If you come to Gosford Park expecting an exercise in “Altmanism” from the 76-year-old maverick filmmaker, chances are you’ll come away disappointed. Apart from the multiple storyline, the huge ensemble of stars and the occasional zoom shot, the film is not traditionally Altmanesque in look or physical approach, which is a maverick gesture in itself! […]
Many, many years ago, Herbert Yates, president of B-picture- and serial-movie-company Republic Pictures, expressed a desire to make a Civil War epic to challenge Gone With the Wind. At the time, some wag inquired, “What are you going to call it? Lavender and Old Stock Shots?” It is in this spirit perhaps that media mogul […]
Glitter is every bit as bad as you probably expected — and worse. I knew I was in for it when people kept asking me, “Have you seen it yet?” (as usual in such cases, none of these people were volunteering to go with me), but I had no idea the stupefying degree of tedium […]
Since the frequently useful Internet Movie Database is connected with Amazon.com, it’s in their best business interest to suggest other titles that readers might like, if they like the film in question. This often results in some pretty strange recommendations — but I have to say that their recommending last year’s stupefyingly bad Red Planet […]
For one reason or another — call it typecasting — people who make horror films tend to specialize in the same. Directors like F.W. Murnau, Tod Browning and James Whale (who, ironically, chose to direct a horror film because he was being typecast as a specialist in war movies) started this trend, which has endured […]
It’s called Get Over It and before the end if the first reel, I definitely was. What we have here is your basic teen comedy (and one apparently aimed at members of remedial adolescence classes) that gamely and lamely tries to reinvent the form by grafting a lot of frighteningly obvious hipness on top of […]
In all honesty — and mindful of Martin Scorsese’s immense reputation — I have never been among greatest his admirers. Frankly, I had been dreading this movie. Nothing about the trailer appealed to me, and the DiCaprio/Scorsese combination just didn’t bode well. It was with some surprise, then, that I found myself loving this film. […]
Neither as bad as some critics have claimed, nor nearly as important as the film itself thinks it is, Full Frontal is the sort of incredibly self-indulgent work that — in terms of mainstream film — could come from a heavy-hitter filmmaker like Steven Soderbergh. A lesser director would have only received blank looks from […]
This is pure, unadulterated, flat-out horror film making at its best — and from an unexpected quarter, the Hughes Brothers (Albert and Allen), who are known for a very different type of movie with Menace II Society and Dead Presidents. Their take on the film seems to be that they approached Whitechapel of Victorian London […]
If you go to see Friday After Next based on the notion that Barbershop was a pleasant surprise, then you’re probably in for an unpleasant here. If, however, your idea of rib-tickling, knee-slapping fun involves an extended sequence with a character being led around by his genitals, which are clamped in a pair of vise-grips, […]
For all its undeniable merits, Frida is the most disappointing film of 2002. There are moments in this account of the life of artist Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek) that are among cinema’s finest this year. Unfortunately — and maddeningly — they’re sandwiched in between the most impossibly dry account of Kahlo’s life imaginable. I wish […]
It’s amazing how relative things are. A few months ago, I was subjected to Dude, Where’s My Car? and was quite certain that movie comedy could sink no lower. Then I saw Get Over It and suddenly the subtle charms of Dude, Where’s My Car? stood out in sharp relief. Next came Joe Dirt and, […]
If we exempt the cult short film, Fish Heads, then Frailty marks the directorial debut of actor Bill Paxton. As debuts go, it’s not unimpressive, but neither is it really an unqualified success. As an essay in Southern Gothic horror, the film very nearly works for a time. There’s no denying that it’s creepy (though […]
Released a year ago in Great Britain as The 51st State, this Guy Ritchie wannabe (think Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels) is something of an embarrassment — and the most embarrassing thing about it is that I enjoyed a good deal of it in spite of myself. I knew all the while […]
Back in 1947, Elia Kazan made a film about the topic of anti-Semitism called Gentleman’s Agreement. The screenplay by the legendary Moss Hart told the story of what happens when a gentile (played by Gregory Peck) tries to unearth the extent of anti-Semitism by posing as a Jew. It was one of the first of […]
Criticizing a film like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a difficult proposition. The sensation is much what it must have been like when talking pictures came into being. I can imagine being astonished that such a thing as The Jazz Singer or Lights of New York existed at all in the late 1920s, while […]
Once you get past the immediate question of how many “final” destinations there can be (what’s next, The Really Final — No Fooling — Destination?), this is an efficiently trashy horror flick of the Creative Death school. For the uninitiated, the Creative Death horror sub-genre has been around nigh on to forever (at least dating […]
The last time I was so torn on the content of a movie — that it was either constituted the worst good movie I’d ever seen, or the best bad one — was Original Sin, which also starred Antonio Banderas. That may or may not be coincidental, but it’s beside the point here. It never […]
WARNING: The following review is addressed only to fans of the horror genre. More genteel, mainstream film fans (i.e., normal people) will do well to pass on this admitted mess of a movie. Horror fans (“Guilty.”), on the other hand, are apt to find more than a few things of passing interest in Fear Dot […]
Back in the 1950s, Douglas Sirk made — or re-made — glossy soap operas like Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life for producer Ross Hunter. At the time, these films were thought of as no more than standard weepies that occasionally (and not very daringly) touched on social issues that had […]
Never underestimate the power of Swedish angst and Lutheran guilt. It seems that somewhere around 1949, the then-fledgling filmmaker Ingmar Bergman had an affair. Some 50 years later, he’s still trying to sort it out. That’s where Faithless comes in. Though the film is signed by frequent Bergman actress (and his former lover) Liv Ullmann, […]
