Of life’s tragedies, the murder of a child has to be the most horrible. The grinding grief imposed on the survivors never ends, and no one involved can remain untouched. The search for justice is insatiable and all too often impossible. On the surface, The Pledge — director Sean Penn’s (The Crossing Guard) electrifying psychological […]
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 […]
Ahoy, Asheville eco-warriors! The Perfect Storm is your feel-good hit of the summer! Thrill as a rowdy gang of lumpenproletariat carnivores, hell-bent on destroying the aquatic ecosystem, get smacked around royally by Mother Nature! Seriously, that is the movie’s plot. Based on a true story (and recounted in a best-selling novel by Sebastian Junger), The […]
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 […]
The Other Side of Heaven is a charming, sweet movie about a young missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 1950s. John Groberg (Christopher Gorman, TV’s Felicity), eldest of seven boys from Idaho Falls, Idaho, is sent to do his required three-year missionary service to one of the islands in […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
“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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
See the preview for The Master of Disguise, and you’ll catch all the funny scenes — no need to watch the movie itself. Running at just a little over an hour, The Master of Disguise is about 60 minutes too long, and if you pay full price expecting to see a full movie, the only […]
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 […]
It ain’t fer nuthin’ that there’s a poster from Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life festooning a wall of the crumbling Majestic Theatre in Frank Darabont’s The Majestic, a movie that tries its damnedest to bring the kind of movie Capra used to make back to theaters. Therein lies the intent and therein lies the […]
“How long have you been playing chess?” Natalia (Emily Watson, Breaking the Waves) asks chess genius Alexander Luzhin (John Turturro) during one of their early meetings in Marleen Gorris’ film of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, The Luzhin Defence. “Nine thousand, two hundred and sixty-three days, four hours and five minutes,” he answers matter-of-factly before she can […]
The immediate question, of course, is whether The Two Towers lives up to The Fellowship of the Ring, and the answer is … not quite. But that’s not a complete answer, since The Two Towers is, in many respects, a very different film than its predecessor in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s much […]
I’m going to be swimming upstream with this one. Most of my critical comrades-in-arms are four-square against Alan Parker’s latest offering, The Life of David Gale, and while I understand where they’re coming from, I have to admit I don’t share their antipathy for the film. It may be that I am more in tune […]
Castles were built to keep people out. Prisons are meant to keep them in. So says General Irwin (Robert Redford, The Horse Whisperer ) to his fellow inmates in the U.S. military prison known as “The Castle” (shot in Nashville, Tennessee’s magnificent old former State Prison). But rebellions that occur in both structures are similar, […]
Tim Meadows, who was always underutilized on Saturday Night Live, finally gets his due with an SNL Studio movie of his own. The film stretches his sketch as smooth-talking womanizer Leon Phelps, better known as The Ladies Man, into 87 minutes that will give Meadows’ fans plenty of laughs. As the host of a radio […]
