I thought the phrase “inspired by a true story” consisted of the most horrifying words I would encounter this weekend. That’s only because no one told me that “Music performed by the Polyphonic Spree” would be emblazoned on the opening credits of Thumbsucker. I know a lot of people hold a different point of view, […]
Perhaps the last great filmmaker of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” yet to be fully recognized, William Dieterle was a master stylist with an intensely personal style. He hit Hollywood in 1931 and immediately turned out the brilliant — and far too little known — The Last Flight, and followed it up with Her Majesty, Love, a […]
It’s not surprising that Marc Forster’s Stay has taken a drubbing from many critics (though by no means all), nor that it has been less than enthusiastically greeted by audiences, who are not flocking to see it. The fact that Stay has been gathering dust on the shelves for some time, of course, indicated a […]
The very fact that there’s nothing wrong with North Country may be what’s wrong with it. The film is so efficient at being exactly what it sets out to be that it could become the classic text for a filmmaking class called “Crafting the Message Picture 101” (as well as a supplementary teaching aid for […]
Everybody’s talking about it. It’s won numerous awards and will probably get nominated for an Oscar, but this is the kind of movie that no one wants to see. We don’t really want to remember how fragile the human body is. Let’s pretend there’s no such thing as the statistical inevitability caused by sports, accidents, […]
First-time documentarian David Redmon takes an unusually cinema verite (well, with the addition of rather non-verite subtitles on occasion) approach to what would otherwise have been yet another dry-as-dirt, dull-as-ditchwater tract on the evils of globalization. Rather than preach on the topic, he allows his footage to speak for itself — crosscutting footage of Mardi […]
Like North Country, which also opened this week, Kids in America is a fact-“inspired” picture with a message — but of a much more modest scale. Kids is low-budget, low-profile and a bit ragged, and it unfortunately trades on the fortunately very limited presence of Paris Hilton nemesis Nicole Richie in its cast. But I’d […]
While you’re watching this movie and wiping the wayward tear, the full title keeps nagging — inspired by a true story, not based on a true story. You can’t help but wonder: Which parts of this movie should you pay attention to because their truths have meaning for your life and the lives of all […]
How do you review a movie like Doom? Why even bother? Doom is exactly what you think it is — a noisy, gory, silly movie taken from a video game, populated with disposable cardboard characters running around corridors shooting guns and/or being chased and eaten by nasty monsters. You already know whether it’s on your […]
As Word Wars proclaims, the game played in National Scrabble Association tournaments is “not your grandmother’s Scrabble.” And what a shame — according to this fascinating but ultimately unpleasant documentary about cutthroat Scrabble competition, grandmother’s game was a lot more fun. The Scrabble champions in Word Wars, most of them men, are unlikable, obsessive fanatics […]
I saw The Fog, a singularly pointless remake of John Carpenter’s fairly enjoyable 1980 ghost story, with one friend who can best be described in this context as a “jumper.” That’s to say that he’s an easy mark for a shock effect. Even the slightest such attempt will normally have him nearly leaping from his […]
The first thing you encounter in Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown is a narration by Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) that discusses the difference between a failure and a fiasco — the idea being that anyone can fail, but that it takes a special type of person to create a fiasco. If that’s so, then Crowe himself is […]
About a week ago, I changed the water in my aquarium. What a fool I was! I realize now I could have sold the thing to Tony Scott to shoot his next movie through. At least, I could have if he plans on making his next film look anything like Domino, which appears to have […]
Straight off: This film is not for the squeamish or those with tender sensibilities. That said, David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence is anything but gratuitously violent (see Domino for that), but it is most assuredly violent. And Cronenberg being Cronenberg, he doesn’t flinch from it, or prettify it — nor does he revel in […]
If I’m a little less enthusiastic about Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit than many of my fellow reviewers, chalk it up to my having difficulty with the grotesqueness of the human characters (I’m OK with Gromit the dog and the various and sundry rabbits) in this claymation work from Nick Park and […]
I was watching a documentary on Ken Russell’s The Devils the other day, wherein British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies remarked, “People say he’s got bad taste. Well, yes, he does — and thank God for it!” What has this got to do with first-time writer-director Rob McKittrick’s Waiting …? Simply that McKittrick strives for […]
Two for the Money is perhaps the most seriously deranged movie of the season — possibly of several seasons. Apart from the three lead performances, the movie is bad in the train-wreck sense. And that’s also what makes it fascinating. Yes, a little while back, I applauded Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm for refusing to […]
The Gospel has its eyes on being a surprise hit a la Diary of a Mad Black Woman, but it lacks that film’s low comedy and Tyler Perry’s fan-base. For that matter, it also lacks the overheated melodramatics of its target, though it understands the religiosity all too well — even if one might question […]
This is one of those cult items that I’ve never “gotten,” and trying it again for this review didn’t change that. I think this is one of those Generation X things that requires the viewer to have grown up on Sesame Street (or worse, Fraggle Rock) to appreciate. For someone whose only childhood exposure to […]
With so much cinematic junk flooding theaters, it’s a relief to encounter a movie like Proof, which actually dares to deal with ideas and complex — and complexly motivated — characters. The situation may also cause the movie to be overrated. That was certainly the case with the previous collaboration between director John Madden and […]
It’s called a “chick flick,” what 60 years ago was called a “woman’s picture” — aimed at a largely female audience, focused on female characters and likely (though not invariably) directed by a gay filmmaker such as George Cukor, Edmund Goulding or Mitchell Leisen. Not much has changed in the intervening years. I have no […]
