The Coen Brothers have never been all that far from film noir, with works like Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing (an almost plagiaristic rethinking of Dashiell Hammett’s novel, The Glass Key), Barton Fink and Fargo. Even The Big Lebowski turns briefly into an exercise in classic noir for part of its length. But with The Man […]
The Mexican isn’t really a bad movie, but it isn’t really a good one, either. It’s one of those films where you’re mildly entertained, but can’t keep from wondering, “Who thought this was a really good idea?” And why on earth did anyone opt to co-star the potentially sexually explosive Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts […]
A tepid horror film that looks for all the world like a badly padded episode of The X Files, The Mothman Prophecies can be given some credit for creating an eerie atmosphere, achieving a nice — if somewhat too clever — look, and containing an entertaining supporting turn by Alan Bates. For that matter, the […]
It’s big and it’s loud and it’s colorful. The widescreen cinematography of Adrian Biddle is breathtakingly gorgeous. The production design by Allan Cameron is stunning and seems effortlessly in period (something the script threatens to scuttle with easy laugh anachronisms such as having an 8-year-old mutter, “Get a room,” upon seeing his parents osculate). The […]
“As you’ve never seen it before,” claims the advertising for Peter Hyams’ new version of The Three Musketeers, and that’s not entirely untrue. Having seen the story in just about every manner imaginable — including a musical-comedy version with Don Ameche and the Ritz Brothers — I have never seen a version this incredibly dull. […]
Although highly regarded in many circles — especially those that consider Masterpiece Theatre the ne plus ultra of culture — I can’t say that I number the films of Merchant-Ivory among my more cherished moviegoing memories. Even during the films of theirs that I admire, I never quite escape the sense of being dosed with […]
The latest cinematic Thanksgiving dinner from the Revolution Studios poultry farm is far from being the worst of its breed. And it deserves some sort of cockeyed praise for casting Lyle Lovett as the father of comic lead DJ Qualls (Big Trouble), since Qualls is sufficiently odd looking to make the ancestry believable. It gets […]
This is what is known as a “four-waller” — a movie without a movie studio to distribute it that its makers handle by renting theatres in which to have their movies shown. For years, this was the exclusive province of exploitation pictures. Now it appears to be the favored method for presenting “morally uplifting” films […]
The One has a little of everything – two Jet Lis for the price of one, at least three Carlo Guginos, a couple Delroy Lindos, a laborious home-grown mythology, lots of CGI effects, bodies hurtling through space, explosions, car crashes, famine, flood, pestilence…Oh, alright, they left out the last three, but it was probably an […]
An elegant, supremely old-fashioned, methodically paced, unbelievably creepy horror movie, writer/director/composer (yes, composer) Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others — while not a film for every taste — arrives on the scene to join the ranks of the best of the surprisingly few bonafide ghost stories the movies have given us. Not since Peter Medak’s The Changeling […]
Probably no filmmaker working today is so uniquely qualified to make a film about the Holocaust as Roman Polanski. The director himself lived through those years as a young Jewish man in Poland, his own mother dying in the Nazi gas chambers. It’s natural that he should turn his attention to the subject with this […]
This has got to be one of the strangest movies I’ve ever encountered. It’s ostensibly a kiddie picture — and to judge by the kids in the audience, it does work on that level. But what exactly is an in-joke based on the idea that the viewer has a strong familiarity with the Coen Brothers’ […]
Is there room in this world for an outrageously old-fashioned, G-rated “ugly duckling” movie? Judging by the surprisingly strong opening of Garry Marshall’s The Princess Diaries, the answer would appear to be yes, even if a number of people — especially critics (who, yes, are people) — are expressing misgivings about the message the film […]
It’s not surprising that this movie was held back from release for a period of time, the thought being that it wasn’t something likely to go down well after 9/11. Not that the film is casually “distasteful” in the manner that temporarily put the brakes on junk like Collateral Damage. Nor does it contain newly […]
I really hate reviewing this particular type of movie — it’s the sort of thing that’s impossible to get worked up over either way. It’s not good enough to like, but it’s not bad enough to dislike either. It’s simply an adequate two hours of mildly entertaining professionalism that scales the heights of so-soism. Apparently, […]
Is The Ring this year’s The Others? No, not by a jug-full, but it’s probably the best 2002 has to offer by way of a horror picture. (True, Ghost Ship doesn’t open till this Friday, but that’s the darkest of dark-horse contenders.) Based on a popular 1998 Japanese film, The Ring seems more than a […]
The Royal Tenenbaums is one of the damndest pictures to come out of Hollywood in recent times. Yes, it’s a star-laden comedy, but it’s a peculiar one by just about any standards. It’s very rarely laugh-out-loud funny, some of the humor is quite grim, and it’s ultimately and obviously fairly serious in its intention. Personally, […]
A word of warning before you read any further: The Rules of Attraction is an uncompromisingly ugly, unflattering, unsympathetic, unlikable portrait of a nightmarish collection of characters in an equally nightmarish world. To get an “R” rating, writer-director Roger Avary cut nine minutes from the original 110 minutes, and even its 101 minute version ranks […]
Ho, ho, no. There’s a spectacularly unfortunate moment in one of the last-gasp “Our Gang” shorts where the little girl replacing Darla Hood is hell-bent on showing that she not only knows her lines, but everybody else’s, and to prove it she mouths every one of those lines while the other actors are speaking. That’s […]
DeNiro! Brando! Edward Norton! Take three powerhouse actors — one a bona fide legend and one virtually a legend — and put them in a film directed by … Frank Oz? Oz is a competent-enough director with a string of moderately successful, but decidedly undistinguished, films to his credit. And if The Score is his […]
I hate to be the bearer of sad and sobering — even depressing and dispiriting — news, but the shocking truth is this: The Rock (nee Dwayne Johnson) can’t act. I know, I know. That’s hard to believe, after his brilliantly rounded original portrayal of the “Scorpion King” in The Mummy Returns, but I very […]
