It’s 1941 London. Hideous German planes drop death on the city, forcing thousands of youngsters to seek refuge in the countryside. Among them are the four Pevensie children. There’s Peter, about 15 (William Moseley), Susan, 14 (Anna Popplewell), and Edmund, 9 (Skandar Keynes). At 7, little Lucy (Georgie Henley) is the youngest, but she’s also […]
Rich, complex, multilayered and by turns maddening and depressing, Syriana not only makes up for Stephen Gaghan’s Abandon, but it emerges as one of the best films of the year. That said, it’s best to approach it with the understanding that it’s not the most user-friendly offering now in the multiplex. The film’s structure, though […]
Leon Ichaso’s 2001 film on Puerto Rican poet-writer Miguel Pinero is one of those movies that missed playing locally. Despite the best efforts of the Fine Arts Theatre, it’s inevitable that a few smaller, more experimental films are going to slip past us — and this is one of those. So it’s nice to see […]
That this Palestinian-Dutch-French-German co-production from Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad should be playing the same week as Syriana is interesting. Both films deal with the topic of suicide bombers, and both have a good deal in common on the topic. In one instance — the actual moment of detonation — both are virtually (even creepily) identical. […]
In my view, there’s a time and a place for watching people propel themselves down a mountainside on skis or snowboards or whatever makeshift thingie happens to be available — that time involves James Bond being pursued by S.M.E.R.S.H. operatives and at least one person (not Bond) needs to perish over a precipice, while another […]
In the year 2415, what’s left of mankind — most everyone was offed 400 years earlier by something called “the industrial virus” (which would make a good name for an acid house band) — lives in a walled matte painting that’s supposed to be a city called Bregna. When seen in three-dimensional bits and pieces, […]
Little kids are like puppies. They make a lot of mistakes before learning how to behave properly, and they know that being in a group is a lot more fun than facing the scary world alone. That’s why little kids like movies about little kids acting like puppies. Adults who grew up in large families […]
As a black comedy, The Ice Harvest has its heart in the right place — off on vacation in some other movie. Unlike the hedged-bet cynicism found in Just Friends (for people who want to feel cool without the guilt), this is one nasty little film. I happened to be in the position of seeing […]
There were moments in Rent where I was convinced that “525,600 minutes” wasn’t a lyric, but the actual running time of the film. And yet there were also moments — even sequences — that I found myself liking. However, I fear the latter have fled my brain in the intervening days, so that my lasting […]
My only qualm with Joe Wright’s version of Pride and Prejudice is almost identical to the one I had with Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist. At the end of the day, no matter how good this film is, it’s still another version of something I remain unconvinced needed another version. Oh, it’s not that there’s no […]
Ryan Reynolds, the honeymoon is definitely over. I forgave you for Van Wilder when you made Blade Trinity, and I was ready to add points after Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. But then it was a downhill slide with The Amityville Horror and Waiting. While Just Friends may be no worse than Waiting […]
Heavy-hitting R&B star Usher apparently has a following, but they don’t seem to be lining up for this lame vanity project that’s being palmed off as a real movie. The fact that In the Mix was directed by the fellow who gave us The Adventures of Pluto Nash enters into the equation, though I doubt […]
Despite having liked the previous directorial collaboration of Scott McGehee and David Siegel, The Deep End, I did not hold out much hope for Bee Season. Nothing that I’d read about the film really connected with me. In fact, the most encouraging thing about it lay in the number of bad reviews it had garnered […]
I’m probably not the best audience for this, since the persuasive charms of country music have yet to persuade or charm me. Thus I can’t say how well the film will play to a viewership made up of Johnny Cash fans — though I suspect they will be in more immediate sympathy with Walk the […]
Anyone who has ever been involved with a film festival knows full well that movies that pick up “audience awards” are rarely the most adventurous of entries and often have a very high sentimentality quotient. So upon seeing that The Thing About My Folks had snagged such awards and garnered almost endless Internet Movie Database […]
When the Hendersonville Film Society’s Chip Kaufman told me that they were showing George Cukor’s The Blue Bird as their Thanksgiving turkey, I didn’t fully appreciate the enormity of that statement; I’d never seen this legendarily disastrous film. Having now seen it, I can only say, “Wow!” This isn’t just a bad movie, it’s mesmerizingly […]
The great Frank Capra’s most ambitious and disturbing film, Meet John Doe is possibly more relevant today than when it first appeared in 1941. The idea of a completely media-fabricated celebrity — raised almost to the level of deity and used as a tool for political gain — probably seemed pretty fantastic then. It doesn’t […]
As with Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Mike Newell’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is not afraid of frightening the horses. It will be interesting to see whether more objections will be raised over the film’s dark and even violent tone, or its decidedly upped quotient of sexuality. Both […]
As I settled in and found myself subjected to an ersatz Tim Burton opening-credit sequence (albeit a pretty neat one) backed by an ersatz Danny Elfman score (not so neat, but not disgraceful), it was impossible not to believe that there were some pretty rough seas ahead. Thankfully, director Jon Favreau almost immediately dropped the […]
When 20th Century Fox decided that their long-running Charlie Chan series was no longer a viable commodity after 11 years, their Charlie Chan, Sidney Toler, bought the rights to the character and proceeded to shop the property around. What looked like small potatoes to Fox looked pretty appealing to little Monogram Pictures, which was just […]
Josef von Sternberg belongs in the very top ranks of any list of the greatest filmmakers of all time — and nowhere is this more apparent than in his self-described “relentless excursion into style,” The Scarlet Empress. Bearing the improbable credit that the film is “based on a diary of Catherine II” that was “arranged […]
