The White Countess is the final film from the partnership, both professional and personal, of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant (who died last year). The new film marks something of a return to form after their disastrous Le Divorce and tepid The Golden Bowl. In fact, this is probably the most satisfyingly realized […]
The most critically damned of all Ingmar Bergman films, the legendary director’s only English-language work is by now ripe for rediscovery and reappraisal as an intensely personal work unlike anything else in his filmography. The background of The Serpent’s Egg helps put it into perspective. Claiming he was being persecuted by Swedish income-tax authorities, Bergman […]
At first glance, first-time filmmaker Jeff Barrie’s documentary Killowatt Ours looks like more of the same. You know, more of the same well-meaning, conservation-conscious, finger-wagging stuff that you’ve been seeing for years. The sort of film that likes to lecture you about how you are the problem and how you aren’t doing your bit. That […]
It’s 90 years old and there’s still nothing quite like D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Oh, sure, there have been other multi-storied films that intersect to play on a constant theme: P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia is probably the most successful, with Paul Haggis’ Crash and Steven Gaghan’s Syriana the most recent. But these all differ in that their […]
If you ranked movies solely on ambition, Joe Roth’s Freedomland would get an A. Oh, it’s ambitious. I don’t know when I last saw a movie try to do so much — or get so tangled up and keep tripping over its own feet. It would have helped if screenwriter Richard Price (adapting his own […]
Sled dogs rule! In Eight Below, six huskies and two malamutes prove that penguins aren’t the only stars in Antarctica. This surprisingly impressive adventure tale from director Frank Marshall (Alive) escaped being Disneyfied, meaning that the animals are heroic, wondrous and believable, but not cute. “Restraint” is the operative word here — and considering how […]
Sample humor in Date Movie: Two hobbits and a wizard walk into a jewelry store. One hobbit asks the clerk how much she’ll give him for a certain ring in his possession. She offers him 50 bucks and he grudgingly takes it while the wizard bemoans the fate of mankind over this transaction. The hobbit […]
This frequently on-target and often very funny film would have been better if it was half as hip as it thinks it is. As it stands, Anarchy TV is still a pretty good indie film — especially if judged on a sliding scale, which is almost essential when dealing with low-budget efforts of this kind. […]
Reviewed Feb 15, 2006 Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s first feature caused quite a ripple of interest at the time of its release in 2001. It seemed to announce the arrival of a fresh voice on the filmmaking scene — not to mention that of a young actor named Gael Garcia Bernal, who would leap to much […]
This attempt at resuscitating the old Blake Edwards-Peter Sellers franchise raises the question of whether a film can be said to at least fitfully succeed as a comedy if some of the gags are so bad that their very ineptitude is a cause for mirth — painful mirth, yes, but mirth all the same. Offhand, […]
As part of Kindness Week, this little 25-minute documentary is scheduled for three showings at the Fine Arts. An admirably straightforward documentary, the film details the — amazingly successful — efforts of 7-year-old Ryan Hreljac of Kemptville, Ontario, to have a well built in Uganda. Ryan at first mistakenly thought that he could get the […]
Woody Allen’s latest has garnered him some of his best reviews in years — and I’m still pondering why. To some degree, I think it’s a case of heaping undeserved praise on a filmmaker for no other reason than that he’s done something that at least offers the illusion of being different. I certainly see […]
Good Morning, Babylon presents a charming idea for a film that somehow never quite achieves its promise, despite the 1987 film itself being constantly watchable and interesting, sometimes even fascinating. The idea is brilliant: Two Italian artisans, Nicola (Vincent Spano) and Andrea Bonnano (Joaquim de Almeida), come to America in 1915 seeking their fortunes, which […]
If this movie does nothing else, it should settle the question of whether Harrison Ford ought to do a fourth and final Indiana Jones picture. The answer is no. The prospect of seeing Ford at this stage of his life as an all-out action hero is not a pleasing one, since his — blessedly limited […]
If you’ve seen either of the two previous Final Destination movies, then you have a pretty good idea what you’ll be getting into if you go see this one. The concept is the same in each case. A group of movie teens (read: a bunch of people you’ve never heard of somewhere between the ages […]
Curious George is one curiously mixed-bag movie. Visually, it’s a treat. It’s gorgeously illustrated in old-fashioned 2-D animation, faithful to the lovely drawings in the 1940s books on which the movie is based. If looks were the only critical consideration, I’d give George an A+. Curious George is a cute and inquisitive monkey (a chimpanzee, […]
“Forget it, Jake. It’s New Year’s Town.” That bit of altered Chinatown dialogue makes a good description for the months of January and February at the movies. There’s almost never anything to get excited about at the movies until March. It would have been foolish to approach Simon West’s When a Stranger Calls with anything […]
Something New really isn’t, at least insofar as the basics of the romantic-comedy formula are concerned. The film definitely plays by the conventions of its genre. Uptight businesswoman Kenya (Sanaa Lathan, Alien Vs. Predator) and landscape architect Brian (Simon Baker, Land of the Dead) “meet cute” on a disastrous blind date. Circumstances force them into […]
Reviewed Feb 8, 2006 One of the delights for me of movies coming back around for film society and other special showings is the opportunity it provides for reassessment — and the simple excuse to watch them again. Not having seen the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? in some time, I wasn’t sure […]
Watching Wolfgang Petersen’s Hollywood movies Outbreak and Troy can make you wonder what all the fuss about him was in the first place. Even at their best, those films scale the heights of lowest-common-denominator adequacy and might just as easily have been done by a John McTiernan — or with a little bad luck, a […]
Perched precariously somewhere between popular entertainment and art-house fare, Richard Shepard’s The Matador is a constantly entertaining, invariably good-looking, bittersweet black comedy that’s actually a lot more sentimental than it seems to think. The premise, as expressed by the tag line, “A hit man and a salesman walk into a bar …,” suggests something pretty […]
