I flipped five years ago over the original The Fast and the Furious, a movie about Los Angeles’ subculture of car racing and high-stakes hijacking. It was stupid but enjoyable because of terrific racing sequences and charismatic actors, especially a relatively unknown bald guy with big biceps named Vin Diesel. In 2003 came 2 Fast […]
I don’t know that it’s fair to say that Jared Hess’ new film, Nacho Libre, proves that his film Napoleon Dynamite was a fluke. In the end, Nacho Libre is pretty much the same film all over again — right down to its nebbishy hero (Jack Black) and his even more nebbishy sidekick (Mexican actor […]
This alternately engaging and clunky comedy comes from local production outfit, Papercookie. Who or what is Papercookie? According to the press release, it’s “a film production collective of art/film school dropouts who left college to pursue do-it-yourself independent filmmaking.” Comprised of John Ferrer (writer-director of Grownups), Aubrey Curtis and Joe Chang, the group left the […]
This movie is mediocrity incarnate. Watching it I felt brain cells leaping to their deaths like so many lemmings. I tried thinking of the experience in terms of training for the Big Fight — toughening up for the eventuality of Little Man opening on July 14 — but it didn’t work. There may be some […]
Water marks the third film in Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s “Elements” trilogy, following Earth (1998) and Fire (1996). (It would seem that a tetralogy including “air” might be more inclusive elementally speaking, but that’s a separate issue.) I can’t speak to the quality of the first two, never having seen them, but it’s apparent that […]
An unusual film to come from indie filmmaker John Sayles, The Secret of Roan Inish is completely out of keeping with the generally cynical tone of his other work. Sayles is the last person on Earth you’d expect to be making a “family film,” but that might be part of the reason this 1995 film […]
With John Hillcoat’s The Proposition one is faced with a curious dilemma. The film is certainly well made. It’s weirdly compelling. There’s a great deal of evident artistry in both Hillcoat’s direction and Nick Cave’s screenplay. Plus, there are several noteworthy performances. But having said all that, the film is also unregenerately unpleasant — to […]
It’s been a good 16 years since I last saw Richard Donner’s 1976 film The Omen. I found it then as I found it on its original release — unpersuasive, shakily conceived, cheesy and mostly notable for the sight of two major stars, Gregory Peck and Lee Remick, slumming in a more than usually preposterous […]
A case could be made that Chaplin’s 1917 film Easy Street is the greatest of all his early work. It is certainly his most ambitious — seeming less a short film than a feature done in shorthand. Often remembered today for the iconic image of Chaplin subduing the villain (Eric Campbell) by gassing him with […]
Neon, NASCAR and America’s magnificent desert scenery provide the unique visual backdrops for Pixar’s latest animation feature, Cars. Although a tad long and perhaps too sophisticated for pre-kindergarten tots, older kids will enjoy the movie’s high-octane action, and adults will delight in the in-jokes, the numerous cameo voiceovers and the sentimental tribute to 1950s car […]
Considered in 1979 one of the great follies of all time — over budget, overlong, overstated — Francis Ford Coppola’s attempt to look at the Vietnam War in terms of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has come full circle (in various forms) to emerge as possibly the most significant film ever made about war. That […]
The marriage of 81-year-old filmmaker Robert Altman and 63-year-old writer-performer Garrison Keillor has produced the first film of 2006 that I can honestly — without qualification of any kind — say I love. However, it’s not just a relative thing since I can count the films of 2006 that I’ve even liked very much on […]
Unrelenting in its sheer awfulness, the romantic comedy known as The Break-Up boasts neither romance, nor comedy. In its stead, this cinematic version of the famed Chinese water torture invites the viewer to spend most of its 107 minutes (trust me, it feels at least twice that long) trapped with two singularly unlikable characters fighting. […]
Peter Weir is not one of my favorite filmmakers. I was baffled by the acclaim his 1977 film, The Last Wave (my first exposure to his work), received and even more perplexed when I read Weir’s explanation of the film’s ending — that the final freeze frame of Richard Chamberlain symbolized the impending end of […]
One of the undisputed classics of modern international film, 8 1/2 (its title literally meaning that it was Federico Fellini’s eight-and-one-halfth film — seven full features and a couple short segments of omnibus films precede it) is the movie where the greatest of all Italian filmmakers moved completely away from traditional realism toward a more […]
Bryan Singer’s X2 was the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas and, yes, even the lobster’s dinner shirt of comic-book movies. But it was ludicrous to think that a third entry helmed by Brett Ratner — known for the Rush Hour franchise, and as a Hollywood party boy and an egotist without a cause — would […]
Wings is primarily famous today as the first-ever Best Picture Oscar-winner, which sounds a bit more impressive than it is, since the awards for 1927-28 seem to have been pitched to give everybody something. Wings may have won Best Picture for overall production, but it sat side-by-side with F.W. Murnau’s far better Sunrise, which won […]
I am often considered to be a cynical curmudgeon and even an elitist bastard — the latter, I think, mostly because I prefer, say, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou to Ron Burgundy: Anchorman. The charges have some merit; I wouldn’t argue the point. I am, however, not sufficiently cynical, curmudgeonly or elitist to be […]
When you watch upwards of 200 movies a year because your job demands it, it’s not often that you get to watch movies just because you want to. That’s one of the beauties of local film societies. Not only are they good for the community, offering viewers the chance to expand on their cinematic literacy […]
It will be seen by many as another case of preaching to the choir. And to some extent that’s true, but that’s also true of most documentaries. Let’s face it, folks who were planning on voting for George W. Bush were not the ones lining up around the block to see Fahrenheit 9/11. Similarly, the […]
When the Dardenne Brothers’ The Son appeared in 2003, those critics who reviewed it ran out of superlatives. Roger Ebert found it “assured and flawless.” Andrew Sarris couldn’t help “being stirred by the wildly melodramatic climax” and the “thunderously quiescent Zen Buddhist conclusion.” I understand where they’re coming from, even while thinking enthused hyperbole has […]
