It’s not quite A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. It’s more like Jivin’ Jamal Goes Low-Brow Medieval. Jamal (Martin Lawrence, What’s The Worst That Could Happen?)is a self-absorbed no-achiever who rightfully insists that people shouldn’t have high hopes for him. One day while at work at the down-in-the-moat Medieval World amusement park in Los […]
Through the years, as Mountain Xpress teen reporters Amanda Levesque and Claire McLendon advance in age and wisdom, we notice that their film reviews advance in humor and discernment, as well. So, look out movie moguls, you’re not going to have Amanda and Claire eating out of your hands any more. A film has got […]
My God, Gwyneth Paltrow is thin. The poor, poor woman. She appears to be made out of clothes hangers twisted into the shape of a cocktail waitress. It ain’t healthy. If she ate a peanut, you could watch it move through her body like a mouse inside a snake. Her shoulders couldn’t support the weight […]
Bubble Boy is a nasty fairy tale that should have gotten boiled in a cauldron and left on the shelf forever. The only thing that saves this mean-spirited mish-mash is the bubbly charm of the teen leads. Jimmy (Jake Gyllenhall, October Sky) was born without immunities, and he’s lived all his life inside his germ-free […]
When it comes to A Bug’s Life (or any creature’s life), Michelle Raiford is a woman who knows her stuff. One of the “directors of chaos management” at All Pets Animal Hospital, I’ve seen Michelle comfort a thermodynamically-challenged Iguana, as well as cheerfully clean up after the alpha canines when they’ve lifted their legs and […]
Oh, how this reviewer wanted to love this movie. From the moment I heard its title, so campy — yet so girly — I hounded Ashely to let me screen it. In a satisfyingly ironic twist, I watched Cheerleader on the anniversary of the day my first love relegated me to the closet (along with […]
Teen-reporter Maggie West — fresh from a stint on the journalistic high-road reviewing Les Miserables — now romps curbside in order to scope out the graduating senior class of Huntington Hills High. Frankly, I could hardly wait to send her out there … movies don’t get much more “teenier” than Can’t Hardly Wait, and the […]
Grrrrrrr. Hoodwinked again. Cats & Dogs is not a treat. In fact, I give it the Bare Bone award for the most misleading preview of 2001. Like the rest of the packed audience, I recently fell for the furry-fun promised by the previews and was eager for an afternoon of anthropomorphic amusement. Cats & Dogs […]
In Corky Romano, Chris Kattan (TV’s Saturday Night Live) careens onto the feature-film scene in a mindless, maniacal comedy that is funny enough to distract anyone from today’s real news headlines. The title character is the goofy youngest son of a low-level Mafia don who hasn’t seen the family in years. Away from them, Corky […]
To enjoy Cradle 2 the Grave, you have to leave your intellect in the theater parking lot. During the turbo-charged 100 minutes of the film, all you can think (if you can think at all with the riveting sights and sounds on the screen) is: Wow, this is one fantastic action movie! So what if […]
The main problem with Crazy/Beautiful is that it’s neither. Too bad. If the filmmakers had allowed it to go all-out crazy, the movie might have soared. There’s stand-out performances by all the actors, fantastic cinematography of Los Angeles’ highly divergent cultures, and a sizzling soundtrack. But with pat solutions, illogical character leaps, and a formulaic […]
The incomprehensible mystery in Dark Blue isn’t who is the most crooked cop, but how could a movie blessed with so much proven talent and potential turn out to be such a dud? With a story by famous crime writer James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) and a screenplay by David Ayer (who wrote last year’s brilliant […]
It’s amazing how lone cowards imagine themselves to be heroes when they join with other cowards and become a pack. The pack mentality among teenage boys has created its own cinematic genre: the gang movie. Dueces Wild is the latest entry in the genre, a curious ’50s-retro film that is both depressing and pointless, but […]
What’s most disturbing about Domestic Disturbance is that it has all the right ingredients to be a terrific thriller, but misses the boat so completely it ends up in ho-hum dry dock. On paper the plot probably looked pretty good. Newcomer 12-year-old Matthew O’Leary plays Danny, a troubled adolescent who is so distraught over his […]
Don’t Say A Word is a first-rate thriller of the old-fashioned kind (think Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window) with homage to recent hits (think Ron Howard’s Ransom). From the moment the film’s kidnapping starts, and an ordinary man (Michael Douglas Traffic) is forced into extraordinary acts, Word races on a relentless single-minded track of terror. Don’t […]
“Let’s go sit down front and make fools of ourselves!” a wannabe prankster shouted to his cohorts as they raced ahead of me into the theater for opening night of Double Take. Seems they, too, had believed the trailers and assumed the movie was going to be a love-in of foolish fun. Oh, well. Conned […]
The demanding lives of working actresses can be hell sometimes, but 14-year-old Amanda Levesque (ACT’s The Miracle Worker) and 15-year-old Lauren Ford (ACT’s Diary of Anne Frank) have accepted their fame graciously. We caught up with the girls only hours before Lauren was to appear in an In The Park Shakespeare production, and before Amanda […]
Somewhere inside Dr. T and the Women, a gentle new social satire from director Robert Altman, there’s an engaging character study of a fundamentally nice man drowning in a sea of women. It’s just very hard to find amid the clutter of Altman’s idiosyncrasies. Everything we’ve come to expect from this misanthropic auteur is here: […]
Driven careens with gut-wrenching, wheel-gripping 24 mph auto-racing footage, shot during the course of nine races spanning five countries. Combining real footage with fantastic digital imagery, director Renny Harlin’s (Die Hard 2: Die Harder) technical tour de force keeps you on the edge of your seat when its on the track. But when it’s off […]
“I’m here to hear the drumming, man,” one teenager announced to the packed audience for Drumline. I’m sure he left the theater satisfied. If there were an Oscar for rousing, heart-pounding, soul-kicking, we-are-one drumming, Drumline would win it, sticks down. It doesn’t really matter that the script is absolutely awful and the lead character is […]
Two decades after it first did so, can the story of a lonely boy and a bug-eyed extraterrestrial still melt the hearts of kids and grown-ups everywhere? Yes, it sure can. Nothing that was wrong with the original E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial has been improved with its 20th-anniversary reissue. The gaps in logic are still as […]
