Love him or not love him, Lasse Hallström has done it again: the human frailty, the sorrowful past, the hopeful future, the triumph of love and family over crushing despair. Ever since he broke out in 1985 with his Swedish feature Mitt Liv Som Hund (My Life as a Dog),…
The most daunting thing for an actor is to portray a god, and when that god comes equipped with a tangle of myths and the quickest left jab in history, the actor’s job can soon verge into guesswork. To Will Smith’s credit, he has managed to get, at least partway,…
David Salo’s colleagues and classmates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have absolutely no idea how he spends his free time. It’s not that the 32-year-old linguistics grad student is ashamed of his hobby (or obsession), which has occupied him for some 26 years. They simply cannot be bothered with it…
It took Andre Dubus all of eighteen pages to communicate the grief that fills every frame of Todd Field’s two-hours-plus In the Bedroom, a wrenching bit of filmmaking based on Dubus’s short tale “Killings.” Both story and film tell the same tale in the same solemn and gripping tone, with…
Appropriately A Beautiful Mind does not offer a literal translation of the life of John Forbes Nash, Jr., the mathematician whose work on game theories won him a Nobel Prize in 1994. The film leaves out significant events, people, and places; it amalgamates central figures, disguises prominent locations and hides…
It is December 5, the day AOL Time Warner-owned DC Comics has been anxiously awaiting for almost 15 years–the day writer-illustrator Frank Miller once more dons cape and cowl to resurrect the Dark Knight, his fiercely rendered vision of an obscenely obsessed middle-aged Batman. Today, stores will finally open their…
Had The Royal Tenenbaums been made by a first-time filmmaker unburdened by acclaim or expectation, it could be heralded — and then just as easily dismissed — as a light, literary exercise in filmmaking that’s as pleasant as it is frustrating. Its tale of a dysfunctional family of geniuses torn…
Beneath the hazy, mystifying layers of Vanilla Sky lies a remarkable Tom Cruise performance — one that, to a large extent, takes place beneath a makeup artist’s piled-on scars and a costumer’s blank “prosthetic” mask. As David Aames, hipster publisher of Maxim-like magazines, Cruise plays a lothario so vain he…
The lights go down and the puzzlement begins. Ensemble cast of superstars? Check. Loose remake of amusing curiosity? Check. Built-in, prefab sense of cool? Check. A little something for wistful fans of Dino and Sammy? Check. So … wait a minute. Is this The Cannonball Run Redux? With his ambitious…
Some movies you see because you want to. Others you see because you have to. For anyone who is interested in film noir, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur (1955) is one of the latter. Just as John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) is credited with starting the genre in the…
“Mr. Human Rights,” they once called him, and though his was never the most famous name on the bill–that was Bono or Bruce Springsteen, Sting or Peter Gabriel–as the organizer of the Conspiracy of Hope concerts in 1986 and the Human Rights Now! world tour two years later, Jack Healey…
This is the true story of seven people (Tommy! Annie! Ashley! Maria! Griffin! Carpo! And Benjamin!) picked to live in a city and have their lives changed. Find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start being real. The Real World: Sidewalks of New York. If you came…
Stop the presses! I must report that I have just seen a film that could top my personal list of the worst movies of all time. The new contender is La Cienaga (The Swamp), a recent release from Argentina that is so godawful it makes Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from…
Only a couple of months ago, it looked as though Donald Miller had a publishing home run on his hands–a thoughtful, exhilarating, inclusive book about World War II scheduled to hit stores just as Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ Band of Brothers was finishing its critically lauded run on HBO…
It takes a nimble mind to mix light and dark, to wed humor with treachery, and in Novocaine newcomer David Atkins is not always up to the task. Neither is Steve Martin, who wants to be taken seriously while reserving the right to produce the occasional sick yuk. If you…
The heroine of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s bold and bracing new comedy, Amelie, is Amélie Poulain, a doe-eyed crusader with the face of a porcelain doll and a sleek helmet of jet-black hair. From her high perch in Montmartre, where she works as a café waitress, Amélie secretly resolves to emancipate all…
Joel and Ethan Coen’s periodic genuflections to classic Hollywood are inevitably accompanied by a knowing wink from one brother and a wry smile from the other. These devoted movie buffs’ versions of vintage gangster pictures (Miller’s Crossing) or the populist comedies of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges (The Hudsucker Proxy)…
Natalie Merchant finished recording her third solo album, Motherland, on September 9, so by no means should anyone listen to the disc’s first song, “This House Is On Fire,” and think it has anything to do with hijacked airplanes, collapsed skyscrapers and the thousands buried beneath the rubble. The song…
If you’re a college freshman, don’t read this. Just grab your newfound peers and go see Richard Linklater’s new movie, Waking Life, then head off to one of those ethereal late-night dining establishments for which you’ll desperately pine once the real world gets ahold of you. Discuss. For others this…
The stateside success of Penelope Cruz, Antonio Banderas, and Salma Hayek got the folks at Venevision International to thinking: Why let Hollywood make all the money off great Spanish-speaking actors? Instead of importing movie stars, why not import entire movies? Not those grim arthouse bores made for miniscule audiences but…
There cannot be man, woman, child or beast alive who does not know that on November 6, Fox will debut its new series 24. Long before the fall season was to begin, it had already been appointed the most anticipated and beloved show of the year–by critics who had seen…
Revolutionary times have always been tempting backdrops for film stories. Some are fictional epics set against a historical backdrop (Dr. Zhivago, The Year of Living Dangerously). In these there’s plenty of personal drama, love, and thrills, with the historical setting essentially background to the fictional derring-do. An alternative approach is…
