Well, whaddya know? The new Batman movie isn’t perfect, but it’s actually good. And this is an assessment from someone who’s as burnt out as is humanly possible on movies that are either adapted from comic books or might as well be. The movie’s isn’t quite the fabulous “rethinking” of the Batman mythos that it […]
This film used to be a stock item during the era of the cult-film midnight movie, standing side by side with Phantom of the Paradise, Rocky Horror, The Devils, Harold and Maude, The Gang’s All Here and just about any Marx Brothers movie. The ingestion or inhalation of contraband substances was optional, but far from […]
This innocuous, sweet-tempered and frequently enjoyable little movie was made by people who quite obviously love the TV show on which it’s based. Nonetheless, the film is getting an undeservedly bad rap that carries with it more than a hint of racism. I know that the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) message boards aren’t exactly populated […]
Robert Aldrich’s penultimate film is an easygoing work of some considerable charm that relies far too much on ethnic humor — mostly Jewish, but not entirely — to sit quite as comfortably as it might like. The premise is workable: A singularly bad rabbinical student, Avram (Gene Wilder), is sent to serve as rabbi for […]
It’s unclear whether the credit “A Rodriguez Family Film” is intended to indicate that The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3-D is a Robert Rodriguez picture for families or a film made by his family — and both definitions could be accurate. The film, after all, is written, photographed, edited, scored (with […]
As slick a piece of high-concept star vehicle as you could hope for, Mr. and Mrs. Smith would be a lot slicker if it was shorn of about 20 minutes of what is finally a ponderous running time. The last act not only drags on forever, but manages to be strangely inconclusive at the same […]
This French import is the year’s cause celebre of horror, but I didn’t find all that much to celebrate. That the film’s director has been tapped to helm a remake of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes seems just about right, since Alexandre Aja’s idea of horror seems thoroughly grounded (I’m tempted to say “bogged”) […]
Sobering and somber, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall comes close to being the film it wants to be without quite getting there, owing to a certain literal-mindedness on the director’s part and a screenplay by producer Bernd Eichenger (who, incidentally, also produced Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s legendary seven-and-a-half-hour Our Hitler: A Film from Germany) that tries to take in […]
While there’s nothing exactly — or at least actively — wrong with The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, neither is there anything all that right about it. As the title suggests, this movie is pretty much a teenage knock-off of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood — something that I presume extends to the source […]
This is a relic from that very frightening period when it appeared that Steven Spielberg was simply going to take over the world of film. If he couldn’t make the movie himself, he would produce it or executive produce it and, in the bargain, steamroll the nominal director — be it Tobe Hooper or Barry […]
I liked enough things about Rebecca Miller’s The Ballad of Jack and Rose that I want to give the film higher marks than it deserves — but its flaws run too deep to ignore. The movie starts out as an unusually insightful deconstruction of a bogus Garden of Eden relationship between a father and daughter […]
Having quite enough trouble staying upright without putting wheels under me, I freely confess that I have never been on a skateboard in my life. There was an unfortunate incident involving a pair of plastic roller skates when I was about 7, but that was enough to convince me that such pursuits come under the […]
I watched Matthew Vaughn’s Brit gangster movie Layer Cake without so much as looking at the presskit, or in fact knowing that it even was a gangster flick. I note this because the movie immediately reminded me of Guy Ritchie’s Snatch — a meaner, somewhat less stylized Snatch — so it didn’t come as a […]
Calling It’s All True a documentary is really a bit wide of the mark, since the centerpiece of the film is an assemblage of the extant footage of the Four Men on a Raft section of the aborted 1941 Orson Welles’ project, It’s All True, but I’m not really sure what else to call this. […]
By a happy coincidence, I saw this film the same day I happened to watch Mervyn LeRoy’s 1931 pre-Code (read: before the Production Code emasculated movies for 30 years) newspaper melodrama, Five Star Final. The two movies have nothing in common, but there’s a scene in the LeRoy film where newspaperman Ziggie Feinstein outlines his […]
Before getting down to the specifics of this inoffensive but thoroughly inessential offering from Dreamworks Animation, I want to make an open plea to filmmakers everywhere: Let’s lay off the Chariots of Fire parodies and quit slapping Louis Armstrong’s recording of “What a Wonderful World” on soundtracks. The first is just no longer funny (if […]
“When America was on its knees, he brought us to our feet,” claims the tag line for Ron Howard’s Depression-era drama about boxer James Braddock (Russell Crowe). Resisting the fact that I know there’s a rude gag in there somewhere, I’ll concede that the claim pretty much sums up the approach Howard takes with Cinderella […]
Fans — especially the more hardcore variety — should just add one-and-a-half stars to my rating of this supposedly final installment in the Star Wars saga and move on. I’m not a card-carrying Star Warvian (or whatever the Star Wars equivalent to a Trekkie is), but I did like a good many things about the […]
Speaking as the guy who wrote the chapter on Edward D. Wood Jr. for a book entitled The Sleaze Merchants (my work only appears in the classiest tomes, you understand), I’m glad to see Asheville getting a dose of the peculiar delights of Ed Wood-style cinema. And those delights don’t come any more peculiar than […]
Yes, this film is French and it’s subtitled. These combined factors are apt to play against Agnes Jaoui’s second film, Look at Me, when it hits town this week, but I find myself asking why this should be. Asheville has a pretty darned savvy set of moviegoers, but from what I’ve seen in the past […]
The pity of a movie like this one is that the people most in need of seeing it are the very people who won’t. They’ll brand it as “liberal agenda” propaganda and head off to see Star Wars, where the liberal agenda is washed clean in a sea of severed limbs and falls on ears […]
