Movie Reviews

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

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Lara Croft: Tomb Raider seems to be a movie designed first and foremost to prove to the skeptical that there are far worse things awaiting the summer moviegoer than The Mummy Returns. The Mummy Returns was no great shakes, I grant you, but it emerges as the Citizen Kane of summer blockbusters by comparison. It […]

Lantana

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Admirers of Ray Lawrence’s Bliss (and I confess to being a major admirer) may be somewhat startled by his second film, Lantana (named for the pesky, invasive shrub), which arrives a mere 16 years after his debut work. (Prolific the man isn’t.) Less stylish, less playful and certainly a lot less fantasticated, Lantana seems at […]

Kung Pow: Enter The Fist

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Apparently jealous over the fact that Paramount’s Pootie Tang beat out their Freddy Got Fingered as the worst comedy of 2001, 20th Century Fox makes an early bid for that honor in 2002 with Kung Pow: Enter the Fist — and they have done themselves proud. This may not only be 2002’s worst comedy, but […]

Knockaround Guys

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Five minutes into the deplorable Knockaround Guys you know why it sat on the shelf for a couple of years. The movie opens with mobster Teddy Deserve (an embarrassing John Malkovich) trying to force 12-year-old Matty Demeret (Andrew Francis) to shoot the man who — according to Deserve — betrayed the boy’s father. When the […]

Kissing Jessica Stein

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It’s not a perfect movie. It’s not even as good as much of what has been said about it. It can’t seem to decide exactly what it wants to be. It trades too heavily on certain conventions of its genre. And it has an ending that it’s hard not to feel is a cop-out. But […]

Kiss Of The Dragon

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“Martial arts and cinema action superstar Jet Li and visionary filmmaker Luc Besson (The Professional, The Fifth Element) join forces on Kiss of the Dragon,” trumpets the press kit for Kiss of the Dragon — and in a sense, that’s true. Besson did co-produce and co-write the screenplay. However, the direction of the film was […]

Kingdom Come

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The worst thing that can be said about Kingdom Come — that it is a nice, well-intentioned little movie — is unfortunately also the best thing that can be said about it. There’s nothing horribly wrong with the film, yet almost everything about it just feels wrong. Why, for example, take an intimate source play […]

Kate And Leopold

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A complete and almost wholly successful change of pace for director-co-writer James Mangold and the film that might finally transport Hugh Jackman (Swordfish) to the ranks of full-fledged movie star, Kate and Leopold provides the third truly worthy romantic comedy to come out this year. And if it’s not quite in the same league as […]

Kangaroo Jack

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Everybody involved in Kangaroo Jack should be roasted on the barbie, as the Aussies say. Although the movie boasts some bonzer footage of Australia’s outback, plus a trio of farting camels, Kangaroo is a boring, brainless, bodgy waste of money. Worse, Kangaroo is the basest kind of movie rip-off–one aimed at kids. It’s possible to […]

K-Pax

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Though cursed with possibly the worst title in the history of film, threatening to smother in its own high-mindedness, and never getting anywhere near the level of profundity to which it aspires, K-Pax is at least a thoughtful, beautifully acted film with its heart in the right place — most of the time. Anyone who […]

K-19: The Widowmaker

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“I sound more like Boris Badenov than you do!” “No, I sound more like him than you do!” That at least is what I like to think Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson argued about while watching the dailies on this soggy submarine story. Having been subjected to their fluctuating accents in the trailer for K-19: […]

Juwanna Mann

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Juwanna spend 91 minutes watching Miguel A. Nunez Jr. (a supporting and bit-part actor, suddenly — and ill-advisedly — promoted to star status here) learn about the value of teamwork by dressing up as a woman? Juwanna see a lame, unfunny re-hash of Tootsie. played out on a basketball court? Juwanna movie with absolutely no […]

Just Visiting

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Just Visiting is goofy, charming, very sweet. There are beautiful chic women, and chivalric men who don’t bathe much — you guessed right: It’s French! In twelfth-century France, evil witchery causes brave Count Thibault (Jean Reno, Ronin) to hallucinate and kill his beloved bride-to-be, the beautiful Lady Rosalina (Christina Applegate, TV’s Married with Children) on […]

Just Married

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Oh, dear, it’s the film industry’s annual January White Sale — the cinematic equivalent of the bargain table of remaindered books at Barnes and Noble. The only difference is that the movies being hastily dumped into theaters are rarely a bargain. Just Married is certainly no exception, and it’s only distinction lies in the fact […]

Jurassic Park III

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All in all, Jurassic Park III isn’t a bad film … if plot, characterization, believability and originality don’t count. If you can think of the film as an extended amusement-park ride (actually, it often seems to have been inspired by the Dinosaur Encounter at Epcot, except you don’t get sprayed with mist — that’ll happen […]

Joy Ride

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B-picture thrills with a vengeance are to be had in John Dahl’s Joy Ride, an efficient and stylish exercise in cinematic mayhem. True, it has a pair of central characters — Fuller (Steve Zahn) and Lewis Thomas (Paul Walker) — brothers who are neither very bright nor especially likable. Lewis is basically just a bit […]

Josie And The Pussycats

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Yes, it’s silly and even rather goofy. And Josie and the Pussycats has a central problem in that the girls — even with post-recording sweetening and Kay Hanley (Letters to Cleo) doing Josie’s actual vocalizing — can’t sing very well, a significant drawback for a musical. The film’s not anywhere near as funny as it […]

Joshua

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Tony Goldwyn as Jesus? Giancarlo Giannini as the Pope? What’s going on here? What’s going on is, of course, another “faith-based” drama of the sort that gets booked directly into theaters without benefit of a traditional releasing company (though Paramount is somehow involved with this one). These films usually aren’t very good, and tend to […]

Jonah: A Veggietales Movie

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Bible studies will never be the same after kids have feasted on Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie. It’s anarchic and anachronistic animated fun, peppered with terrific sing-a-long tunes and a spicy delight of veggie characters. With all its wholesomeness, however, Jonah gets my PGG (Parental Guidance for Girls) rating because of its shameful dearth of female […]

John Q

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Heavy-handed, embarrassingly manipulative, plotted like a bad TV movie, John Q ought to have been called Dog Day Heart Transplant. No pun intended, but this movie’s heart is in the right place, even if nothing much else is. Do we need an indictment of the health-care system in this country and outrage over the fact […]

Joe Somebody

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You’d assume that a movie starring TV actors and directed by a veteran TV director (John Pasquin) would have its fill of pithy one-liners, a pretty predictable plot and a dearth of wide-screen vistas. Yes, Joe Somebody couldn’t completely escape its TV roots. Even so, it’s a terrific little feel-good movie — funny, touching and […]