There’s one thing to be said for The Day After Tomorrow: It’s a whole lot funnier than Soul Plane, a movie that consistently mistakes tastelessness for bad taste. As director John Waters pointed out years ago, you actually have to have taste in order to produce something that’s in bad taste. The makers of Soul […]
“She’s so cute! the women sitting behind me whispered to one another throughout the entire two hours of Raising Helen. I agree completely — no matter what actress Kate Hudson is doing, she’s cute. Those Goldilocks ringlets, that cupcake face, that dazzling smile — and let’s not forget the cute little butt perched northward on […]
Yes, The Fourth World War is deliberately inflammatory and often a little bit unfocused in approach, but it’s also one of the most courageously outspoken and creatively made documentaries I’ve seen in a while. As I’ve said before, I don’t think it incumbent of the documentary form to present an unbiased point of view. Indeed, […]
If you liked the original Shrek, I can’t imagine you won’t like this one — and perhaps even more so than the first. Shrek 2 is that rarest of rarities: the sequel that lives up to and in some ways even surpasses the parent film. It’s not unheard of: Bride of Frankenstein and X 2 […]
I freely and unapologetically admit that I am not a fan of sword-and-sandals movies, and have never quite gotten their appeal beyond the beefcake level. They tend to bore me after a very short time, and their tendency toward irredeemably bad dialogue loses its amusement value in an even shorter one. So you might want […]
Personally, I find Mary Pickford a little frightening, and I find the idea of the 33-year-old actress playing a girl about 20 years her junior even more alarming. Still, I can’t say that Little Annie Rooney — either despite or because of these things — didn’t finally win me over as a charmingly old-fashioned entertainment. […]
Will somebody please get Gabrielle Union a good movie? She deserves something more than this kind of recycled junk that has her get all a-dither over Jamie Foxx’s character just because he says she looks like Halle Berry. It’s hard to imagine Union feeling the need for that sort of validation. Then again, just about […]
I suspect that I never warmed to the charms of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory because I was about 16 years old when it made its cinematic bow. I was far too “adult” and cynical to care much about a “kid’s movie”; thus, it’s not a part of my childhood — and seeing it […]
As a horror-movie geek, I’m supposed to hate Van Helsing and call it travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham as concerns its desecration of the 1930s horror films from Universal. And, truth to tell, were I to hold it up against those […]
Taking my life — or at least my reputation as a serious film scholar — in my hands, I’m going to admit that D.W. Griffith is high on my list of least-favorite directors. He was certainly a pioneer in filmmaking in that, at the time of his greatest successes, he used a lot of now-standard […]
In what possible alternate universe could we really find an Olsen twin (I think it’s Mary-Kate, but it hardly matters) playing drums on a recording of “Suffragette City?” That’s not only just wrong, but there’s something a little creepy about either of these scrubbed-so-clean-they-squeak bastions of underage wholesomeness being involved in covering a David Bowie […]
With this and Hildago, Omar Sharif reclaims his place as a major star of film — albeit one somewhat removed from his more dashing days in Larwrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. That’s not to say that Mr. Sharif isn’t still rather dashing in a 70-plus sort of way, but he makes no attempt to […]
The Black Pirate is far and away the most purely “fun” of all Douglas Fairbanks’ “mature” films. While lacking the scope and sweep of the more elaborate Thief of Baghdad, it also lacks that film’s lumbering, elephantine bloat. Fairbanks started out as a kind of overly athletic, light leading-man in a remarkably engaging series of […]
This is a rare chance to take in some of the Oscar-nominated short films — those little movies that most of us never see. There was a time, of course, when short films were better known than they are today. They were once part and parcel of the movie-going bill of fare, often consisting of […]
I can’t say that I was surprised to find myself enjoying Mean Girls; the re-teaming of the Freaky Friday team of director Mark Waters and star Lindsay Lohan alone suggested something worth watching. I was surprised, though, by how much I enjoyed it — to the degree that I want to see it again, and […]
I didn’t hate Laws of Attraction; I did, however, like it better in its 36 or so earlier incarnations. This film is essentially a harmless, bland confection that just manages to squeak by on the basis of a few clever lines and the appeal of its stars. At least, I think it’s harmless: I have […]
I don’t require horror films to be terribly realistic. I figure the basic fantastic nature of the genre cuts its films some slack. For that matter, some horror films can get by — or at least attain a level of interest — on style alone (I’m one of maybe six people who kind of liked […]
The only reason to see this movie is because Christopher Walken (Catch Me If You Can, for which he should have won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar) is in it, and any time you get to see this brilliant, quirky, give-me-one-reason-I-shouldn’t-go-postal-right-now! actor do his thing is time well spent. Alas, that means you might have […]
College is all but unknown in Buster Keaton’s filmography. And while it was made fairly quickly and cheaply, I still don’t know if I’d call it a minor work, however modest it is in comparison to Keaton’s more elaborate — and even spectacular — films. As such, College gives us Keaton working without the benefit […]
I won’t deny for a moment that the game of golf requires tremendous skill. Why, I’ve certainly had my own share of trouble through the years getting that little ball through the blades on those windmills! What golf is not, however, is the most cinematically exciting of sports. And the few attempts at making it […]
Winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film this year, writer/director Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions is both easy to admire and easy to love. Even so, it’s not especially creative as moviemaking goes — though that’s perhaps entirely because it is the work of Arcand (such that I’m not even sure that’s a […]
