The Shipping News marks the fourth (the less we talk about the aberrant Something to Talk About the better) major English-language film from Swedish filmmaker Lasse Hallstrom since the success of My Life as a Dog brought him to America. After a tentative start with the little-seen Once Around, Hallstrom defined both his style and […]
There’s nothing really wrong with writer/director/star Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room, but neither is there anything all that special about it. It’s a small, well-intentioned study of a family coping with — and not coping with — the drowning death of the son. I enjoyed it well enough while it was onscreen. I even admired […]
It’s supposed to be a “thinking man’s” spy flick, but, frankly, the old Michael Caine Harry Palmer pictures of the 1960s came a lot nearer that self-same accolade. There’s more unbelievable nonsense per square inch in the film version of Tom Clancy’s novel The Sum of All Fears than in an Austin Powers flick. But […]
Almost as interesting as The Sweetest Thing’s good-humored efforts at giving women their very own “bad taste” comedy is the general tone of the reviews that blast the film. What’s especially interesting is the inescapable sense that more than a few of the film’s (predominately male) detractors are threatened by the concept of a movie […]
It’s been 14 years since director John Boorman had a mainstream “hit” with Hope and Glory — or a mainstream film at all. Never the most prolific of filmmakers (most of his films are separated by two to four years), Boorman has willfully bitten the hand that was feeding him at least twice with Zardoz […]
Writer-actress Agnes Jaoui’s directorial debut is a deliciously funny and insightful comedy about people’s varied tastes and perceptions, especially perceptions of other people. The intricately criss-crossed plot of The Taste of Others centers on a wealthy manufacturer (just what he manufactures is never made clear and it hardly matters), Castella (Jean-Pierre Bacri, who also co-authored […]
This latest attempt to translate H.G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine, to the movies isn’t bad, but then again, it isn’t really all that good either — meaning that 2002 is still shaping up as the year of indifferent movies. It’s unlikely that this effort will ever reach the quasi-classic status of the 1960 George […]
If we must have shaven-headed action heroes, then I’ll take the ultra-cool sophistication of Jason Statham over the guttural street-thuggery of Vin Diesel any day of the week — especially when Statham is showcased in a movie as agreeably over the top as Corey Yuen’s The Transporter. No, the movie doesn’t make any more sense […]
Seeing Stanley Donen’s 1963 Hitchcock-like thriller, Charade, for the first time is one of those rare, treasured childhood memories that has stood the test of time. I loved the film when I was 9 and I love it just as much at 48 (though for different reasons, I suspect). So I went to Jonathan Demme’s […]
The Tuxedo starts with a beautiful pastoral scene involving a deer urinating into a stream that feeds a bottled water factory — and goes downhill. It’s been obvious for some time that the studio knew they had a stinker on their hands — the summer release date kept getting pushed back while they fiddled with […]
No sooner do we lose one Snoop Dogg picture than we get another. Conspiracy or blessing? You decide. I have no idea for whom this movie was made and even less of an idea as to why Lion’s Gate Films (usually associated with “art” films) released it. It is, I suppose, a comedy, but it’s […]
No, it’s not great. It isn’t going to change the world. It isn’t even going to change the way you think about movies. It isn’t going on anybody’s “10 Best” anything list. Almost no aspect of its plot is going to surprise even the most unsavvy moviegoer. However, The Wedding Planner is a fairly consistently […]
Patrice Leconte’s new film, The Widow of Saint-Pierre, is everything an old-fashioned (in the best sense of the word) romantic spectacle ought to be — at once involving, moving, beautiful to look at and (even better) laced with ironic observations and a sense of purpose. The story — based on the historical account of a […]
They is this year’s apparent last gasp of a horror film. They is pretty lame. They looks like They was made for the bottom half of a double-bill at a drive-in that no one told the filmmakers had closed 25 years ago. All right, enough fun with grammar; I’ll stop trying to make my editor […]
This could so easily have drifted into the realm of Full Frontal or, worse yet, a live-action Waking Life. Its jigsaw-puzzle structure is not dissimilar to the former (though it certainly has more point) and its philosophizing gets perilously near the 3 a.m. stoner profundity of the latter. Thankfully, Jill Sprecher’s film is in a […]
There’s a moment in an early ’60s exploitation thriller called Panic in the Year Zero when Los Angeles is nuked out of existence, at which point one of the characters — hiding some distance away in the mountains — evidences surprise at being alive with the telling phrase, “I thought when it happened … .” […]
A huge raft of talent on both sides of the camera can’t salvage the incredible mess that is Town and Country. If nothing else, the film serves as its own answer as to why it’s been gathering dust for three years. Perhaps they thought it would improve with age. It didn’t. That doesn’t mean there’s […]
Training Day is an ugly, unpleasant, violent, gratingly foul-mouthed and slang-ridden movie that’s hard not to admit is extremely well made — even while being all that — and ridiculously over-plotted in the bargain. On certain levels, the film works quite well. I won’t for a moment deny the ferocity of Denzel Washington’s no-holds-barred performance […]
No, it’s not high art. No, it’s nowhere near the same league as other films opening this week. But it’s a perfect complement to them. I’m glad I saw The Two Towers, Far from Heaven and Gangs of New York first. Viewed in that manner, Two Weeks Notice assumes its rightful place as a pleasant […]
Lightning will almost certainly not strike twice for the combination of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan and star Bruce Willis, at least in terms of box-office receipts. Unbreakable — their follow-up to the immensely successful, Oscar-nominated The Sixth Sense — is simply too complex, too convoluted and, ultimately, too downbeat to repeat that success (or, in […]
They say this cat, Undercover Brother is a bad mother … sorry, I was having an Isaac Hayes moment, but that’s exactly the sort of thing you can expect after seeing Undercover Brother. “This is a great day for black people of all races!” announces The Chief (Chi McBride, Gone in Sixty Seconds) of the […]
