It’s remake week at the movies with Sweet November and Down to Earth winning no awards in the originality sweepstakes. Sweet November is at least better than Down to Earth, but that’s mostly because it merely retreads a so-so flop (the 1968 Anthony Newley/Sandy Dennis film of the same name). Probably the worst thing that […]
Connoiseurs of Bad Cinema will want to beat a path to this incredible high school knock-off of Fatal Attraction, a movie so awful that it’s little short of mesmerizing. It should be noted, though, that the trailer’s most notoriously funny line — “She’s not good enough for you, Ben!” — must have garnered too many […]
Swordfish has already achieved a degree of notoriety as the movie where they paid Halle Berry half a million dollars to take off her shirt — and in the end that may be the most notable thing about it. For the record, I can now safely attest to the fact that Ms. Berry has breasts. […]
Sure, it won awards and caused a stir at Sundance, but is this a great movie? No, just a passable one (albeit threaded with superb performances) that manages to take a potentially tasteless, even explosive, topic — a 15 year old boy in love with his 40-something step-mother (Sigourney Weaver), who finds himself embroiled, accidentally, […]
Hollywood movies can be so very instructive, as director Antoine Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun is a perfect example. Within the confines of its stacked-deck propaganda-laden plot (the last time I saw anything this blatant was John Wayne’s The Green Berets in 1969) involving A.K. Waters (played by Bruce Willis) and his band of generic […]
There’s a certain advantage to diminished expectations, as was aptly demonstrated when I approached the screening of Texas Rangers with the same degree of anticipation usually reserved having my tires rotated. Looking at the cast — with the eyebrow-raising exception of Alfred Molina (Chocolat) as a character improbably named King Fisher (can the Amos ‘n’ […]
A not wholly successful blend of the requisite aspects of a Schwarzenegger action picture and a reasonably thoughtful take on the gradual erosion of humanity through technology, The 6th Day manages to be constantly entertaining, if never distinguished. Director Roger Spottiswoode (possibly chosen to lend a certain moral weightiness to the picture, based on his […]
I’m calling this film a “sci-fi comedy.” It’s certainly marketed as a comedy, so I suppose that’s what it’s supposed to be. But unless we’re using the word “comedy” in the classically strict sense — meaning “not a tragedy” — then the label is a misnomer. Actually, even in the classic sense, tragedy might be […]
There comes a time in the affairs of film critics when critical acumen completely breaks down, when one reaches one’s cinematic Waterloo, when all the carefully turned phrases that might otherwise occur flee the room and one is forced to merely say, “God, this movie is just plain dumb.” And — apart from some curiosity […]
This is clearly the new film in town to catch! It could so easily have been a self-indulgent disaster of the worst kind — an overblown “home movie” by first-time writer/directors Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh, riddled with cryptic autobiography, shot on digital video and starring themselves and their Hollywood friends. Happily, it turns […]
The critical response to The Banger Sisters is almost more interesting than the film itself. While not receiving quite the male-dominated critical drubbing as that meted out to The Sweetest Thing, there’s an undeniable similarity in tone — a kind of nervous negativism about the depiction of sexually forward females behaving in a raunchy “locker […]
Nice to look at, terribly high-minded (albeit with an elementary-school-level view of the world), decently acted — and just about the dullest thing you can imagine — The Basket is first-time director Rich Cowan’s attempt to revive the “inspirational family film.” The problem with such attempts stems from the basically dubious concept of “they don’t […]
There was a time when director Peter Bogdanovich was himself “the cat’s meow,” boasting a string of successful films that started with Targets in 1968 and carried on with The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon, only to falter with Daisy Miller in 1974. Then his career truly came tumbling down with […]
I’ve followed — though not morbidly — Wayne Wang’s career ever since he broke onto the international film scene with his $20,000 indie, Chan Is Missing, in 1982. In that time, Wang has made some good films (The Joy Luck Club) and some near great ones (Smoke), but he’s never quite crossed the line into […]
A clumsy — if sincere — attempt to transfer the goals of the Billy Graham Evangelical Crusade to the movies, The Climb comes across as a mishmash of awkward symbolism, simplistic theology, lukewarm acting and pat situation on top of pat situation that ultimately plays like a movie of the week. The concept of mountain […]
Writer/director Francis Veber, who gained international recognition in 1978 with La Cage aux Folles, has cooked up another engaging comedy with its heart in the right place and something on its mind. The Closet details the story of a drab latex-factory accountant, Francois Pignon (Daniel Auteuil, The Widow of Saint Pierre), who’s about to be […]
I wish I knew whether anyone involved in making The Core was being serious. I’m tempted to believe that at least director Jon Amiel and most of the cast were kidding. Top-billed screenwriter Cooper Layne has no other writing credits (though an executive-producer credit on The Emperors’ Club bodes ill), so it’s hard to gauge […]
Kevin Reynolds’ The Count of Monte Cristo is such a gloriously old-fashioned, swashbuckling adventure movie that it makes one wonder if we’ve been blaming the wrong Kevin for the cinematic atrocities that are Waterworld and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The combination of Reynolds and the memory of the dreary attempt at putting Dumas pere […]
Disney World opened somewhere around 1971. That means that I spent more than 30 years strenuously avoiding being subjected to The Country Bear Jamboree. Well, the damned bruins have finally caught up with me with a vengeance, thanks to their cinematic incarnation as The Country Bears. The movie left me feeling that I never wanted […]
It’s lightweight Woody Allen, but even lightweight Woody Allen is better than most filmmakers’ best efforts. In tone, it’s probably closest to Manhattan Murder Mystery; in look it’s nearer Radio Days. It has a fairly complex quasi-mystery plot and also works as a nifty parody of 1940s-style film noir, but at heart it’s a romantic […]
Rich, strange and riddled with imperfections, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys runs the distinct risk of having its sins overlooked a little too easily in what more and more seems a particularly grim summer of movie going. It’s so much better than most everything out there right now, that its virtues seem exaggerated and […]
