The buzz is golden, the word is out, and this festival is going to be big. The opening night screening of Andy Garcia’s Modigliani at Gusman sold out so fast a second showing was added at the Regal Cinema in South Beach for the following afternoon. And so it goes…
When did we first encounter a feel-good film that united delinquent kids, a devoted (if professionally frustrated) teacher, and the transformative power of music? Was it Julie Andrews? Could it have been the spirited, soft-hearted Maria and her Austrian brood, trilling their way up the hills above the abbey? Whether…
You have to hand it to Sean Penn. Okay, you don’t absolutely have to, and if you’re a Red Stater through-and-through, you certainly won’t want to, but give him some credit. After being pilloried in the press for visiting Iraq under Saddam’s reign, torn apart by house cats in a…
Twenty-four hours. Three hundred fifty miles. His girlfriend’s kids. What could possibly go wrong? In the case of Are We There Yet?, here’s the short answer: a flaccid screenplay, bratty kids stripped of depth and personality, a single joke replayed in every scene, unearned attempts at sentiment, and a bizarrely…
In her first stab at narrative drama, writer/director Shainee Gabel has managed to assemble a superstar cast and a seasoned technical team. She spent five years on the project, adapting an unpublished novel written by the father of a friend, working with a clarity of vision and an admirable goal:…
A bit of advice when considering whether to see Bear Cub, a lovely new drama from Spanish director Miguel Albaladejo: Ignore the title. Also, if you would, please bypass the cringe-worthy pun of the tagline, “Parenthood is about to get a little hairier.” Because quite apart from those cutesy and…
The grim little green-walled apartment where Walter finds himself after his release has the look of a jail cell — with one apparent easement. What seems to be the only window in the place faces a school playground across the street. When Walter looks outside, he often sees kids running…
The story is simple enough: Sometime during the dying days of the Tang Dynasty in China, though it could really be any time and any place, two cops named Leo (Andy Lau) and Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) sit in a station house drinking tea. They decide one of them will go…
Clint Eastwood began digging into the third act of his career — the one that reveals the mature, deep-thinking artist … with a little jazz piano on the side — a dozen years ago, with the discomfiting anti-western Unforgiven. Since then, he’s hardly come up for air or given himself…
Over a three-month period in 1994, machete-wielding Hutu tribesmen in Rwanda hacked to death 800,000 Tutsi men, women, and children. News reports, including film footage of the unfolding carnage, were broadcast around the globe. In the face of such unremitting acts of inhumanity, the world community did nothing. It wasn’t…
When your movie gets riotous laughter out of endless utterances of the word “Focker,” it doesn’t have to try very hard. So it’s no surprise that much of Meet the Fockers, the inevitable sequel to the 2000 hit Meet the Parents, barely breaks a sweat. When in doubt, after all,…
By all accounts, the only living creatures who’ve never taken in a stage production of The Phantom of the Opera are Osama bin Laden and Uncle Elmer’s deaf hound dog Bart — which means that everyone else on the planet has an opinion about how Joel Schumacher’s zillion-dollar movie version…
The critic who takes notes during The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou will ultimately fill a notepad only with scribbled details: “All the crewmen wear red stocking caps with their tuxedos,” “some names of Zissou’s movies: The Battling Eels of Antibes, Shadow Creatures of the Lurisia Archipelago, Island Cats!,” “one…
Bad Education, the new film by the flamboyant Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, opens on a man sitting at a table, poring over the tabloids for stories of interest. When he finds something he likes, he reads it to his lover: Isn’t this an arresting image? Could we generate drama from…
This much can be said for the movie version of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: Its villain, Count Olaf, just might be Jim Carrey’s finest screen role. A bitter, would-be master thespian who delights in donning ridiculous disguises and adopting funny accents, he doesn’t seem that far removed…
If you’ve already decided to see Ocean’s Twelve, it’s probably best not to read much about it. Unlike its predecessor, a remake that clung to a hoary heist formula, the sequel contains ample pleasures, most of which amuse as the result of surprises both great and small. There’s no one…
They walk among us. They resemble people, approximate our words and actions, present themselves more or less as human. And yet they are more — a different species, with their own dark legends, their own clandestine meeting places. They are dorks, and they are going to be pretty okay with…
Mike Nichols’s new film Closer is a boiling pot of lust, mistrust, and double-dealing that might well be taken for outright soap opera — or, in quite a few places, soft-core porn — were it not for the sophisticated gleam of its well-heeled London desperadoes and the vicious dazzle of…
When shot with verve and skill, so that we can feel the heat and passion of the moment, a concert film is the next best thing to being there. That’s the way it is with Lightning in a Bottle, a Martin Scorsese-produced documentary that captures an extraordinary evening in February…
If you’ve ever gone line-dancing with a gaggle of amputees on crank and hallucinogens, you know something of the feeling engendered by viewing Alexander. This broad, bold, and ambitious film by Oliver Stone presents itself as a fairly straightforward endeavor, but its rhythms quickly go strange while its participants hobble…
s the year stumbles toward its conclusion and critics begin penning their best-and-worst compendiums, here’s a holiday contender fit for the all-time Naughty List. Based on the John Grisham novel Skipping Christmas — which, face it, is less a novel than an impulse item stacked on bookstore checkout counters –…
Whatever else can be said about Tarnation — and there is plenty to say — there is no denying this: It is a very brave movie. Rarely is the subject of a documentary willing to lay himself bare before the camera, exposing his very consciousness to the audience, and it’s…
