Get Rich or Die Tryin’ was better than I thought it would be, but don’t mistake that for a ringing endorsement. I was firmly convinced it was going to be just plain awful, and it’s not — at least as filmmaking, thanks to director Jim Sheridan. Parts of it are pretty bad — and at […]

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it’s not stranger than Werner Herzog, whose documentary on grizzly bear expert Timothy Treadwell is both real and strange — and far more central to Herzog’s overall work than might at first be assumed. Grizzly Man, a look at self-styled expert Treadwell, is as quirky and ironic as […]

When Warner Oland died in 1938, 20th Century Fox wasn’t about to lose one of its most lucrative products, so they quickly replaced him with Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan – and, like Charlie himself had done, “carried on.” Their first effort — Charlie Chan in Honolulu — was rather weak, in part because director […]

Even if you aren’t already burned out by the incessant ad campaign for Disney’s desperate bid to turn itself into Pixar or Dreamworks, you’re apt to find Chicken Little pretty tough slogging — assuming you’re beyond the age of 10. Granting the fact that Disney’s last-gasp hand-drawn animation efforts have been — with the exception […]

Actor Liev Schreiber makes a very audacious debut as a writer/director with Everything Is Illuminated, a strange film that starts out as one thing and transforms into something quite different before it’s done. I haven’t read the source novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, which is apparently something of a fantasticated memoir (the main character of […]

We live in an age where people — Ann Coulter, in particular — are trying to rehabilitate or re-invent or re-imagine the long-disgraced Sen. Joseph McCarthy as some kind of misunderstood American hero. Tom Sawyer and Aunt Polly’s fence had nothing on this line of thought when it comes to whitewash, so it’s more than […]

Walking out of the Fine Arts on Friday night after seeing Julian Fellowes’ Separate Lies, I overheard a woman tell a friend, who was on her way in, that the film was “very dry, but marvelously acted.” Once on the sidewalk, I turned to my companion and said, “I think ‘dry’ is about the last […]

I doubt it’s necessary by this time to point out that this isn’t your average Steve Martin movie. It isn’t aimed at the same audience who can’t wait for Cheaper by the Dozen 2. It’s not even aimed at the five or six people who actually went to see the agreeably quirky Novocaine. And it […]

Having finally been forced to watch Jeremiah Chechik’s much detested big screen version of the classic ’60s British TV series, I have to confess that I thought it was a lot of well-intended fun. That sentence will get me branded a traitor by Avengers fans — and, yes, I’m a major fan of the show. […]

Just as he did with Outfoxed, documentarian Robert Greenwald takes aim in his latest effort at a corporate giant — this time, Wal-Mart. And as before, his approach presents more facts than opinions, a tactic that separates Greenwald from Michael Moore, whose documentaries, built around the filmmaker as star, might better be called “essay films.” […]

Artistically, this may be Gore Verbinski’s best film — certainly it’s his most ambitious and daring. And that in itself works against it in a twisted way with many film snobs crying out, “How dare this commercial filmmaker presume to tackle something weighty?” After this, they conclude that it’s not weighty at all, thereby proving […]

This late-in-the-day offering from Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa — with its compendium of stories drawn from the director’s own dreams — is undeniably uneven, owing to the fragmented structure. As is often the case with “portmanteau” films, it’s simply a case of some episodes being more interesting than others. Even that can be a subjective […]

Far and away the most popular of the Warner Oland Charlie Chan films, Charlie Chan at the Opera owes much of its success to the presence of guest star Boris Karloff (given special billing with “Warner Oland versus Boris Karloff”) as a deranged opera star and the undeniable horror element this adds, combined with atmospheric […]

When Fox Films ran out of novels to adapt for their immensely profitable series of relatively inexpensive mysteries featuring the Chinese detective, the studio hit upon the idea of sending the supposedly Honolulu-based sleuth on a run of globe-trotting adventures where he could solve murders in exotic locales — even if those locales actually never […]

I’ve no clue why anyone thought of turning F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby into something that might better be called Hip Hop in the Hamptons. Perhaps director and co-writer Christopher Scott Cherot thought that since no one had made a really successful film of the novel by approaching it in a straight manner (though […]

I had the pleasant experience of seeing Saw II in pretty distinguished company, which included Don Mancini (the creator of the homicidal Chucky doll and writer-director of Seed of Chucky) and Barry Sandler (the writer-producer of the Ken Russell film Crimes of Passion). We tried to get Ken Russell to go with us, but he […]

How do you review a movie like Doom? Why even bother? Doom is exactly what you think it is — a noisy, gory, silly movie taken from a video game, populated with disposable cardboard characters running around corridors shooting guns and/or being chased and eaten by nasty monsters. You already know whether it’s on your […]

Like North Country, which also opened this week, Kids in America is a fact-“inspired” picture with a message — but of a much more modest scale. Kids is low-budget, low-profile and a bit ragged, and it unfortunately trades on the fortunately very limited presence of Paris Hilton nemesis Nicole Richie in its cast. But I’d […]

First-time documentarian David Redmon takes an unusually cinema verite (well, with the addition of rather non-verite subtitles on occasion) approach to what would otherwise have been yet another dry-as-dirt, dull-as-ditchwater tract on the evils of globalization. Rather than preach on the topic, he allows his footage to speak for itself — crosscutting footage of Mardi […]

The very fact that there’s nothing wrong with North Country may be what’s wrong with it. The film is so efficient at being exactly what it sets out to be that it could become the classic text for a filmmaking class called “Crafting the Message Picture 101” (as well as a supplementary teaching aid for […]