Channeling the spirit of my late father, I’m tempted to dismiss The Ring Two with the phrase he uttered when confronted with a movie like this: “That was the nearest nothing I ever saw.” Alas, that assessment doesn’t quite do justice to this steaming pile of donkey droppings that’s being palmed off as a follow-up […]
I was surprised to find that this is the first talkie ever made of The Merchant of Venice, though television — mostly the BBC — has offered it up several times. The most famous of the TV versions (1973) starred Laurence Olivier (Shylock) and Joan Plowright (Portia), while the most intriguing (1972) starred Frank Finlay […]
Your appreciation of this film version of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera will largely depend on two factors: How you feel about the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, and your tolerance (or lack thereof) for filmmaking that tries too hard to preserve the theatricality of a stage production. Regarding the latter factor, it’s just too […]
As might be expected, in terms of the plot, Ice Princess is about as predictable as they come. So much so that it brings to mind Miss Prism’s definition of fiction in The Importance of Being Earnest: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.” But in Ice Princess, there […]
As filmmaking, The Take is a deeply flawed work, not in the least because Canadian-TV host Avi Klein (who directed) and anti-corporate author Naomi Klein (No Logo) insist on incorporating themselves in the drama of the film and the situation it describes. The best I can say for them is that they aren’t as grating […]
Judging by the apparent lack of enthusiasm at the box office on this film’s opening weekend, it would seem that the phenomenon known as The Passion of the Christ is over. Gibson re-cut the film — removing six minutes of the most graphic violence — in an attempt to receive a PG-13 rating. But he’s […]
Luchino Visconti, whose films tend to be long and rather slow moving, is not a filmmaker for everyone. That certainly was the feeling of the American distributor in 1963 when The Leopard first hit U.S. movie screens. Visconti’s film weighed in at a whopping 205 minutes, and 20th Century Fox execs felt stuck with an […]
In a wild, Erector-set world, a young robot seeks fame and fortune as an inventor. While fighting evil forces of planned obsolescence, he repairs his fellow robots with spare parts, proving that, “You don’t have to be upgraded to be valuable.” That’s the nuts and bolts of Robots, the latest animated adventure from the folks […]
OK, I admit it. I had a very good time watching the new Bruce Willis vehicle Hostage. But I strongly doubt that the filmmakers intended for said good time to consist of raucous laughter at the over-the-top, melodramatic shenanigans in this movie. No, I suspect their intention was to produce something more akin to nail-biting […]
This is one of those movies that you may end up wanting to like more than you actually do. The idea — updating Georges Bizet’s Carmen with new lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and an all-black cast — is certainly intriguing and even daring, though it’s perhaps not the “breakthrough” some modern writers would like […]
Lt. Shane Wolfe (Vin Diesel, Chronicles of Riddick) is a poster boy for the Navy SEALs: fearless, noble and super-sexy in that form-fitting wet suit. Wolfe and his fellow SEALs perform a daring high seas operation to rescue an American scientist from a terrorists’ ship. Alas, our scientist is later killed in an ambush that […]
I’ve been tussling with this movie ever since I saw it two nights ago. I still can’t decide if The Jacket gets close to something like greatness, or if it’s just a (sometimes accidentally) funny mess. At this point, I lean toward the former assessment, but can’t quite overlook the latter. This is a difficult […]
With considerable intelligence and discernment, Istvan Szabo’s film of Ronald Harwood’s (The Pianist) play, Taking Sides, tackles the thorny subject of the “de-Nazification” of high-profile artists who had remained in Germany during the war. However, the film deals from a stacked deck and only touches on the questions of who was “certified” as OK, who […]
I first saw this 1932 film at the age of 15, when my father took me to see it at a Rouben Mamoulian retrospective at the University of South Florida in Tampa. I don’t know when I had ever been less interested in seeing a movie. I wanted to see Mamoulian’s legendary Dr. Jekyll and […]
I spent the bulk of Be Cool thinking that I’d never seen a more badly structured film, nor one so completely — and with so little reason — convinced of its own coolness. All the while, I knew that I shouldn’t enjoy what I was watching — but still I did, partly because of the […]
In many ways, the 1925 Phantom of the Opera is the granddaddy of the American horror film, though it’s perhaps edged out of that position by the Goldwyn production A Blind Bargain (a seemingly lost 1922 work that also starred Lon Chaney). Phantom certainly marks the starting point of Universal Pictures being the “home of […]
The first scene in Man of the House involves wild man Cedric the Entertainer and some very gross interaction with cow poop. I’m stupefied to report that my husband and every other man in the audience found this bit of dramatic conflict to be uproarious. At least I was immediately prepared for the possibility that […]
This is no mere bad movie. Instead it’s at least three bad movies very loosely tied up in one jaw-droppingly peculiar package. On the one hand, this film is a made-for-Lifetime style soap opera (actually, several of them). On the other, it’s a lowbrow comedy involving drag acts and really bad character make-ups, with a […]
In Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, there’s an amusing aside where Wes Craven directs Shannen Doherty in a cheesy horror movie. When the script calls for her to be attacked by an orangutan dressed in a Scream costume, she upbraids the director: “Jesus, Wes, you guys aren’t even trying anymore!” Who would […]
It’s not that I especially object to sitting through bad movies. After all, that’s something I do with alarming frequency. However, this is a special case, since this week finds me writing reviews from Florida, which I’m visiting because of a family emergency. Why bring this up? Well, simply because the perks of being a […]
Despite the film’s terribly generic title, it would be possible to give John Duigan’s Head in the Clouds a free pass based on eye-candy alone. Any movie populated by the glamorous movie-star looks of Charlize Theron, Stuart Townsend, Penelope Cruz (1930s clothes benefit her to no end) and Thomas Kretschmann is certain to be easy […]
