As a zombie movie, Land of the Dead is an OK horror opus. For director George A. Romero, who has a tendency to turn 60 minutes worth of story into 120-plus minutes of movie, it’s reasonably compact. And it does have an agreeably handmade feel to it (which, admittedly, results in a certain cheese factor). […]
First of all, Herbie: Fully Loaded gets points just for not being The Perfect Man (Hilary Duff’s new flick). And beyond that, the movie just isn’t bad. It may not be in the same happy-surprise league as the Lindsay Lohan/Jamie Lee Curtis remake of Freaky Friday, but it is a pretty pleasant diversion, albeit one […]
Destiny — or more to the point, Der Mude Tod (literally The Weary Death) — was the film that brought the great German filmmaker Fritz Lang worldwide acclaim. It’s also said to be the movie that inspired Luis Bunuel to take an interest in filmmaking. And it was clearly a major influence on the play […]
The best thing about Bewitched is that its cinematography is so plodding that, unlike Nicole Kidman’s other movies where the camera is all over the place, you actually get to see her for more than a few dizzying split seconds at a time and can realize how exquisitely gorgeous she truly is. The idea behind […]
I didn’t think it possible that Hilary Duff could sink any lower than her last film, Raise Your Voice. I had not reckoned on the combined talents of producer Ma Duff (sure, she’s Hilary’s manager, but how does that qualify her as a producer?), Duffian directorial favorite Mark Rosman and this appalling screenplay by Gena […]
This movie’s been touted as a kind of blend of last year’s spelling bee documentary, Spellbound, and Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom, but it’s not riddled with the troubling undercurrents of the former and lacks the quirky, almost John Waters-esque style of the latter. And while Mad Hot Ballroom doesn’t share the overbearing success ethic of […]
The Asheville Community Resource Center continues its Cult/Trash movie series with this Canadian oddity from filmmaker Lee Demarbre, who made his mark (such as it is) by cooking up a trailer for a nonexistent movie called Harry Knuckles, which paved the way for a short film, Harry Knuckles and the Treasure of the Aztec Mummy. […]
This fascinating documentary about the lives and works of composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham works in large part because it allows the duo — along with their friends, co-workers and a treasure-trove of archival footage — to speak for themselves in a more or less cinema verite manner, without editorial comment. Filmmaker Eliot […]
Well, whaddya know? The new Batman movie isn’t perfect, but it’s actually good. And this is an assessment from someone who’s as burnt out as is humanly possible on movies that are either adapted from comic books or might as well be. The movie’s isn’t quite the fabulous “rethinking” of the Batman mythos that it […]
This film used to be a stock item during the era of the cult-film midnight movie, standing side by side with Phantom of the Paradise, Rocky Horror, The Devils, Harold and Maude, The Gang’s All Here and just about any Marx Brothers movie. The ingestion or inhalation of contraband substances was optional, but far from […]
This innocuous, sweet-tempered and frequently enjoyable little movie was made by people who quite obviously love the TV show on which it’s based. Nonetheless, the film is getting an undeservedly bad rap that carries with it more than a hint of racism. I know that the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) message boards aren’t exactly populated […]
Robert Aldrich’s penultimate film is an easygoing work of some considerable charm that relies far too much on ethnic humor — mostly Jewish, but not entirely — to sit quite as comfortably as it might like. The premise is workable: A singularly bad rabbinical student, Avram (Gene Wilder), is sent to serve as rabbi for […]
It’s unclear whether the credit “A Rodriguez Family Film” is intended to indicate that The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3-D is a Robert Rodriguez picture for families or a film made by his family — and both definitions could be accurate. The film, after all, is written, photographed, edited, scored (with […]
As slick a piece of high-concept star vehicle as you could hope for, Mr. and Mrs. Smith would be a lot slicker if it was shorn of about 20 minutes of what is finally a ponderous running time. The last act not only drags on forever, but manages to be strangely inconclusive at the same […]
This French import is the year’s cause celebre of horror, but I didn’t find all that much to celebrate. That the film’s director has been tapped to helm a remake of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes seems just about right, since Alexandre Aja’s idea of horror seems thoroughly grounded (I’m tempted to say “bogged”) […]
Sobering and somber, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall comes close to being the film it wants to be without quite getting there, owing to a certain literal-mindedness on the director’s part and a screenplay by producer Bernd Eichenger (who, incidentally, also produced Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s legendary seven-and-a-half-hour Our Hitler: A Film from Germany) that tries to take in […]
While there’s nothing exactly — or at least actively — wrong with The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, neither is there anything all that right about it. As the title suggests, this movie is pretty much a teenage knock-off of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood — something that I presume extends to the source […]
This is a relic from that very frightening period when it appeared that Steven Spielberg was simply going to take over the world of film. If he couldn’t make the movie himself, he would produce it or executive produce it and, in the bargain, steamroll the nominal director — be it Tobe Hooper or Barry […]
I liked enough things about Rebecca Miller’s The Ballad of Jack and Rose that I want to give the film higher marks than it deserves — but its flaws run too deep to ignore. The movie starts out as an unusually insightful deconstruction of a bogus Garden of Eden relationship between a father and daughter […]
Having quite enough trouble staying upright without putting wheels under me, I freely confess that I have never been on a skateboard in my life. There was an unfortunate incident involving a pair of plastic roller skates when I was about 7, but that was enough to convince me that such pursuits come under the […]
I watched Matthew Vaughn’s Brit gangster movie Layer Cake without so much as looking at the presskit, or in fact knowing that it even was a gangster flick. I note this because the movie immediately reminded me of Guy Ritchie’s Snatch — a meaner, somewhat less stylized Snatch — so it didn’t come as a […]
