global warming better understood and recognized presents a truth that is indeed inconvenient to a great many people — people who will probably never see the movie. I have friends who would benefit […]
It would be unwise to approach Josef von Baky’s 1943 Munchhausen expecting anything like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the 1988 Terry Gilliam film adapted from the same material. Despite having a few similarities, this “German Wizard of Oz” is a very different kettle of winged monkeys. It was made in Germany during World War […]
Despite the fact that I could happily go the rest of my life without seeing another in the seemingly endless procession of superhero comic book movies, I had awaited Superman Returns with some anticipation. True, Superman is far and away the dullest of comic book characters. He completely lacks the darker side inherent in Batman, […]
Viewed dispassionately, this probably ought to get decked at least a half-star for plot predictability alone. I mean, here’s the pitch :Awkward journalism grad Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) comes to the big city where she lands a job as personal assistant to high-powered fashion magazine editrix Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), despite the fact that she […]
Michalangelo Antonioni’s first color film, The Red Desert (1964), could be called a film for persons who found The Passenger too straightforward and cheery. In some ways, this is Art House 101 stuff — the kind of movie you just know is good for you, because it’s so damn dull and depressing. It’s cinema as […]
The jury is still out (and probably always will be) as to whether The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries is Ingmar Bergman’s greatest film. For me, it depends largely on my mood of the moment — today, I’d lean toward The Seventh Seal. It is hard to deny that The Seventh Seal is the film […]
There’s something more than a little bit ironic that a movie preaching the gospel of the value of having nothing should rake in a projected $40 million on its opening weekend. Yes, the latest Adam Sandler assault on the art of film is one of those films — the kind where multi-millionaires explain to you […]
The period from the late 1960s to early 1970s was one of filmmaking’s most adventurous eras. Films that were unthinkable a few years earlier were being made by filmmakers ready to test the new “permissiveness” of the ratings system. Unfortunately, a number of these films were made for short-lived production companies and have subsequently drifted […]
This movie is mediocrity incarnate. Watching it I felt brain cells leaping to their deaths like so many lemmings. I tried thinking of the experience in terms of training for the Big Fight — toughening up for the eventuality of Little Man opening on July 14 — but it didn’t work. There may be some […]
This alternately engaging and clunky comedy comes from local production outfit, Papercookie. Who or what is Papercookie? According to the press release, it’s “a film production collective of art/film school dropouts who left college to pursue do-it-yourself independent filmmaking.” Comprised of John Ferrer (writer-director of Grownups), Aubrey Curtis and Joe Chang, the group left the […]
I don’t know that it’s fair to say that Jared Hess’ new film, Nacho Libre, proves that his film Napoleon Dynamite was a fluke. In the end, Nacho Libre is pretty much the same film all over again — right down to its nebbishy hero (Jack Black) and his even more nebbishy sidekick (Mexican actor […]
