Though undoubtedly indebted to Les Belles de Nuit — Rene Clair’s 1952 film about a young man whose dream life invades his waking one — Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep is the most strikingly original film to hit movie screens this year — or any other year for that matter. Let that serve as […]
The Guardian is simply one of those movies that exists: It’s not good; it’s not bad; it’s just there. It’s one of those movies that if you don’t see it in the theater, you’ll probably forget about it in a month (give it two months to fade from your memory if you happen to catch […]
With The Flower of My Secret (1995), Almodovar comes perilously close to making a straightforward soap opera in the grand 1950s Hollywood tradition — or as straightforward as Almodovar can be. If the film had come from almost anyone else, it would be considered at the very least slightly bizarre. For Almodovar, however, it’s surprisingly […]
Talk to Her (2002) was the first Almodovar film I reviewed for the Xpress, and while since then I have come to a far greater appreciation for his other works than stated in that review, my enthusiasm for Talk to Her as a magnificent and daring film has not lessened. With this film, Almodovar pushes […]
I approached this documentary with some trepidation — thinking it was likely to be yet another well-meaning, but not very persuasive issue-oriented film — but Pamela Yates’ State of Fear isn’t “yet another” anything. This is a singularly impressive — and disturbing and important — work that carries an emotional punch. It also carries with […]
School for Scoundrels is to the art of film what processed cheese food is to fine dining. It takes some standard ingredients, mixes them and comes up with a product that bears a vague resemblance to a movie. Rather than create anything new — and I’m not talking about the fact that this is (barely) […]
No, Open Season is not a whole lot more than what threatens to become Computer Animated Movie of the Week. It has no more substance than most such movies, and when it slaps the 20-year-old Talking Heads song, “Wild Wild Life,” on the soundtrack, the sense of throwing a bone to the adults in the […]
I couldn’t make it through Facing the Giants in one sitting. The first 45 minutes were quite enough to satisfy me that it was pretty awful. I did, however, go back the following day and watch the rest of it. That didn’t help. I freely admit that my problems with the film are partly due […]
It hasn’t been very long since I reviewed All About My Mother (1999) for a special showing of the film, and the best I can do without repeating myself is to direct readers to the Xpress online movie review archives on the Web site. I will note, however, that I had not seen Almodovar’s The […]
It’s easy to see why Quinceanara picked up the Audience Award at Sundance — it has “crowd-pleaser” writ large over every frame. It’s a little harder to understand it copping the festival’s dramatic Grand Jury Prize, since the film, while certainly a pleasant and worthy attempt, is both significantly flawed and a little troubling in […]
Roberto Rossellini’s Open City (1945) ushered in a period — and a style — of filmmaking called Italian neo-realism — a movement in Italian cinema born more of economics than an aesthetic decision. Federico Fellini, who had his first job in film as co-screenwriter of this film, wrote, “It was an art form invented by […]
Is this really Jet Li’s farewell to the martial arts genre? Call me a cynic, but I’m doubtful. I’m doubtful because Li’s claims that he’s quitting the genre – due to the perversion of the whole concept of martial arts by the fans — is just too much the same as the theme of Jet […]
Ah, Paramount Pictures! Think of it — it was once the most sophisticated of all movie studios, home to such giants of film as Josef von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch and Rouben Mamoulian, all of whom did their best work there. The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields and Mae West shone brightest during their tenures at Paramount. […]
One review for Flyboys, this week’s entry in the “inspired by a true story” genre of filmmaking, asked what’s wrong with making an old-fashioned, feel-good war movie. And while there’s no arguing with the fact that Flyboys accomplishes just that, when your film is cliched, hokey and, in some cases, downright irresponsible, then it’s safe […]
In one of his more mainstream efforts, indie darling John Sayles tackles the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal when eight (or six, depending on who you believe) members of the Chicago White Sox agreed to throw the World Series for financial gain. It’s one of the major events in the history of the sport and the […]
Heavy-handed, pretentious and weighed down by a spectacularly strange central performance, Steven Zaillian’s All the King’s Men is ultimately a failure. However, it’s the kind of admirable failure that’s worth seeing for what it tries to do — and for what it sometimes accomplishes. It’s certainly nowhere near the artistic disaster it’s been painted as. […]
Someone writing in praise of this angst-driven whine-fest of a movie noted that it is not escapist fare. That may be true, but well before the halfway point in The Last Kiss, I was looking for an escape route. Now, I liked Zach Braff’s Garden State (2004) and I liked Braff in it. It was […]
Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia may well be the most supremely messed-up film I’ve ever afforded four stars. (Actually, “messed-up” doesn’t really convey the level of derangement I’m trying to convey, but the dictates of taste and the sensibility of my readership will not allow the term I’d adopt in casual conversation.) Oh, sure, […]
If you see Testimony (1988) — Tony Palmer’s unusual biopic on Dmitri Shostakovich — it will come as no surprise that the filmmaker worked with Ken Russell on Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World (1966) during Russell’s BBC days. (You might be more surprised to find that he co-directed Cream’s Farewell Concert for […]
It’s fascinating to look back on the original reviews for Costa-Gavras’ Missing (1982). Most gave the film high marks for drama, performances and the sheer chutzpah of daring to make a film that concludes U.S. government officials knew of and were even implicated in the murder of left-wing American journalist Charles Horman in Chile in […]
Laurent Cantet’s Heading South is a good movie that thinks it’s a daring one — and it may be, but it’s also a movie that hedges its daring and often seems unclear on just what point it’s out to make. The story — set in the late 1970s in Port-au-Prince, Haiti — concerns three (well, […]
