This attempt at resuscitating the old Blake Edwards-Peter Sellers franchise raises the question of whether a film can be said to at least fitfully succeed as a comedy if some of the gags are so bad that their very ineptitude is a cause for mirth — painful mirth, yes, but mirth all the same. Offhand, […]
“Forget it, Jake. It’s New Year’s Town.” That bit of altered Chinatown dialogue makes a good description for the months of January and February at the movies. There’s almost never anything to get excited about at the movies until March. It would have been foolish to approach Simon West’s When a Stranger Calls with anything […]
Watching Wolfgang Petersen’s Hollywood movies Outbreak and Troy can make you wonder what all the fuss about him was in the first place. Even at their best, those films scale the heights of lowest-common-denominator adequacy and might just as easily have been done by a John McTiernan — or with a little bad luck, a […]
Reviewed Feb 8, 2006 One of the delights for me of movies coming back around for film society and other special showings is the opportunity it provides for reassessment — and the simple excuse to watch them again. Not having seen the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? in some time, I wasn’t sure […]
Something New really isn’t, at least insofar as the basics of the romantic-comedy formula are concerned. The film definitely plays by the conventions of its genre. Uptight businesswoman Kenya (Sanaa Lathan, Alien Vs. Predator) and landscape architect Brian (Simon Baker, Land of the Dead) “meet cute” on a disastrous blind date. Circumstances force them into […]
I never saw the original Big Momma’s House, and I can safely say that the likelihood of my having seen its sequel if I hadn’t been reviewing it is marginally less than the probability of my mounting a Himalayan expedition in search of the yeti. The film follows in the footsteps of Martin Lawrence’s last […]
Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins make a perfect — if somewhat unorthodox — screen team in this delightful new film from Stephen Frears about the history of London’s legendary Windmill Theatre. Don’t let the historical notion — nor even that dreaded phrase “inspired by true events” — put you off. This is no dry study […]
Nanny McPhee may not be a great film — it certainly has its share of flaws — and yet it is such a strange brew as to be fascinating even at its worst. Its striking combination of day-glo psychedelic colors and a rich streak of morbidity is enough to keep it afloat most of the […]
In the sixth of the 11 chapters (plus prologue and epilogue) that make up Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband, we find the 85-year-old Johan (Erland Josephson, Scenes from a Marriage) with his ear pressed close to a stereo speaker listening to the second movement of Anton Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony — a piece of music that frames the […]
Perched precariously somewhere between popular entertainment and art-house fare, Richard Shepard’s The Matador is a constantly entertaining, invariably good-looking, bittersweet black comedy that’s actually a lot more sentimental than it seems to think. The premise, as expressed by the tag line, “A hit man and a salesman walk into a bar …,” suggests something pretty […]
Idiosyncratic visionaries don’t come any more idiosyncratic or visionary than Werner Herzog — especially when Herzog was teamed up with his madman in residence, Klaus Kinski, as he is here in the first of their six films together. The film is Herzog’s imagining of what happened to a group of men who were sent out […]
Back in 1963, a silly Bob Hope picture by the name of Call Me Bwana offered the concept of Hope as a bogus authority on Africa who was sent by President Kennedy to the innermost recesses of the continent to help discover the location of a spy satellite that came down where it wasn’t meant […]
I cannot in good conscience recommend The New World. Still, I have to admit that I admired this film more than a number I have recommended. Calling The New World a noble failure or a grand folly would be the easy way out of explaining my high regard for Terrence Malick’s film on the story […]
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 film The Passenger — being given a new lease on theatrical life by star Jack Nicholson — is probably more important as a representative of its time than as a film in its own right. Though it played at this past year’s Asheville Film Festival, I missed it owing to a hectic […]
This is the odd-film-out in the major works of Michael Powell and Emerich Pressburger — rarely spoken of in the same breath with their standard classics, The Life and Death of Col. Blimp, Stairway to Heaven, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, yet clearly part of the same creative impetus behind those films. Why? Well, […]
In most cases, I’ll go back and re-watch the previous film when tackling a sequel. In the case of Underworld Evolution, I contented myself, on the Life-Is-Too-Short principle, with merely looking over my review of Underworld. Doing so mostly reminded me that I’m still awaiting the return of werewolves in trousers — like Lon Chaney […]
After theatrical impresario John Barrymore’s disastrous production of Joan of Arc in Howard Hawks’ 1934 comedy Twentieth Century, Roscoe Karns’ character says of Oscar Jaffe (Barrymore’s character): “Well, he’s gonna end up in the breadline unless he figures out that these dithering horse operas with a lot of people staggering around in foul iron suits […]
Like a cinematic Roman candle, Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto bursts onto the screen ablaze with more color, more ideas, more nerve, more invention and more heart than just about anything imaginable — reminding us anew that Jordan is quite probably the finest filmmaker working today. He’s certainly the most stylish, but even more, he’s […]
J.B. Priestley used to be one of the most famous voices in 20th- century English literature. Today, the mention of his name is more apt to result in a blank stare than anything else. His plays are still known, but a quick search of Amazon.com shows only one of his novels, The Magicians, as readily […]
By turns brilliant and frustrating, Vincent Ward’s Map of the Human Heart (1993) is one of those films that you admire more for what it tries to do than for what it actually accomplishes. The movie is nothing if not ambitious, something that works both for and against it. Ward’s story contains a lot of […]
The opportunities for study and appreciation of film are truly inexhaustible — witness the fact that until this essential of the Italian Neo-Realist school of filmmaking was scheduled for a special showing, I’d managed to never catch up with it before, despite having watched just about everything of any note or repute that crossed my […]
