D. A. Pennebaker virtually created, defined and refined the cinema verite style of the documentary film, so what more natural than finding he and his partners, Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus, at the helm of just such a documentary about the staging of the concert performance of the music from the Coen Brothers’ film, O […]
Down to Earth is a remake, but — and this must be clearly understood — it is not a remake of the 1947 film, Down to Earth. Rather, it is a remake of the 1978 Warren Beatty film, Heaven Can Wait, which is not a remake of the 1943 Ernst Lubitsch film Heaven Can Wait, […]
This sequel to the 1998 blockbuster Dr. Dolittle isn’t a great film, but it is very much a fun one — and a cute (but not cloying) and sweet (but not saccharine) one. There are lots of good, solid laughs to be had. Eddie Murphy is at his most appealing, the rest of the cast […]
Horrormeister Wes Craven executive-produced this surprisingly stylish, frequently clever, always watchable modern-day extension of the Dracula story from director Patrick Lussier and screenwriter Joel Soisson. This first effort at a Dracula film since Francis Ford Coppola’s bloated, overlong, pretentious and ultimately vacuous Bram Stoker’s Dracula doesn’t always work, but it’s blessedly free of self-importance and […]
No, it’s not very good. It’s frequently pretty cheesy. The screenplay has some of the worst — and most transparent — writing imaginable. Kevin Costner continues to display the kind of career sense that once condemned actors like Bela Lugosi and John Carradine to poverty-row movies (just exactly what keeps Costner from ending up in […]
A long, long time ago a fellow by the name of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote a very famous poem about a mythical place called Xanadu (“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree …” — yes, it really was Coleridge and not the rock band Rush). We now know that he penned this […]
Anyone paying good money to see a movie called Dude, Where’s My Car? deserves what they get. The obvious idea of the film is to propel That ’70s Show TV star Ashton Kutcher to big-screen stardom. The obvious result is a stupefyingly lame comedy that subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge every time […]
Adapted from the famous — or infamous — “role-playing” game, Dungeons and Dragons is the first effort from director Courtney Solomon, with the help of equally fledgling screenwriters Topper Lilien and Carroll Cartwright. Glancing at most of the reviews that have come this film’s way, one would think that the three amount to the unholy […]
The first time I took note of Eddie Griffin was in John Q. Then there was the generally unfunny The New Guy. At the time I wrote: “And then there’s Eddie Griffin, a performer of sufficient charm and magnetism that he manages to seem funny, even when the material is wanting — and here it’s […]
Eight Legged Freaks (yes, the filmmakers left out the hyphen) is sometimes enjoyable, sometimes clever, sometimes effective, but ultimately not really successful. It either tries too hard, or it doesn’t try hard enough. The major problem is that it’s a movie that tries to be an affectionate parody of a type of film from half […]
When a movie has a trailer containing a line that invariably draws chuckles — if not outright laughter — from audiences, it’s generally considered a good idea to remove the offending line before the film’s release (think: “She’s not good enough for you, Ben!” in Swimfan). Well, Universal didn’t bother removing John Leguizamo’s crowd-pleaser, “I’m […]
Enemy at the Gates is that rarest of things — an intelligent epic. This isn’t to say that Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film concerning the battle of Stalingrad in World War II is a masterpiece, but it is at once thoughtful, involving and sweeping, which is an unusual combination. Not so surprisingly — even at this point […]
I’m not sure that Michael Apted’s Enigma — the first film from Mick Jagger’s Jagged Productions — quite exonerates him for Enough (which was actually made later), but it at least proves he hasn’t forgotten how to make a movie with wit, intelligence and solid craftsmanship. With a strong screenplay by Tom Stoppard, a first-rate […]
One of the taglines for Enough is, “Everyone has their limit,” and Enough sure as hell tested mine. This absolute fiasco is a shoo-in for a top slot on my 10 Worst of 2002 list — and that’s no mean feat, considering what the first five months of 2002 have brought us. It’s a lot […]
After the disappointing box-office of Six Days Seven Nights, the so-called (by publicity departments, anyway) “King of Comedy,” Ivan Reitman, returns to the sort of thing he does best with the utterly formulaic Evolution. If Reitman’s film feels a little too by-the-numbers, that’s probably because he’s made the thing at least twice before — Ghostbusters, […]
It’s big. It’s loud. It’s dumb. People are shot, bludgeoned, blown-up, hurled through space, impaled and generally subjected to indignities that are inimical to good fellowship. Good guys and bad guys alike boast weapons that only need reloading after about 500 shots. Characters are harder to kill than a New York City cockroach — until […]
When bad movies happen to good people is the order of the day for Rufus Sewell and Rupert Graves in Extreme Ops — a movie so extremely awful that it’s actually pretty damn funny. Remember when Sewell was in movies like A Man of No Importance and Carrington — or even when he played the […]
Never underestimate the power of Swedish angst and Lutheran guilt. It seems that somewhere around 1949, the then-fledgling filmmaker Ingmar Bergman had an affair. Some 50 years later, he’s still trying to sort it out. That’s where Faithless comes in. Though the film is signed by frequent Bergman actress (and his former lover) Liv Ullmann, […]
Back in the 1950s, Douglas Sirk made — or re-made — glossy soap operas like Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life for producer Ross Hunter. At the time, these films were thought of as no more than standard weepies that occasionally (and not very daringly) touched on social issues that had […]
WARNING: The following review is addressed only to fans of the horror genre. More genteel, mainstream film fans (i.e., normal people) will do well to pass on this admitted mess of a movie. Horror fans (“Guilty.”), on the other hand, are apt to find more than a few things of passing interest in Fear Dot […]
The last time I was so torn on the content of a movie — that it was either constituted the worst good movie I’d ever seen, or the best bad one — was Original Sin, which also starred Antonio Banderas. That may or may not be coincidental, but it’s beside the point here. It never […]
