I expected to dislike this admittedly ungainly first-time bout of auterism from David Duchovny more than I did. Maybe the fact that reading that Robin Williams plays a mentally challenged character in the movie had simply prepared me for something far, far worse than The House of D. No, it’s not a good movie, and […]
I have a kind of love-hate relationship with this film version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and no, my feelings about it aren’t grounded in any special fondness for the source material, since I only heard a couple episodes of the radio series and saw a few minutes of the BBC-TV film, and […]
Off the Map is a movie for sensitive adults or attuned junior-high girls, since they’re probably the only ones who can accept the unhurried pace with which this lyrical coming-of-age story unfolds. Even in the relative coolness of the thick-walled adobe house where much of the story takes place, summer in the high desert near […]
It’s Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1943. The Gestapo of the invading Third Reich is everywhere, eyeing every Czech who walks without downcast eyes. Eliska (Czechoslovakian Anna Geislerova, Little Scars) is a beautiful, fashion-conscious nurse whose dream of becoming a doctor has been thwarted, since the Germans closed the nation’s medical schools. Eliska, her surgeon lover and […]
Thirty years ago, Sydney Pollack made a critical and commercial hit with Three Days of the Condor, a tight adaptation of James Grady’s novel Six Days of the Condor (so tight, you see, that they had to shave off three days). This political thriller worked because Pollack remembered that it was a thriller first and […]
Legendary architect Louis I. Kahn dropped dead in the men’s room at Penn Station at the age of 73. Having just returned from a trip to India, he was facing bankruptcy at the time, and was probably the most honored and simultaneously underemployed architect of his era. His obituary said that he was survived by […]
To call Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle silly and/or ridiculous is to miss the whole point. The film’s not only supposed to be silly and ridiculous, it revels in the fact that it is — and it provides the most sheer fun you’re likely to find at the movies these days. The 41-year-old Chow has […]
I have but one piece of sage advice concerning this movie. To paraphrase a friend of mine, spurn King’s Ransom as you would spurn a rabid weasel. This witless concoction is a shoo-in for a place on many “10 worst” lists, come the end of 2005. It’s an amazingly unfunny and mean-spirited film variant on […]
Inventive, entertaining and sometimes enlightening, Inside Deep Throat ultimately falls short of the film it might have been, because it tries too hard to paint Deep Throat, Gerard Damiano’s 1972 porn “classic” about a woman with an anatomically misplaced clitoris, as some kind of stand-alone work without taking into account the far more mainstream films […]
The most important thing to know about this Oscar-winning documentary is that it’s not what you’d expect. Set in the red light district of Calcutta, the film cannot, of course, avoid grinding poverty, filth and misery. What’s surprising, and what makes this film so magnificent, is that while you’re wiping away the predictable tears (you’ve […]
A Lot Like Love is a lot like a lot of other utterly disposable movies — only more annoying. Working from the concept of two people with bad timing, first-time offender Colin Patrick Lynch has taken this bewhiskered plot device and somehow stretched it out to a feature length script. It’s not a bad plot […]
Saying that the new version of The Amityville Horror is better than the old version is not, in itself, a recommendation. I will give the film this: It’s shorter and better acted (which speaks volumes about the acting in the original), and it isn’t bogged down with the type of nonsense that asks us to […]
For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, filmmaker Bahman Farmanara is thought of in some circles as the Iranian Woody Allen. Assuming that such a credential can even be imagined, the comparison seems to rest entirely on this one semi-autobiographical film, which is, if anything, even more obsessed with death than Allen is when in full […]
Not since Ken Russell followed up his X-rated The Devils with his G-rated musical, The Boy Friend, has a filmmaker so thrown critics and audiences off-balance with such a seeming about-face. What is the director of Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and 28 Days Later… doing making a charming fantasy about a little boy who sees and […]
Famous — or perhaps infamous – for being the movie that made Jack Nicholson consider retiring (if this was the sort of thing people wanted, he reasoned, then movies were no place for him), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is really a largely inoffensive little comedy. It just happened to catch on as part of the […]
For all of you who are avoiding the movie with the tag line, “Bollywood Meets Hollywood… and it’s a Perfect Match,” out of fear that you might have to read subtitles (and you know who you are), set aside that fear. The film is almost entirely in English, with little more than a couple of […]
Well, now we really know what that excited credit — “Directed by Breck Eisner!” — at the end of the trailer for Sahara meant. Not much. There’s nothing all that wrong with Eisner’s direction of Sahara, apart from his tendency to shoot action scenes in so close that you can’t tell what’s happening to which […]
In the pretty much evenly split reviews of Woody Allen’s latest film, those who admire Melinda and Melinda tend to call it either Woody’s best film in ages or a return to form — suggesting that his last few films have been significantly wanting. That’s not a bandwagon I choose to clamber aboard. While his […]
It’s hard not to like a movie that manages to work Hurricane Smith’s obscure but classic ’70s pop song, “Oh, Babe, What Would You Say?”, into its soundtrack, so it’s a relief to report that there are a lot of other things about Fever Pitch that are hard not to like. When compared to Shallow […]
No, we’re not talking about that blasphemous remake with Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley from a few years ago. We’re talking about Stanley Donen’s echt-’60s film that best captured the comic genius of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore at the height of their powers — in a film they wrote (and for which Moore provided […]
It’s 1950 in London, a gray, sunless city still weary from the massive war effort. The city’s filled with battle-scarred men, and women who have learned to rely not on them, but on each other. Luxuries like chocolate and sugar remain in short supply. Few ordinary people have washing machines and the acquisition of a […]
