“You’re a woman scorned with no prenup. That’s a recipe for good livin'” is just one of the zingers Kathy Bates gets to deliver as Charlotte Cartwright, a rich Southern matriarch whose son (Cole Hauser) is having an affair with Andrea (Sanaa Lathan), the social-climbing daughter of Charlotte’s Bible-waving best…
Earlier this year, when I found myself assigned to jury duty on a drug-related trial at the Los Angeles Superior Court, our jury foreman turned out to be a blond, blue-eyed reality-TV producer from the bedroom community of Altadena. During the jury-selection process, when the judge asked if we had…
Where once the decline of Robert De Niro’s and Al Pacino’s prodigious talent inspired howls of anguish and impassioned critical essays, it’s a sad state of affairs when the best news about Righteous Kill, the cop thriller that stars them both, is that it isn’t awful. New York City tough-guy…
Masters of the carefully crafted cheap shot, Joel and Ethan Coen have built a career on flippancy. Given their refusal to take anything seriously — least of all the enthusiasm of their fans — the brothers surely got a chuckle from an upcoming academic tome, The Philosophy of the Coen…
Bebo Valdés’s story is familiar to fans of Cuban music: A great bandleader in the Forties and Fifties who created his own rhythm (in this case, the speedy and complicated batanga), he was forced into early retirement and expatriation by the revolution. Valdés then migrated to the piano bars of…
And so another summer movie season comes to an end, not with a bang but a whimper — what else to call four new releases (Babylon A.D., Bangkok Dangerous, College, and Disaster Movie) in the past 10 days that weren’t prescreened for critics by their respective distributors? These are, literally…
In the Adam Sandler vehicle Little Nicky, Hitler spends eternity in Hell in a frilly smock getting pineapples shoved up his butt. Compared to anyone watching Disaster Movie, he got off light. Rushed into production with no better drape for its threadbare gags than Cloverfield — unless you count proud…
Despite his reputation as the rarest of creatures — a Hollywood intellectual — new evidence suggests Steve Martin reads … prepare yourself … thrillers and spy novels. Or at least that’s the only conclusion one can draw from the “Story by” credit the comedian receives on Traitor, an uneven yet…
This locally produced movie about Miami hip-hop includes everything you’d expect: pretty pictures, lots of violence, and good urban music. Starring Lark Voorhies (of Saved by the Bell fame) and Fredro Starr, it’s a “whodunit” in which “at least three rap icons are killed and a producer gets stuck in…
In its final 10 minutes, Hamlet 2 is little more than chaos, noise, and nonsense, and those are 10 perfectly enjoyable minutes. It’s hard to knock any sequence that climaxes with a musical number titled “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus,” done up nice and Grease-y. Problem is, the 80 or so…
Often kidded for the many times he bellows “Dammit!” at 11th-hour moments on 24, Kiefer Sutherland finally gets to show his range — and he proves equally skilled at “Goddammit!” and “Shit!” Even so, it’s a mystery why Sutherland attached himself to this dour, muddled thriller (copied from a Korean…
Early buzz out of Hollywood pegged Tropic Thunder, directed and co-written by star Ben Stiller, as the end-all and be-all of movie-biz parodies — a savage beast with a rough touch featuring Tom Cruise in a career-resurrecting role as bald-headed, big-gutted, foulmouthed studio boss Les Grossman, who does the fuck-you…
George Lucas, that greedy visionary, is now in the infomercial-manufacturing business — the pitchman forever selling rehashed product to successive generations of younger and younger Star Wars fans raised on fond memories further curdling with each new entry in a sagging saga that peaked in 1980. As Star Wars movies…
On the surface, Pineapple Express offers precisely what it advertises: a roll-’em-up, smoke-’em-up, blow-’em-up bromantic comedy from the freaks and geeks who have made Judd Apatow’s brand of stunted-man yuks a global franchise. Once more, Seth Rogen’s red-rimmed, half-shut eyes peek out from beneath his tousled Jewfro, which sits atop…
Resist if you dare, and for as long as you must, but even the hoariest haters eventually succumbed to the girly, cottony charms of 2005’s Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, if in the privacy of their Netflix queues. I foresee a similar fate for its blandly engaging sequel: moms, daughters,…
I was 13 when Stephen Sommers’s 1999 remake-in-name-only of The Mummy came out — just about the ideal age. Sommers is definitely some kind of junk-addled auteur, and if The Mummy didn’t achieve its obvious goal of topping Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was close enough as far as…
Swing Vote is an election-themed comedy that’s about twice as smart as you expect it to be and still only half as smart as you wish it was. The clever premise, which would have seemed like pure science-fiction no more than eight years ago, concerns a U.S. presidential election whose…
The truth is still out there, like an unsold lawn chair at a garage sale, in this just plain lousy second big-screen outing for erstwhile FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). Since we last saw them, she’s become a doctor in a Catholic hospital, he…
I haven’t seen much at the movies in the past two years that has given me as much unbridled comic pleasure as the sight of Will Ferrell as the win-at-any-cost NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby, calling on Jesus, Tom Cruise, and Oprah Winfrey to put out the psychosomatic flames engulfing his…
Dad, which was your favorite part of Space Chimps?” the four-year-old asked the day after a media sneak peek. “Dunno, Harry. Probably the part where Kilowatt lets the giant monster swallow her.” Kilowatt is an alien with a giant, glowing head perched atop a teensy-tiny body; blows high-pitched raspberries when…
What a brooding pleasure it is to return to Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City — if pleasure is the right word for a movie that gazes so deeply and sometimes despairingly into the souls of restless men. In The Dark Knight, the continuation of Nolan’s superb 2005 reboot of the Batman…
I’ve always enjoyed ABBA — not in that post-hoc, so-bad-it’s good hip way, but innocently, the way I like Phil Spector. To this day, howling along in my car to that echoing, cascading, heavily overdubbed wall of sound makes me feel like a member of some dippy but joyous cathedral…
