Tony Goldwyn as Jesus? Giancarlo Giannini as the Pope? What’s going on here? What’s going on is, of course, another “faith-based” drama of the sort that gets booked directly into theaters without benefit of a traditional releasing company (though Paramount is somehow involved with this one). These films usually aren’t very good, and tend to […]
Bible studies will never be the same after kids have feasted on Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie. It’s anarchic and anachronistic animated fun, peppered with terrific sing-a-long tunes and a spicy delight of veggie characters. With all its wholesomeness, however, Jonah gets my PGG (Parental Guidance for Girls) rating because of its shameful dearth of female […]
Heavy-handed, embarrassingly manipulative, plotted like a bad TV movie, John Q ought to have been called Dog Day Heart Transplant. No pun intended, but this movie’s heart is in the right place, even if nothing much else is. Do we need an indictment of the health-care system in this country and outrage over the fact […]
You’d assume that a movie starring TV actors and directed by a veteran TV director (John Pasquin) would have its fill of pithy one-liners, a pretty predictable plot and a dearth of wide-screen vistas. Yes, Joe Somebody couldn’t completely escape its TV roots. Even so, it’s a terrific little feel-good movie — funny, touching and […]
I knew it was going to be bad, but it was worse than I imagined. The trailer clued the wary viewer in on the fact that Joe Dirt was going to be less than brilliant. Conceived and originally marketed as The Adventures of Joe Dirt, yet abbreviated at the last moment to merely Joe Dirt, […]
“I may be small, but I have a big brain!” shouts the hero and title character of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (voiced by Debbi Derryberry). And that’s the point of the movie: Even the smallest school kid — given the brain of a genius, a motley crew of friends, a pet robot dog and the […]
As someone who’s spent large chunks of his life writing about horror movies in books and magazines, I know full well it’s a genre that, critically speaking, is the Rodney Dangerfield of cinema. It comes as a bit of a surprise, then, to see that Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers is on the receiving end of […]
As crass, vulgar, irreverent, raunchy, and iconoclastic as a movie can get, Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is also the savviest, cleverest and funniest movie to hit theater screens in a while — and it’s the first truly daring and subversive “shock” comedy in a year that has boasted more than its […]
Late in Jason X one of the actresses utters the line, “This sucks on so many levels,” making it perhaps cinema’s first self-critiquing movie. I was hoping that Jason X would be the stirring biopic of a machete-wielding, hockey-mask-wearing civil-rights activist, but no. After the first few minutes of wholesale mayhem, when the big guy […]
Ninety seconds into Jackass: The Movie, Lonnie leaned to me. “Please tell me this doesn’t go on for two hours!” he groaned. “No, ” I whispered. “It’s only 80 minutes.” That was no consolation. A few minutes later, Lonnie marched to the exit. How humiliating — my ex-Marine husband didn’t have the guts to sit […]
The trailers for this film are a masterpiece of deception — mostly by omission. After all, if you never show any of the movie’s dialogue scenes, you don’t actually have to let the audience in on the fact that the film’s in Cantonese with English subtitles. This, however, is something learned from Crouching Tiger, Hidden […]
Director and co-writer Richard Eyre (best known for his British TV work), screenwriter Charles Wood (once the principal writer for Richard Lester’s films — Help!, The Knack, How I Won the War, The Bed-Sitting Room) and four fine actors — Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent, Kate Winslet, Hugh Bonneville — in the central roles prove that […]
Christopher Nolan hit the bull’s eye last year with the jigsaw-puzzle thriller, Memento, a film I have never quite gotten beyond thinking was more clever than genuinely good. It’s a pleasure then to encounter his follow-up film, Insomnia, and find that it’s both clever and genuinely good — very, very good. The problems I had […]
A sometimes surprising, invariably thoughtful film in a minor key, Innocence is slightly less successful than much of what has been said about it would seem to indicate — something that may or may not be a classic case of confusing the importance and freshness of the subject matter with the importance and freshness of […]
If nothing else, In the Mood for Love is virtually unique in that it is a film made up almost entirely of subtle touches and things not said, from which we are made to understand the feelings and motivations of its main characters –Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk). The […]
It’s hands down the most positively reviewed film of 2001. It’s hard to find a review of Todd Field’s feature-film directorial debut that is less than glowing. (Though having made several short films and done some TV work, Field is primarily known as an actor. He’s probably most familiar to viewers as Nick Nightingale in […]
Considered the first release of the new year, Impostor is a sleeper in the worst sense of the word — which is to say that I actually nodded off briefly during the film, owing to severe boredom with the antics on the screen. Granted, there’s a slim chance that during that short time, I missed […]
“Why did you risk your life for me?” Diego the Saber-Toothed Tiger (voice of Denis Leary) asks Manfred the Mammoth (voice of Ray Romano) as the two Ice Age adventurers lay exhausted from escaping certain death in the sea of boiling lava below. “That’s what you do in a herd,” Manfred says matter of factly, […]
Except for the fact that it isn’t set on the moon, I kept thinking I was watching The Adventures of Pluto Nash all over again. I have a piece of advice for Owen Wilson: Go write something with Wes Anderson and stop this nonsense. I have a piece of advice for Eddie Murphy: Sign the […]
Rumor has it that the producers of I Am Sam saved themselves $12 million by crafting a soundtrack consisting of some generally white-bread covers of Beatles songs (OK, so The Black Crowes’ version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and Sheryl Crow’s “Mother Nature’s Son” aren’t disgraceful). You wonder why they need to have […]
As one who actually tends to like romantic comedies, I’m moved to confess that I was more or less looking forward to How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days — and there were things about the movie that I did indeed like. But in between those things, I found myself with plenty of time […]
