Half Nelson is very likely going to become the overlooked film of the year. With precious few exceptions — Spellbound (2002), The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2002), Being Julia (2004) — its distributor, ThinkFilm, has had very little luck promoting their releases. Moreover, the subject matter — a cocaine/crack-addict teacher befriended by a 12-year-old […]
Since the entirety of my experience with horses ends at the Mountain State Fair and with the donkey that my neighbor would let my sister and me ride when we were about 4 years old, it’s pretty obvious that I am not the intended audience for Flicka. A supposed adaptation of Mary O’Hara’s children’s book […]
A classic case of the importance of the subject matter being mistaken for the importance of the film about it, Clint Eastwood’s latest Oscar-bait, Flags of Our Fathers, is an uneven collection of mixed messages and the kind of sledgehammer simplifications that are part and parcel of any movie where Paul Haggis (Crash) has touched […]
Tod Browning is one of the great mysteries of film history. His life story is filled with contradictions (some he created himself). No one argues the fact that he was the architect of the classic American horror film Dracula (1931), with Bela Lugosi as Dracula. His success is one that is grounded in his macabre […]
So bad that it’s very nearly sublime, The Marine is easily the most enjoyable of the three mainstream movies that opened this week. The question of whether or not it’s enjoyable for any of the intended reasons is another matter, but in a week where I had to slog my way through The Grudge 2 […]
I don’t think it’s entirely the fact that Sarah Michelle Gellar pegs out early on in the proceedings that I found The Grudge 2 slightly more appealing than its predecessor. Yes, it’s slapdash, silly rather than scary and almost completely incoherent (maybe that’s what Gellar meant when she once said she only chooses to make […]
How can anyone not like a movie in which the heroine sees visions of St. Jude shimmering in the grime on her oven window (“Thank God, I ran out of Easy-Off,” she tells her priest)? Well, maybe there are those who can, but I’m not among them. First-time feature director Alejandro Springall and first-time screenwriter […]
No, One Night With the King isn’t a movie about a date with Elvis. Rather, it marks the most recent entry (after Facing the Giants and Love’s Abiding Joy) in the sudden burst of Christian-themed movies to hit theaters in recent weeks. And while higher production values and name actors manage to set the movie […]
Exiting the theater where I’d just seen Barry Levinson’s Man of the Year, I overheard someone behind me liken Robin Williams’ character in the film to Ronald Reagan. While my basic response to that interpretation is one of head-shaking wonderment, I also think it’s a reading of the film that perfectly illustrates just how toothless […]
This latest entry in the psychotic inbred hillbilly sub-genre earns a star for making a vague attempt at returning the Chainsaw Massacre franchise to the kind of socio-political underpinnings of Tobe Hooper’s original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and its sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986). (OK, so maybe that star has a little […]
The Law of Desire (1987) is Almodovar’s first full-fledged masterpiece — a bold, daring work that is as shocking and impressive today as it was nearly 20 years ago when it was first released. It also offers the sense of being the filmmaker’s most personal film, since its protagonist, Pablo Quintero (Eusebio Poncela), is, like […]
Few films are sufficient in themselves to make me think that I should perhaps go back and rethink a filmmaker’s entire oeuvre, but Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is one of those few. I’ve never doubted Scorsese’s importance as a major filmmaker of the modern era, but, The Gangs of New York (2002) to one side, […]
Though flawed in a number of areas — mostly concerning its depiction of the Red Chinese, which rarely gets beyond the level usually associated with WWII propaganda movies and their characterizations of Nazis — Lewis Milestone’s Pork Chop Hill (1959) is in many ways the first modern war film. Produced by star Gregory Peck as […]
The earliest film in the Viva Pedro! series, Matador (1986) is also one of his strangest concoctions. Mixing just about every genre imaginable, Almodovar here serves up a bleakly comic tale of voyeurism, rape (well, borderline), murder, religious fanaticism, death fixations, clairvoyance and just about anything else that crosses his mind. Needless to say, it’s […]
If this first film from the highly-publicized FoxFaith Films is any indication of what to expect from the fledgling branch of 20th Century Fox, the first thing that comes to mind about the company is a line from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — “And he took the faithful. That’s all, he just […]
Unique in Almodovar’s filmography in that it was based on a novel (by British crime novelist Ruth Rendell) and unusual in that he worked with other writers on the screenplay, Live Flesh (1997) seems to be put into one of two categories: The response is either that it’s lesser Almodovar, or that it’s a sign […]
According to the English Language Monitor, a “global assemblage of linguists, professional wordsmiths, and bibliophiles,” there are approximately 988,968 words in the English language. Nonetheless, there is only one appropriate word to describe Employee of the Month: lame. The film from first-time director Greg Coolidge (whose other big credit is co-writer of 2002’s Sorority Boys) […]
As a child of the Cold War era — you know, one of those kids who actually went through all the “duck and cover” and “don’t look at the blast” training exercises and got to tour a fall-out shelter on a school field trip at the age of 7 or 8 — I’ve only recently […]
I got into considerable hot water with some readers for highly recommending this film when it first came out, so I’ll say from the onset that Bad Education (2004) is a full-blown NC-17 rated work that is dark and disturbing. It’s also a work that makes no bones about its gay sexual content (despite the […]
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) is probably Pedro Almodovar’s most completely accessible film — certainly it’s one of his funniest and most popular works. More comedic in tone than the films that precede it — the dark (sometimes pitch black) side of his world is here only suggested. It’s the perfect […]
Having won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film in 1979, The Tin Drum went on to achieve an extra jolt of fame — or notoriety perhaps — when it was banned in Oklahoma on the grounds of indecency (a ruling that was subsequently overturned). It’s not hard to see either point of view (though […]
