Movie Reviews

The Story: A racing champion crop duster goes to fire and rescue school. The Lowdown: Even by the none-too-exacting standards of kiddie fare these days, this is just dire. It isn't funny. It isn't exciting. It ought to have gone straight-to-DVD — assuming it had to go anywhere.

In Brief: When local musician Hank Bones couldn't get a stage production of his musical The Quitters, he decided to make a film of it. Cheerfully admitting that he had no experience with film, he dived straight into the project — on a $9,000 budget — and with the help of friends and local actors…

The Story: A seemingly completely inappropriate actress goes out of her way to convince a writer-director that she should star in his new play. The Lowdown: Brilliant, bold filmmaking from a great filmmaker, who proves that at 80, he can still be at the top of his game. It's funny and perceptive and maybe a…

The Story: A married couple accidentally lets their raunchy sex tape escape into the outside world. The Lowdown: A flatly directed, wholly unfunny R-rated comedy that’s devoid of edge, laughs or even titillation.

The Story:  A jilted singer-songwriter and a washed-up record producer team up to produce an album on their own. The Lowdown: A mostly pleasant but deeply flawed little film that gets by on its stars and a sense of generosity.

The Story: With humanity nearly wiped out by disease and supersmart apes living in the wilderness, human survivors and their intelligent simian counterparts attempt to build an uneasy alliance. The Lowdown: Deceptively goofy and far too self-important, the attempt to be a thoughtful, intelligent spectacle isn’t enough to give a free pass to what amounts…

In Brief: Wedge Brewery holds their annual showing of Asheville's own Thunder Road, the 1958 moonshine-running and fast-cars classic — well, a classic of this kind of backwoods-action melodrama. Wedge Brewery will show Thunder Road on Saturday, July 19. Films start 15 minutes after sundown.

In Brief: This is the last of the original series of Godzilla movies — starting with Gojira (Godzilla) in 1954 and ending in 1975 with this — and it's one that does much to right the mistakes of the 1970s entries. Bringing back the director who started it all, Ishiro Honda, and composer Akira Ifukube…

In Brief: Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) is simply one of the damndest things you're ever likely to see. Godard took a popular noir-ish, pulp fiction  detective, Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) and plopped him into a nightmarish sci-fi movie that seems to be part serious, part satire — or possibly one huge practical joke. Is Godard serious or not? Good…

In Brief: The Clearing was partly shot in Asheville, giving it a certain local interest — though I fear that Asheville watchers may be disappointed that there’s nothing very specifically Ashevillian about it. Not that that’s so surprising, since the movie is supposed to be taking place in Pennsylvania, and most of the North Carolina…

The Story:  Three stories set in three different countries are intercut with each other. The Lowdown: A fascinating, flawed and occasionally maddening film with a terrific cast giving solid performances. It's wildly ambitious — probably too much so — overstuffed, overlong and yet compelling in ways that better films often aren't.

The Story:  Documentary on movie critic Roger Ebert. The Lowdown: Something of a mixed bag — and one that dodges the hard questions and comes across more like a celebration of its subject than an actual portrait. It nonetheless does a good job of capturing much of the essence of a man who loved the…

In Brief: Since Stephen Frears had a movie up for a Best Picture Oscar — Philomena — last year, it's apt  that his first big hit, My Beautiful Laundrette, should be getting another look. This multicultural, multisexuality comedy-drama-romance kicked off Daniel Day-Lewis' career and made the first mark for a production company called Working Title. It was also…

In Brief: No one and nothing is quite safe at Mrs. Rittenhouse's (Margaret Dumont) swanky Long Island house party when the Marx Brothers show up. Worse, one of them, Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding (Groucho), is her guest of honor. Zeppo is his secretary and, as usual, mostly fades into the background, while Signor Emmanuel Ravelli…

In Brief: This year's feature winner at the Twin Rivers Media Festival is an extremely likable — mostly due to its energetic cast — sex comedy that benefits to some degree by name performers, Gary Busey and C. Thomas Howell, in key supporting roles. The fact that it's mostly gorgeous looking in bright, pop art…

The Story: After discovering her husband’s infidelity, a down-on-her-luck former fast-food employee and her alcoholic grandmother set off on a road trip. The Lowdown: An ugly, unfunny comedy of the supposedly raunchy R-rated variety that’s little more than noisy and grating.

The Story: Story of a dysfunctional, motherless family in Texas, focused on the older, delinquent son. The Lowdown: An indie-basic tale of disaffected youth and their alcoholic dad in rural Texas. Some aspects are pleasing, but you've seen it all before.

In Brief: Back in their day, the Hammer horror films were considered to be quite graphic and bloody. Today, they seem positively restrained, but don’t sell the studio at its best short — and Terence Fisher’s The Gorgon (1964) is definitely Hammer at its best. Premise-wise you mightn’t think so, but somehow transporting a monster from…

In Brief: As good as it is on its own merits, Blood Simple worked as the Coens Brothers' announcement of themselves to the moviegoing world — showing off, to the best of their ability on a low budget, exactly what they had to offer the movies. So much of what they indeed proved they did…

The Story: The last remnants of humanity, broken into class structures, are all aboard a super train that endlessly circles the otherwise frozen world — until revolt breaks out. The Lowdown: Brilliant, creative, exciting, suspenseful — and with much more on its mind than the usual blockbuster, Snowpiercer is a front-runner for one of the…

The Story: On their final night living together, three best friends find an extraterrestrial that shadowy government agents are after. The Lowdown: While it has its heart in the right place, this tween adventure flick is far too derivative and far too distracting within the confines of its found footage artifice to be more than…