I can’t help being amused by the short-term memories of critics who claim that Renny Harlin’s Exorcist: The Beginning has killed The Exorcist franchise. Obviously, they don’t remember what happened in 1977, when John Boorman handed Warner Bros. a $14.5 million art film called Exorcist II: The Heretic. Boorman’s movie, tremendously expensive for its time, […]
Rating caveat: I gave this so-called animated feature (in truth, it’s a long commercial) a low rating because I found it so boring that I spent most of its excruciating 89 minutes fantasizing over how to torture Ken Hanke for making me review it. To be fair, you should know that my movie pal liked […]
Yes, I know, I’m supposed to be cranky (which is a nice way of saying I’m curmudgeonly — and besides, it rhymes). So why don’t I hate this sequel to The Princess Diaries like I’m supposed to — and as most of my fellow critics seem to? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a sucker […]
A great, glowing neon sign reading Suspicions Confirmed appeared in my brain when I went to check writer/producer/director/star Morgan Spurlock’s credentials after watching his Super Size Me. I discovered that Spurlock’s only other credit was as producer and actor on an MTV series called I Bet You Will. See, I knew there was a reason […]
Something about the music of Cole Porter appears to inspire folly on a grand scale — at least when that music is taken out of its original settings. The most notorious example of this is Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love. When I first saw that film upon its original release in 1975, people slowly […]
Early on in Alien Vs. Predator, we get a glimpse of what one of the recruits for the scientific expedition that sets the plot in motion is watching on TV — the granddaddy of all monster-battle flicks, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Now, there was a movie born of a desire to get more mileage […]
A seminal cult classic the exact appeal of which has always eluded me, though most of the world seems to adore it. I hadn’t watched The Princess Bride in years when I did so again for this review. And while I can’t say that seeing it anew really changed my point of view on it, […]
I admit to being pretty disenchanted with the indie-film scene. It’s become so enmeshed in its own formula of calculated quirkiness that it rarely shows any more originality than does the most heavily test-marketed Hollywood extravaganza — and sometimes less so. I’m equally over the indie-film snobbery that works on the belief that if a […]
I’m beginning to think that there’s some kind of curse attached to people who won kudos for their performances in Girl, Interrupted. Think about the careers and career moves of Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie and Brittany Murphy in the wake of that film. It’s not pretty. And Little Black Book does nothing to change that […]
Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service is, of course, a thing of great visual beauty. Although the director’s work is casually lumped into the class of animated films called anime, his films nonetheless have a kind of fluidity of movement that is all too often absent in that genre. (Anime, which basically just means Japanese animation, […]
Finding Nemo was the big animated film of 2003 (OK, so there wasn’t a Lilo and Stitch or a Spirited Away up against the Pixar offering that year), and one of that year’s biggest money-makers. I didn’t originally review the film and nothing about its trailer really enticed me to see it for the sheer […]
Nighttime in Los Angeles. There’s no other place on earth like it at that time of day. And no other movie has ever captured the city’s demonic frenzy and polyglot pulse like this summer’s dazzling thriller, Collateral. To director Michael Mann (Ali), the City of the Angels feeds on seductive danger. There are no sunny […]
I’m not surprised that the original “Supermarionation” puppet show Thunderbirds is utterly unknown to kids today — making the rationale for this movie’s very existence a bit vague. Yet I am surprised by how very few people in my own age group (and beyond) seem to know of it. Roger Ebert goes so far as […]
You don’t need a sixth sense to see all the signs here: The Village proves that M. Night Shyamalan is anything but unbreakable. Ever since Shyamalan became a big noise in the filmmaking world with The Sixth Sense in 1999 — more thanks to that film’s gimmick ending than to anything else — he’s been […]
High on the list of things that probably didn’t need remaking is John Frankenheimer’s best film, The Manchurian Candidate. Of course, the same might be said of Stanley Donen’s Charade, as from it we got Jonathan Demme’s much maligned last film, The Truth About Charlie. Now, as one of the few critics who genuinely admired […]
In a summer drenched in CGI-effect extravaganzas, it’s easy to forgive The Bourne Supremacy its occasional transparent plot device (when a CIA bigwig is all about killing someone rather than capturing him, you know there’s a self-serving reason) and an ending that doesn’t know when to quit. Like its predecessor, The Bourne Identity, this film […]
No, the high rating is not a typo. The absurdly — if engagingly — named Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle isn’t a great film. Far from it. It’s also not without its flaws: Two sequences — one of which plunges new lows in our modern mania for toilet humor — are more gag-inducing […]
Catwoman is pretty bad, all right, though I don’t think it’s as unrelentingly awful as it’s being portrayed in the popular press — unless, of course, you’re a hardcore comic-book fan. In that case, it’s probably way beyond awful. Not being a comic-book aficionado, I wasn’t offended by this rather peculiar mutation of the titular […]
The Clearing, partly shot in Asheville, is a pre-sold local offering — though I fear that Asheville watchers may be a little surprised that there’s nothing very specifically Ashevillian about it. Not that that’s so surprising, since the movie is supposed to be taking place in Pennsylvania, and most of the North Carolina footage appears […]
Ah, the merits of low expectations! And what I anticipated with I, Robot could not possibly have been any less. As I walked into the screening, I was asked if I was looking forward to the film. Unfortunately, the dictates of good taste prevent me from repeating my answer here, though I can say it […]
Cinderella is a fairy tale with no fairies and not much of a tale. It’s cute — starring the poster girl of cuteness, Hilary Duff (The Lizzie McGuire Movie), and a new teen heartthrob (Chad Michael Murray, Freaky Friday). But cuteness can’t cure this film’s also being insipid, predictable, boring and not very funny. To […]
