It’s been 14 years since director John Boorman had a mainstream “hit” with Hope and Glory — or a mainstream film at all. Never the most prolific of filmmakers (most of his films are separated by two to four years), Boorman has willfully bitten the hand that was feeding him at least twice with Zardoz […]
Almost as interesting as The Sweetest Thing’s good-humored efforts at giving women their very own “bad taste” comedy is the general tone of the reviews that blast the film. What’s especially interesting is the inescapable sense that more than a few of the film’s (predominately male) detractors are threatened by the concept of a movie […]
It’s supposed to be a “thinking man’s” spy flick, but, frankly, the old Michael Caine Harry Palmer pictures of the 1960s came a lot nearer that self-same accolade. There’s more unbelievable nonsense per square inch in the film version of Tom Clancy’s novel The Sum of All Fears than in an Austin Powers flick. But […]
There’s nothing really wrong with writer/director/star Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room, but neither is there anything all that special about it. It’s a small, well-intentioned study of a family coping with — and not coping with — the drowning death of the son. I enjoyed it well enough while it was onscreen. I even admired […]
The Shipping News marks the fourth (the less we talk about the aberrant Something to Talk About the better) major English-language film from Swedish filmmaker Lasse Hallstrom since the success of My Life as a Dog brought him to America. After a tentative start with the little-seen Once Around, Hallstrom defined both his style and […]
I hate to be the bearer of sad and sobering — even depressing and dispiriting — news, but the shocking truth is this: The Rock (nee Dwayne Johnson) can’t act. I know, I know. That’s hard to believe, after his brilliantly rounded original portrayal of the “Scorpion King” in The Mummy Returns, but I very […]
DeNiro! Brando! Edward Norton! Take three powerhouse actors — one a bona fide legend and one virtually a legend — and put them in a film directed by … Frank Oz? Oz is a competent-enough director with a string of moderately successful, but decidedly undistinguished, films to his credit. And if The Score is his […]
Ho, ho, no. There’s a spectacularly unfortunate moment in one of the last-gasp “Our Gang” shorts where the little girl replacing Darla Hood is hell-bent on showing that she not only knows her lines, but everybody else’s, and to prove it she mouths every one of those lines while the other actors are speaking. That’s […]
A word of warning before you read any further: The Rules of Attraction is an uncompromisingly ugly, unflattering, unsympathetic, unlikable portrait of a nightmarish collection of characters in an equally nightmarish world. To get an “R” rating, writer-director Roger Avary cut nine minutes from the original 110 minutes, and even its 101 minute version ranks […]
The Royal Tenenbaums is one of the damndest pictures to come out of Hollywood in recent times. Yes, it’s a star-laden comedy, but it’s a peculiar one by just about any standards. It’s very rarely laugh-out-loud funny, some of the humor is quite grim, and it’s ultimately and obviously fairly serious in its intention. Personally, […]
I’m a huge Dennis Quaid fan. He can say more in a look than most people say with words in a lifetime. I loved Finding Forrester, so I was primed to see the second movie scripted by writer Mike Rich, a former Portland, Ore. disc jockey. The Rookie is the true-life story of Jimmy Morris […]
Is The Ring this year’s The Others? No, not by a jug-full, but it’s probably the best 2002 has to offer by way of a horror picture. (True, Ghost Ship doesn’t open till this Friday, but that’s the darkest of dark-horse contenders.) Based on a popular 1998 Japanese film, The Ring seems more than a […]
I really hate reviewing this particular type of movie — it’s the sort of thing that’s impossible to get worked up over either way. It’s not good enough to like, but it’s not bad enough to dislike either. It’s simply an adequate two hours of mildly entertaining professionalism that scales the heights of so-soism. Apparently, […]
It’s not surprising that this movie was held back from release for a period of time, the thought being that it wasn’t something likely to go down well after 9/11. Not that the film is casually “distasteful” in the manner that temporarily put the brakes on junk like Collateral Damage. Nor does it contain newly […]
Is there room in this world for an outrageously old-fashioned, G-rated “ugly duckling” movie? Judging by the surprisingly strong opening of Garry Marshall’s The Princess Diaries, the answer would appear to be yes, even if a number of people — especially critics (who, yes, are people) — are expressing misgivings about the message the film […]
This has got to be one of the strangest movies I’ve ever encountered. It’s ostensibly a kiddie picture — and to judge by the kids in the audience, it does work on that level. But what exactly is an in-joke based on the idea that the viewer has a strong familiarity with the Coen Brothers’ […]
Of life’s tragedies, the murder of a child has to be the most horrible. The grinding grief imposed on the survivors never ends, and no one involved can remain untouched. The search for justice is insatiable and all too often impossible. On the surface, The Pledge — director Sean Penn’s (The Crossing Guard) electrifying psychological […]
Probably no filmmaker working today is so uniquely qualified to make a film about the Holocaust as Roman Polanski. The director himself lived through those years as a young Jewish man in Poland, his own mother dying in the Nazi gas chambers. It’s natural that he should turn his attention to the subject with this […]
Ahoy, Asheville eco-warriors! The Perfect Storm is your feel-good hit of the summer! Thrill as a rowdy gang of lumpenproletariat carnivores, hell-bent on destroying the aquatic ecosystem, get smacked around royally by Mother Nature! Seriously, that is the movie’s plot. Based on a true story (and recounted in a best-selling novel by Sebastian Junger), The […]
An elegant, supremely old-fashioned, methodically paced, unbelievably creepy horror movie, writer/director/composer (yes, composer) Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others — while not a film for every taste — arrives on the scene to join the ranks of the best of the surprisingly few bonafide ghost stories the movies have given us. Not since Peter Medak’s The Changeling […]
The Other Side of Heaven is a charming, sweet movie about a young missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 1950s. John Groberg (Christopher Gorman, TV’s Felicity), eldest of seven boys from Idaho Falls, Idaho, is sent to do his required three-year missionary service to one of the islands in […]
