Having utterly detested Terry Zwigoff’s last film, Bad Santa, and found his previous collaboration with writer Daniel Clowes, Ghost World, incredibly overrated, I approached this new Zwigoff-Clowes effort with no small degree of trepidation. And while the film won me over with its witty observations about art and art schools and its fascinating — and […]
It probably seems pretty tame today, but in 1942 when Cat People first appeared it was a pretty striking departure from the established horror genre. Producer Val Lewton, writer DeWitt Bodeen and director Jacques Tourneur didn’t exactly reinvent the genre, but they definitely rethought it. At the time horror had become largely associated with what […]
The majority of my fellow critics have jumped on this largely inoffensive little movie with undue vigor. Perhaps they used up all of their superlatives with their mystifying praise of Mission: Impossible III — a film they applauded for being the lobotomized actioner it set out to be. Strange then that they’re quick to fault […]
There’s a Web site, www.shipshake.com, that has been created to advertise this film, where you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to rock an S.S. Poseidon in a bottle till it capsizes. It’s a tremendous waste of time, yes, but less so than Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon, and considerably more entertaining. Petersen’s remake of […]
Before screening it for this review, I hadn’t seen Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai since I was 17, at which time it bored me out of my mind — and that was the 160-minute version. This was the restored 206-minute print. Well, either the film got better in the intervening years, or my tastes have changed. […]
What is this? Is it the world’s first R & B opera? Is singer R. Kelly the Fellini of music videos? I have no idea. Until I saw this 43-minute film, I’d never heard of R. Kelly (though both he and his 2005 film were parodied in the South Park episode on Scientology where a […]
Oh, dear, another “based on a true story” horror opus — and this one claims extra legitimacy because it’s based on “the only case in U.S. history where a spirit caused the death of a man.” Well, fair enough, but it’s equally worth noting that the case was tried in a rural Tennessee court in […]
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has gained a considerable reputation in recent years as one of the most interesting Japanese filmmakers specializing in horror films. Yet he has not attained quite the celebrity status in the U.S. as his fellow Japanese horrormeister Hideo Nakata (Ringu). Perhaps when his 2001 film Kairo sees new life in the Americanized Pulse […]
Though nowhere near being in the same league as Werner Herzog’s brilliant Grizzly Man, David Kaplan’s 35-minute documentary on the killing by bears of self-styled wildlife activist Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, in 2003 makes for an interesting companion piece. This third-place winner of the Twin Rivers Media Festival is an admirably straightforward […]
In the first scene of this third installment of the big screen Cruiseified version of the 1960s TV series, we find ourselves in a grubby torture room that looks like something out of Hostel or Saw. We also find that sadistic arch-villain Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has implanted an explosive in arch-agent Ethan Hunt’s […]
By turns clunky, corny and downright brilliant, Abel Gance’s 1936 biopic on Ludwig Van Beethoven is never less than fascinating — and it marks an attempt to break through to something more substantial than the typical Hollywood portrait of a historical great. Of course, Gance had already broken the biopic mould with a vengeance in […]
A little over 20 years ago, Three Men and a Cradle was one of those rare things — a foreign-language film that managed to attract a sizable American audience. In fact, it was popular enough to spawn an Americanized remake, Leonard Nimoy’s Three Men and a Baby, a couple years later. (The less said about […]
There are things that trouble me about Paul Greengrass’ United 93, but those things have nothing to do with whether it was “too soon” to make the film, or if it indeed should have been made at all. After seeing the film, however, I’m less sure that it wasn’t too soon for Greengrass. Greengrass is […]
It’s about as old-fashioned as it can be. It obviously attempts to cash in on the freakish success of Spellbound, as well as the art-house cache of Bee Season. At bottom, it’s basically a pretty standard uplifting underdog sports flick — except the sport is cerebral rather than physical. It culminates in what has to […]
Before South African filmmaker Jamie Uys took the art-house world by storm with The Gods Must Be Crazy, he made quite a few films, including his best-known work, Animals Are Beautiful People. The 1974 film is a decidedly offbeat documentary — a serio-comic look at the animals of the Namib Desert in southern Africa. It’s […]
I’m trying to think of a reason to give Barry Sonnenfeld’s most recent misfire anything beyond a half-star rating, and I’m not getting anywhere. Having laughed once — at Jeff Daniels as a good-natured rube saying, “I am filled with chagrin” — hardly seems a good enough reason. I will however note that there was […]
Both disappointing and not, American Dreamz confirms the suspicion that Paul Weitz is just too much a softie to be a wholly effective satirist. Perhaps that’s why Weitz has himself claimed that his new film isn’t a satire, but a comedy. The truth is that it’s more of a satirical farce than anything else — […]
David Hugh Jones was the third filmmaker to graduate from the BBC’s Monitor series — following (though less successfully) in the footsteps of John Schlesinger and Ken Russell. Though Jones’ forays into theatrical filmmaking have been limited, they’ve also tended to be of a literary nature and a pretty high caliber. Betrayal (1983)is an excellent […]
I enjoyed Friends with Money well enough while I was watching it. I didn’t think it was great, especially clever or profound. But it was entertaining in its slight way, and for a change I didn’t spend the bulk of a movie with Jennifer Aniston wondering what the fuss is over her — perhaps because […]
Film-school grad and first-time filmmaker Monty Lapica overcomes a slightly off-putting screen presence and the fact that he’s a little too long in the tooth to be playing a high-school kid in the surprisingly assured Self Medicated, released in 2005. Lapica plays Andrew Eriksen (a thinly veiled version of himself), a high-school whiz kid who’s […]
I deliberately avoided learning very much about the Silent Hill video games on which Christophe Gans’ film of the same name is based. I wanted — as nearly as possible — to approach it as a film on its own merits, since I’ve never played the game and likely never will. I also had no […]
