Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger (1990) is an odd little movie — and a bit too leisurely paced — that was largely overlooked on its original release, but has come to be associated with a renaissance in black filmmaking of the era. Even at that, it’s a somewhat unusual work that deals — in […]
Here we go again — another of these Tim Allen Santa Clause things. That means once more we’re treated to the unconvincing spectacle of 10-year-olds in elf drag, not very funny comedy on scrupulously antiseptic and unreal sets, and that faint wave of nausea that passes for a tug at the heartstrings in corporate filmmaking. […]
Warning: The motion picture under discussion here contains actual and unsimulated sexual activity of a type usually only found in outright pornographic movies. Nothing is left to the imagination. Everything is shown. (There’s even one shot that makes a rather pointed comment on the splatter form of art associated with Jackson Pollock’s paintings.) It’s all […]
The first venture into computer animation for the traditionally clay-oriented Aardman Animations (the makers of the Wallace and Gromit series and Chicken Run (2000)), Flushed Away manages to set itself apart from the current onslaught of animated films. Despite trading Claymation for CGI (supposedly due to the fact that a number of scenes include water, […]
An interesting screen translation of an Egyptian novel by Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz that transfers the action from Cairo to a single street — Midaq Alley — in Mexico City. El Callejon de los Milagros (1994) is a stylistic treat with a bit too little at its center. Despite the fact the film boasts […]
OK, let’s put this into perspective, shall we? Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (hereafter, only referred to as Borat, thank goodness) is not the funniest movie ever made. It is not an instant classic of the genre. It is not the most subversive film ever made. It is […]
To give it its full title — Who Is Bozo Texino? The Epic Account of the Improbable Discovery of the True Identity of the World’s Greatest Boxcar Artist — is to give something of the flavor of this eccentric-looking film from filmmaker Bill Daniel. Shot in black-and-white on 16mm, the film attempts to find Bozo […]
I liked The U.S. vs. John Lennon, but that was a foregone conclusion. I’m of the Beatles Generation pure and simple. I’m someone who skipped school the entire week that John and Yoko were the co-hosts on The Mike Douglas Show. (And, boy, did the clips used here show Mike Douglas to be a barely […]
I am giving Saw III a two-star rating solely on the grounds of a certain technical proficiency. I was amused to hear two of my friends vocally freak out (there was some mention of the deity I believe) at the implied grotesqueness of shots that actually consisted of nothing more than someone turning a foot […]
The majority of critics have trashed Ryan Murphy’s (TV’s Nip/Tuck) debut feature Running with Scissors. Words like “smug,” “unpleasant” and “loathsome” (this last one crops up several times) pepper these reviews. There are a few notable exceptions — the reviews of Andrew Sarris, Jack Mathews and David Edelstein being among them — but the film […]
Straddling the line between Fellini’s realistic early period and the full-grown fantastication that began with 8 1/2 (1963) is La Dolce Vita (1960). It shares elements of both eras of Fellini — being at once realistic and yet edging toward the fantastic, and even incorporating elements of the fantastic into its reality. The film begins […]
Douglas McGrath’s infamously ill-timed Infamous is at least a minor tragedy of cinema. Not only is the film better than the overpraised (including by me) Capote (2005), it’s about a hundred times better than its famous predecessor — and Toby Jones’ doesn’t so much portray Truman Capote as he inhabits him in a way that […]
Apart from Sam Taylor’s The Taming of the Shrew (1929) (with its legendary title card reading, “by William Shakespeare, additional dialogue by Sam Taylor”), John Barrymore being let loose on a soliloquy from Richard II in Warner Bros.’ Show of Shows (1929), the “radicalized” Max Reinhardt version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), the teaming […]
In a week where the big box office draw is the mindless torture-fest Saw III, it’s refreshing to find a movie that is actually thought-provoking. Set in South Africa during the 1980s, as apartheid’s hold on the country was just beginning to wane, Phillip Noyce’s Catch a Fire is an extremely topical, occasionally touching look […]
Much like Spider-Man, X-Men (2000) has suffered a certain amount of neglect owing to the existence of a superior sequel. In its case, though, it’s understandable since the sequel is vastly superior. Yet, it’s worth remembering that X2 (2003) is a sequel to a film that was pretty darn terrific in the first place. X2 […]
“Are you watching closely?” reads the tagline for Christopher Nolan’s film of Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige. Judging by remarks I’ve overheard by viewers exiting the movie, I can only conclude that more than a few viewers aren’t taking the tagline to heart. Anyone planning on seeing this frequently remarkable, invariably fascinating film needs to […]
When I first saw Peter Medak’s The Changeling in 1980, I was disappointed by it. I think now I was disappointed only because it wasn’t up to his masterpiece, The Ruling Class (1972) — but then very few films are up to that one, and very few filmmakers have ever made anything that good. And […]
Spider-Man is one of those slightly unfortunate films that was all the rage when it came out, garnered a lot of critical praise, and then was subsumed by a more elaborate and even more highly regarded sequel. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of Spider-Man, which, in many ways, is actually superior to its […]
Hirokazu Koreeda’s Nobody Knows (2004) is one of those highly regarded recent films that just somehow never made it to Asheville during its original release, so it’s nice to see it finally show up. The film is based on an actual occurrence in Tokyo in 1988 when four children were abandoned by their mother to […]
Far more baffling than any amount of legerdemain on display in one of this week’s other offerings, The Prestige, is just how Sofia Coppola could have Svengali’d the world into believing that her Marie Antoinette biopic is actually daring. When I first saw the trailer months ago, I thought it looked interesting, and I was […]
Robert Greenwald doesn’t make films with an eye toward being fair and balanced, but then again, unlike the news organization he tackled in his Outfoxed documentary, he doesn’t make any such claims. He’s a fire-breathing liberal and proud of it — and he makes his films without pulling punches. Charges that Greenwald has an agenda […]
