Judging by the reviews I’ve read for Cache, I am supposed to be blown away by its myriad profundities, its mastery of film, its ability to create tension, and so on. I’m not. I’m also supposed to have been shocked — shocked — by a scene of brutal daring unlike anything ever encountered in the […]
Atom Egoyan’s 2002 film, Ararat, met with very mixed reviews and a less-than-enthusiastic push by its distributors, Miramax. The film didn’t play in Asheville, which was understandable to some degree — not so much because the topic of the film is a volatile one, but because the film is so heavily layered in its construction […]
Reminiscent in some ways of Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters, this 2002 film from veteran filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli slipped under the radar most places (including Asheville), and despite its fanciful — occasionally downright preposterous — storyline, it’s hard to see why it didn’t receive more attention. Certainly, Jeremy Irons is a bankable enough name, and […]
More disposable than a five-day-old Good News razor, David Zucker’s Scary Movie 4 is strictly a movie for the moment. As with Zucker’s first outing in the series, it’s entirely reliant on the topical — and on the supposition that the viewer has seen (in this case) Saw, The Grudge, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, […]
As with all low-to-no-budget independent films, Lawrence Benner’s The Nudger must be judged on something of a sliding scale. It’s absurd, unfair and counterproductive to attempt to look at a $15,000 movie and expect it to measure up to even the most financially-constrained Hollywood production. What’s surprising then with The Nudger is how accomplished it […]
Perhaps because I was prepared for The Wild to be a disaster of the sort associated with the Hindenburg docking in Lakehurst, N.J., and it wasn’t quite that, I’m prepared to call it, pleasantly, not too appalling. Truthfully, for all its problems — ranging from lack of originality to uneven animation to indifferent writing — […]
You can tell spring is officially here because outdoor movies — courtesy of Walk-in Theatre — are back. And the first up has time travel, a band of roguish dwarves bent of thievery, the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson) at war with the Evil Genius (David Warner), some Monty Python-like humor, big name guest stars. What’s […]
Like the wondrous peacock that arrives late in the film in an unexpected manner, Fellini’s Amarcord is a thing of breathtaking beauty — and, along with 8 1/2, represents the filmmaker at his very best. For all his genius, Fellini was an artist who often seemed not to know when he’d gotten the good out […]
I’ve spent two days trying to figure out why I don’t like this cheerfully amoral cinematic con job as much as I feel I should. I don’t mind its lack of much in the way of a moral center, though making the solution hinge on a singularly cold-blooded act is not the best way to […]
It would be an easy thing to take apart Liz Friedlander’s Take the Lead. Yes, it’s the umpteenth retelling of one of those “teacher who made a difference” stories, designed to morally uplift viewers and leave them with a smile, a tear, a song in their hearts and, in this case, rhythm in their feet. […]
I’m not at all sure what the few detractors of this unusually sophisticated — and frequently hilarious — satire on spin-doctoring wanted it to be, though I get the sense that they wanted it more squarely aimed at Big Tobacco. I suppose that’s understandable, but the tobacco lobby is such an easy target that an […]
Even as a Happy Madison Production tossed together by Adam Sandler for about a buck and a quarter to showcase his otherwise unemployable buddy, Rob Schneider, The Benchwarmers plumbs new depths. This is less a movie than a catalog of bodily excretions and secretions. Aside from the obligatory assortment of flatulence “gags” (fla]tulence having become […]
Since it’s the question that seems to be central to this film, let me state from the outset that, no, unlike its predecessor, there is nothing of gynecological import in Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction. Perhaps that’s the “Risk” of the title, because certainly nothing else about this fantastically botched attempt to revive Sharon Stone’s […]
I first saw Fred Niblo’s silent version of Ben-Hur 34 years ago — a battered 16mm bootleg print courtesy of a film professor at the University of South Florida. The film was projected at silent speed (an error that made the film take what seemed like three days), looking very scratchy, with obviously missing footage, […]
I’m still not clear on what I think about this Russian vampire opus that works on its own particular mythology, and yet I saw it a full two days ago. After filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov’s Escape From Afghanistan in 1994 and a couple of movies under the auspices of exploitation master Roger Corman, Bekmambetov came into […]
Troma Films veteran James Gunn comes calling with his first feature as a director (he penned the above-average Dawn of the Dead remake). The amusingly gooey horror flick Slither is actually a work of some note, if only because it makes for a welcome respite from the trend that increasingly mistakes torture and sadism for […]
This clever short film kicks off April’s selection of Twin Rivers Media Festival award-winning films. A story is little more than a simple conceit, told without dialogue — thereby (consciously or not) following the dictates of Roman Polanski that short films should have no dialogue — and made with an attitude obviously picked up from […]
If you’ve never seen a Luis Bunuel film, it’s high time you did, and this 1972 Oscar winner is a good place to start. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is more accessible than some of Bunuel’s work and might just change your mind about the whole concept of “art films” and surrealism as something […]
Gorgeously photographed, thematically complex and nothing if not ambitious, but strangely lacking in emotional punch, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Abouna merits an A for effort, even if it finally qualifies as a worthy set of ideas and symbols that doesn’t quite come off as drama. The central problem is that Haroun seems to have tried to do […]
Spike Lee’s new one may not be the incendiary filmmaker’s best, but it just might be his most purely enjoyable and sophisticated. Make no mistake, Lee is still in his typically outspoken form, he’s still using film in the manner I described when reviewing 25th Hour — “like a wild-eyed protestor dousing himself with gasoline […]
The very existence of Larry the Cable Guy would seem like a pretty good argument against the concept of Intelligent Design. For that matter, I’d say it seriously calls into question whether the Piltdown skull really was a hoax. The fact that Larry can find himself in a feature film is undeniably a testament to […]
