Garden State is that rarest of things: a quirky film that actually is quirky, and that isn’t just working overtime in a desperate attempt to seem that way. And I say that despite its climactic wrap-up, which is just too neat and tidy — and which screams of post-test-screening remonkeying. Sure, the film has moments […]
I should start by explaining the high rating on this barely just-better-than-direct-to-video opus. It gets two stars for unintentional mirth, plus one more for a high simian quotient. This last star may seem a little specialized, but in the case of Anacondas, it also accounts for quite the best performance in the film. That’s not […]
I was so prepared for this movie to be awful that I made Ken Hanke come with me as revenge for sticking me with so many turkeys this year. As fate would have it, the rat got a reprieve, because — astonishing both of us — Without a Paddle was also pretty funny (albeit sophomoric, […]
Don’t believe the hype! Every year there’s at least one movie that the majority of the critical populace goes lollipops over, but that leaves the rest of us scratching our collective heads trying to figure out what movie they saw, because it sure as hell wasn’t the same one we were at. The year’s not […]
This presentation by the nonprofit Media Arts Project is a collection of 17 short films made using motion graphics, computer animation and digital video. Few entries run more than four minutes, with some clocking in at scarcely a minute. All are related only in that they were created using modern technologies and steer away from […]
I can’t help being amused by the short-term memories of critics who claim that Renny Harlin’s Exorcist: The Beginning has killed The Exorcist franchise. Obviously, they don’t remember what happened in 1977, when John Boorman handed Warner Bros. a $14.5 million art film called Exorcist II: The Heretic. Boorman’s movie, tremendously expensive for its time, […]
Rating caveat: I gave this so-called animated feature (in truth, it’s a long commercial) a low rating because I found it so boring that I spent most of its excruciating 89 minutes fantasizing over how to torture Ken Hanke for making me review it. To be fair, you should know that my movie pal liked […]
Yes, I know, I’m supposed to be cranky (which is a nice way of saying I’m curmudgeonly — and besides, it rhymes). So why don’t I hate this sequel to The Princess Diaries like I’m supposed to — and as most of my fellow critics seem to? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a sucker […]
A great, glowing neon sign reading Suspicions Confirmed appeared in my brain when I went to check writer/producer/director/star Morgan Spurlock’s credentials after watching his Super Size Me. I discovered that Spurlock’s only other credit was as producer and actor on an MTV series called I Bet You Will. See, I knew there was a reason […]
Something about the music of Cole Porter appears to inspire folly on a grand scale — at least when that music is taken out of its original settings. The most notorious example of this is Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love. When I first saw that film upon its original release in 1975, people slowly […]
Early on in Alien Vs. Predator, we get a glimpse of what one of the recruits for the scientific expedition that sets the plot in motion is watching on TV — the granddaddy of all monster-battle flicks, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Now, there was a movie born of a desire to get more mileage […]
A seminal cult classic the exact appeal of which has always eluded me, though most of the world seems to adore it. I hadn’t watched The Princess Bride in years when I did so again for this review. And while I can’t say that seeing it anew really changed my point of view on it, […]
I admit to being pretty disenchanted with the indie-film scene. It’s become so enmeshed in its own formula of calculated quirkiness that it rarely shows any more originality than does the most heavily test-marketed Hollywood extravaganza — and sometimes less so. I’m equally over the indie-film snobbery that works on the belief that if a […]
I’m beginning to think that there’s some kind of curse attached to people who won kudos for their performances in Girl, Interrupted. Think about the careers and career moves of Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie and Brittany Murphy in the wake of that film. It’s not pretty. And Little Black Book does nothing to change that […]
Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service is, of course, a thing of great visual beauty. Although the director’s work is casually lumped into the class of animated films called anime, his films nonetheless have a kind of fluidity of movement that is all too often absent in that genre. (Anime, which basically just means Japanese animation, […]
Finding Nemo was the big animated film of 2003 (OK, so there wasn’t a Lilo and Stitch or a Spirited Away up against the Pixar offering that year), and one of that year’s biggest money-makers. I didn’t originally review the film and nothing about its trailer really enticed me to see it for the sheer […]
Nighttime in Los Angeles. There’s no other place on earth like it at that time of day. And no other movie has ever captured the city’s demonic frenzy and polyglot pulse like this summer’s dazzling thriller, Collateral. To director Michael Mann (Ali), the City of the Angels feeds on seductive danger. There are no sunny […]
I’m not surprised that the original “Supermarionation” puppet show Thunderbirds is utterly unknown to kids today — making the rationale for this movie’s very existence a bit vague. Yet I am surprised by how very few people in my own age group (and beyond) seem to know of it. Roger Ebert goes so far as […]
You don’t need a sixth sense to see all the signs here: The Village proves that M. Night Shyamalan is anything but unbreakable. Ever since Shyamalan became a big noise in the filmmaking world with The Sixth Sense in 1999 — more thanks to that film’s gimmick ending than to anything else — he’s been […]
High on the list of things that probably didn’t need remaking is John Frankenheimer’s best film, The Manchurian Candidate. Of course, the same might be said of Stanley Donen’s Charade, as from it we got Jonathan Demme’s much maligned last film, The Truth About Charlie. Now, as one of the few critics who genuinely admired […]
In a summer drenched in CGI-effect extravaganzas, it’s easy to forgive The Bourne Supremacy its occasional transparent plot device (when a CIA bigwig is all about killing someone rather than capturing him, you know there’s a self-serving reason) and an ending that doesn’t know when to quit. Like its predecessor, The Bourne Identity, this film […]
