Call them the comeback kids: In its early days, the 2008 Cannes Film Festival has served as a staging ground for a number of unlikely returns, beginning with that of Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, who’s been absent from movie screens (except as an occasional actor) for nearly as long as…
CANNES, France — The competition for the Palme d’Or is ongoing as I write, but the story of the 61st Cannes Film Festival is Steven Soderbergh’s two-part, four-and-a-half-hour Che—an epic non-biopic that might well have been approved by Roberto Rossellini, envied by Francis Coppola, and even appreciated by its subject…
No adult has ever been able to codify what separates a good movie from a classic. In kid terms, though — those favored by Son of Rambow, a chipper tribute to the cinema as both supplier and repository of dreams — a good movie merely sends you bounding home from…
“Things never happen the same way twice.” Thus boometh Aslan the lion (Liam Neeson), alias the Son of God, briefly popping his computer-generated shaggy head into The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian to pep-talk a bunch of discouraged Brits into fighting the good fight again. As in life, so in…
Every now and then, a movie comes along that looks so spectacularly, cosmically bad that you fear for the sanity of its producers. What Happens in Vegas …? Nothing surprising. It’s a clunker of a title, and the film’s premise — career woman Cameron Diaz and laid-back, laid-off Ashton Kutcher…
Converting a fondly remembered cartoon series — one of the first Japanese animes syndicated on American television — into a prospective franchise, the Matrix masters, Larry and Andy Wachowski, have taken another step toward the total cyborganization of the cinema. Even more than most summer-season f/x fests, Speed Racer is…
David Mamet’s Redbelt is a tricky bar brawl — call it the Roundhouse of Games. The writer-director has scarcely abandoned his sense of the movies as an innately duplicitous medium, one best suited to stories that play out as conspiratorial chess matches. But, with his 10th feature — an entertaining…
First-time writer-director Helen Hunt stars as April Epner, a schoolteacher desperate to have a child before she turns 40 (Hunt herself turns 45 this year, but never mind that). Adapted by Hunt and two other writers from Elinor Lipman’s novel, it’s a not surprisingly confident debut; Hunt directs like she…
Chalk it up to personal preference, but I’ve always been fonder of those comic-book heroes who emerge by intent rather than happenstance. I mean the ones, like Batman’s Bruce Wayne, whose transformation from average joe into masked crusader is an act of will instead of the unintended result of a…
In Made of Honor, Patrick Dempsey plays a conveniently rich and willfully single serial “fornicator” slowly but surely domesticated by his unspoken love for longtime BFF Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), who’s on her way to Scotland to marry Mr. Right Now since Mr. Right is too chickenshit to say boo before…
Lonely is the life of the mogul. The long hours and hectic schedule make dating a headache, but who needs romance when you have the services of an anonymous sex club at your disposal? Like Rideshare with benefits, the “list” around which Deception centers is a phone directory of stock-market…
Jay McCarroll knows he needed Project Runway more than Project Runway needed him; after all, humility is just one facet of his considerable charm. The other part is his outsize personality, equal parts wit and whimsy, and although Project Runway has done just fine since McCarroll won the Heidi Klum-hosted…
Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg wrote Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle with the novel idea: What if you made a John Hughes movie, but instead of writing garishly caricatured bit players with names such as Long Duk Dong, you cast an Asian actor as the smart, handsome, upwardly…
Could have sworn I’ve seen this episode of Baby Mama before — like sometime in January 2007, when it was originally titled “The Baby Show” and aired on the other prime-time series starring Tina Fey, 30 Rock. (Waitaminute — you say Baby Mama is a movie and not a TV…
Earnest, sad, and righteous, they are not. More inspired by M*A*S*H or Dr. Strangelove than The Deer Hunter or Coming Home, a new pack of political films that defies the clichés of the post-9/11 Iraq War cinema has arrived. Notwithstanding a few holdovers of moral outrage (Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss, Nick…
Morgan Spurlock, the daredevil documentarian who lived on Big Macs for a month and turned this exercise in “body art” into the 2004 hit Super Size Me, returns — this time expanding his horizons rather than his girth. Paraphrasing the title of a venerable computer game, Where in the World…
During George W. Bush’s fourth term as president, the administration’s desire for crises and predisposition toward fuckups leads to the creation of a zombie virus that the government hopes will help replenish troops for its various overseas conflicts. Infected women become superstrong and maintain their intelligence, but the men remain…
Before either was famous, Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler were roommates in Los Angeles, where they both worked the stand-up circuit and awaited their big breaks. Those breaks would come: Sandler has been one of the most bankable performers in Hollywood for the past decade, while screenwriter/director/producer Apatow is singularly…
Jason Segel is responsible for two of the most cringe-inducing, hands-in-front-of-your-face moments in recent TV history, both of which occurred during the sole season of NBC’s Freaks and Geeks, on which Segel played bright-eyed burnout Nick Andopolis. On the episode “I’m with the Band,” Nick imagined himself an arena-size drummer…
Smart people got no reason to live — and, sure, that’s not quite how Randy Newman sang it, but the point still stands. Because in Noam Murro’s directorial bow — one of those Sundance premieres starring famous people slumming it in dingy Indieland — the smart people ain’t doing much…
For a movie built around questions of failed ethics and duplicitous behavior, Street Kings is just as dishonest as its characters. Though conceived as yet another sobering frontline report on law enforcement’s ever-expanding gray area, director David Ayer’s grim police thriller mostly plays as one long dick-measuring competition. You sense…
If you turn the first page of Scott Smith’s The Ruins, a friend said astutely, you won’t put it down — but if you know what it’s about beforehand, you won’t pick it up. So let’s just say that if this reworking never approximates the abandon-all-hope ferocity of Smith’s hair-whitening…
