Three people — including producer/guest-star Queen Latifah — cooked up the story for this Barbershop wannabe. At that point, three more folks (none with previous writing credits) grilled the concept into an overdone screenplay that manages to incorporate every racial stereotype known to man. And finally, record-label co-founder-turned-director Lance Rivera served it up almost entirely […]

Victor Sjostrom is probably best remembered today for his starring role as professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s classic Wild Strawberries. However, Sjostrom — or Seastrom, as he was rechristened by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for American consumption — was also a powerful filmmaking pioneer whose directing (and acting) career dates back to 1912 in his native Sweden. […]

William Makepeace Thackeray’s sprawling comic novel Vanity Fair has been irresistible where the movies are concerned, going back as far as 1911. Four adaptations were made even before the dawn of sound, followed by two talkies. The “definitive” version, Becky Sharp, made in 1935 by Rouben Mamoulian, remains a stylistic and technical milestone (it was […]

I should start by explaining the high rating on this barely just-better-than-direct-to-video opus. It gets two stars for unintentional mirth, plus one more for a high simian quotient. This last star may seem a little specialized, but in the case of Anacondas, it also accounts for quite the best performance in the film. That’s not […]

Garden State is that rarest of things: a quirky film that actually is quirky, and that isn’t just working overtime in a desperate attempt to seem that way. And I say that despite its climactic wrap-up, which is just too neat and tidy — and which screams of post-test-screening remonkeying. Sure, the film has moments […]

Yimou Zhang’s Hero is easily the most gorgeous film gracing movie screens right now. No matter that its beautifully designed, color-themed flashbacks inextricably reminded me of the three-tribulations section of Ken Russell’s Tommy and the shifting color schemes (in both set and costume design) that divide the restaurant in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, […]

Silent-comedy legend Buster Keaton’s last independent film — and penultimate one under his exclusive control — before giving himself over to MGM, which proceeded to run his career into the ground. Steamboat Bill, Jr., from 1928, is one of the comedian’s richest works. Far more elaborate than the breezy, but minor, College, this movie returned […]

E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire may have been the first film to which I gave a five-star review after starting this column four years ago (in any case, it was certainly among the first). As a result, I was really looking forward to his next effort, Suspect Zero. And while I think the […]

I can’t help being amused by the short-term memories of critics who claim that Renny Harlin’s Exorcist: The Beginning has killed The Exorcist franchise. Obviously, they don’t remember what happened in 1977, when John Boorman handed Warner Bros. a $14.5 million art film called Exorcist II: The Heretic. Boorman’s movie, tremendously expensive for its time, […]

This presentation by the nonprofit Media Arts Project is a collection of 17 short films made using motion graphics, computer animation and digital video. Few entries run more than four minutes, with some clocking in at scarcely a minute. All are related only in that they were created using modern technologies and steer away from […]

Don’t believe the hype! Every year there’s at least one movie that the majority of the critical populace goes lollipops over, but that leaves the rest of us scratching our collective heads trying to figure out what movie they saw, because it sure as hell wasn’t the same one we were at. The year’s not […]

Early on in Alien Vs. Predator, we get a glimpse of what one of the recruits for the scientific expedition that sets the plot in motion is watching on TV — the granddaddy of all monster-battle flicks, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Now, there was a movie born of a desire to get more mileage […]

Something about the music of Cole Porter appears to inspire folly on a grand scale — at least when that music is taken out of its original settings. The most notorious example of this is Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love. When I first saw that film upon its original release in 1975, people slowly […]

A great, glowing neon sign reading Suspicions Confirmed appeared in my brain when I went to check writer/producer/director/star Morgan Spurlock’s credentials after watching his Super Size Me. I discovered that Spurlock’s only other credit was as producer and actor on an MTV series called I Bet You Will. See, I knew there was a reason […]

Yes, I know, I’m supposed to be cranky (which is a nice way of saying I’m curmudgeonly — and besides, it rhymes). So why don’t I hate this sequel to The Princess Diaries like I’m supposed to — and as most of my fellow critics seem to? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a sucker […]

A seminal cult classic the exact appeal of which has always eluded me, though most of the world seems to adore it. I hadn’t watched The Princess Bride in years when I did so again for this review. And while I can’t say that seeing it anew really changed my point of view on it, […]

Finding Nemo was the big animated film of 2003 (OK, so there wasn’t a Lilo and Stitch or a Spirited Away up against the Pixar offering that year), and one of that year’s biggest money-makers. I didn’t originally review the film and nothing about its trailer really enticed me to see it for the sheer […]

Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service is, of course, a thing of great visual beauty. Although the director’s work is casually lumped into the class of animated films called anime, his films nonetheless have a kind of fluidity of movement that is all too often absent in that genre. (Anime, which basically just means Japanese animation, […]

I’m beginning to think that there’s some kind of curse attached to people who won kudos for their performances in Girl, Interrupted. Think about the careers and career moves of Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie and Brittany Murphy in the wake of that film. It’s not pretty. And Little Black Book does nothing to change that […]

I admit to being pretty disenchanted with the indie-film scene. It’s become so enmeshed in its own formula of calculated quirkiness that it rarely shows any more originality than does the most heavily test-marketed Hollywood extravaganza — and sometimes less so. I’m equally over the indie-film snobbery that works on the belief that if a […]