Warning: This review is not intended for fans of the Resident Evil video games. I have no idea how faithful this film is (or isn’t) to its sources, nor how much it might please (or displease) fans on this basis. The movie certainly plays like a video game — with one basic, very contrived goal […]
Despite my once having appeared on FOX News Radio as a guest on Alan Colmes’ show debating the FOX Movie Channel’s banning of Charlie Chan films, I confess to only a minimal firsthand knowledge of FOX TV’s news coverage prior to watching Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. Oh, sure, I knew that […]
Thirty-four years ago, in 1970, a private train bustling with music superstars, their roadies and equipment traveled across Canada, stopping to put on concerts along the way. It was “a train of insane people careening across the country,” says The Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart. Like a traveling circus, this Woodstock-on-wheels packed musicians together for five […]
Somebody get Larry Cohen a movie he can call his own — please! The genial exploitation schlockmeister behind It’s Alive!, The Stuff, Q: The Winged Serpent and The Ambulance keeps coming up with scripts and concepts that would no doubt have turned out better had Cohen himself directed them. First there was Phone Booth and […]
One person’s profound is another person’s pretentious twaddle. And I am very much in the minority where Before Sunset is concerned — 126 glowing reviews versus six naysayers. Because I lean toward the latter, regarding it as pretentious twaddle. Here’s the scoop: Back in 1995, Richard Linklater contrived a little romantic film, Before Sunrise, about […]
According to astrologers, when the planet Mercury is in retrograde, communications of every kind get fuzzed up. Computers crash. E-mails get sent to wrong addresses. Highway signs get missed, and you end up in Tennessee instead of at your new doctor’s office. Tissy fits and hurt feelings run rampant, because everyone is misinterpreting what everyone […]
William Makepeace Thackeray’s sprawling comic novel Vanity Fair has been irresistible where the movies are concerned, going back as far as 1911. Four adaptations were made even before the dawn of sound, followed by two talkies. The “definitive” version, Becky Sharp, made in 1935 by Rouben Mamoulian, remains a stylistic and technical milestone (it was […]
Victor Sjostrom is probably best remembered today for his starring role as professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s classic Wild Strawberries. However, Sjostrom — or Seastrom, as he was rechristened by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for American consumption — was also a powerful filmmaking pioneer whose directing (and acting) career dates back to 1912 in his native Sweden. […]
Three people — including producer/guest-star Queen Latifah — cooked up the story for this Barbershop wannabe. At that point, three more folks (none with previous writing credits) grilled the concept into an overdone screenplay that manages to incorporate every racial stereotype known to man. And finally, record-label co-founder-turned-director Lance Rivera served it up almost entirely […]
Is this the worst movie ever made? No, but it’s certainly a strong contender for the most loathsome piece of self-serving, hypocritical trash ever to ooze its way out of a studio. It’s also quite possibly the most morally reprehensible film ever to slither by the MPAA with a PG-13 rating. Not that it’s uncommon […]
Before there was a Rocky Horror Picture Show phenomenon, and before midnight movies like Phantom of the Paradise, Tommy and Carrie were the order of the day, there was Harold and Maude. Director Hal Ashby’s cult classic spoke to the generation of the early 1970s much as Richar Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night and Karel […]
E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire may have been the first film to which I gave a five-star review after starting this column four years ago (in any case, it was certainly among the first). As a result, I was really looking forward to his next effort, Suspect Zero. And while I think the […]
If you care for your children, keep them away from Super Babies: Baby Geniuses 2. The underlying theme of this ridiculous waste of film stock is that kids worldwide are being brainwashed by bad TV. To hammer home his point, director Bob Clark (Porky’s) relentlessly bludgeons his audience with every technique from bad kids’ TV […]
Silent-comedy legend Buster Keaton’s last independent film — and penultimate one under his exclusive control — before giving himself over to MGM, which proceeded to run his career into the ground. Steamboat Bill, Jr., from 1928, is one of the comedian’s richest works. Far more elaborate than the breezy, but minor, College, this movie returned […]
Though certainly not the best movie of the year, for many people, Last Flight Out may be the only movie of the year. I found the story of a rescue in the Colombian jungle to be mildly interesting. But for those of the Baptist faith, it would seem to be much, much more. In a […]
Yimou Zhang’s Hero is easily the most gorgeous film gracing movie screens right now. No matter that its beautifully designed, color-themed flashbacks inextricably reminded me of the three-tribulations section of Ken Russell’s Tommy and the shifting color schemes (in both set and costume design) that divide the restaurant in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, […]
Garden State is that rarest of things: a quirky film that actually is quirky, and that isn’t just working overtime in a desperate attempt to seem that way. And I say that despite its climactic wrap-up, which is just too neat and tidy — and which screams of post-test-screening remonkeying. Sure, the film has moments […]
I should start by explaining the high rating on this barely just-better-than-direct-to-video opus. It gets two stars for unintentional mirth, plus one more for a high simian quotient. This last star may seem a little specialized, but in the case of Anacondas, it also accounts for quite the best performance in the film. That’s not […]
I was so prepared for this movie to be awful that I made Ken Hanke come with me as revenge for sticking me with so many turkeys this year. As fate would have it, the rat got a reprieve, because — astonishing both of us — Without a Paddle was also pretty funny (albeit sophomoric, […]
Don’t believe the hype! Every year there’s at least one movie that the majority of the critical populace goes lollipops over, but that leaves the rest of us scratching our collective heads trying to figure out what movie they saw, because it sure as hell wasn’t the same one we were at. The year’s not […]
This presentation by the nonprofit Media Arts Project is a collection of 17 short films made using motion graphics, computer animation and digital video. Few entries run more than four minutes, with some clocking in at scarcely a minute. All are related only in that they were created using modern technologies and steer away from […]
