Don’t let the PG-13 rating fool you. Though it’s acted almost completely by children, Nobody Knows is not a film for children. A poignant, deeply affecting tale of child neglect and abandonment — all the more disturbing for being based on a true incident — this Japanese film (with English…
Agent Fox Mulder, the coolly instinctual sleuth of The X-Files, got pretty good at unraveling paranormal mysteries. If only the actor who played him were as adept at solving the riddle of his movie career. David Duchovny’s new vanity project, House of D, is the tortured tale of a thirteen-year-old…
Back for a seventh year, the Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival kicks off an early hot summer with ten days of movies, parties, and pride. Indies and majors from here and from abroad come together April 22 when Craig Lucas’s highly anticipated The Dying Gaul opens the festival as…
It is both quite a coup and a kooky touch to have landed Bea Arthur as the gala diva of ceremonies of the Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. The Tony-winning, Emmy-hoarding, age-defying human rights activist and entertainment dynamo will perform a short version of her acclaimed one-woman show, And…
“No more soccer!” declares small-time thug Sing (writer-director-star Stephen Chow) as he vigorously stomps on a child’s ball. In the context of Kung Fu Hustle, it’s a pathetic attempt by Sing to make himself look tough. The larger signal, however, is to followers of Chow’s work — it’s a direct…
Latin in the truest and broadest sense of that beauteous word, the Miami Latin Film Festival brings us movies not only from Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, and Costa Rica but also from France and Italy as well as, of course, Spain. This year’s edition, which opens Thursday (April 14)…
When the great playwright Arthur Miller died in February, many admirers took stock again of his most enduring creation, Willy Loman. A delusional idealist who finds himself failed and felled by the American dream, the tragic hero of Death of a Salesman has for half a century been the most…
What if a man has no friends? What if he speaks only when spoken to, and then only of the weather? What if every day of the week he attends mass, serves as a janitor, and retires to a one-room studio, emerging only to return to work? What happens to…
Sahara is a stunning piece of work — stunningly inept, stunningly incoherent, stunningly awful in every single way imaginable. How this didn’t go direct to video or cable or airplane or bootleg is unfathomable. Actually that’s not entirely true. It gets a proper blockbuster theatrical release through Paramount Pictures because…
If nothing else, Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, co-directed with Frank Miller (and Quentin Tarantino, for a few seconds), will be remembered as the most faithful comic-book adaptation ever put on film (or high-def video anyway). Rodriguez uses Miller’s hyper-noir serial, published over a ten-year period, as storyboards for the movie…
A spin-off of a sequel, Beauty Shop plays like most Hollywood comedies these days — as tepid sitcom, benign product, and cynical afterthought. If last year’s Barbershop 2: Back in Business was little more than a dilapidated retread of the charmingly lightweight 2002 hit Barbershop, consider this incarnation condemned for…
Better than I thought it’d be” was the refrain repeated by those exiting the preview screening of Guess Who, which doesn’t mean much — freebie audiences expect nothing and usually receive it. But in this case it neatly summed up the experience of catching Ashton Kutcher in a part once…
The Ring, Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, offered sufficient closure that it didn’t exactly demand a sequel. The horror lay in wondering why a mysterious videotape kills viewers seven days after they watch it; to a lesser extent, there was the mystery of the creepy girl, face…
Let the lady gloat. Ellen Wedner, director of the 2005 Miami Jewish Film Festival, has a point when she boasts of this year’s “wonderful festival filled with a huge diversity of film topics.” She’s not kidding. With pictures from Israel, Argentina, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, Uganda, Luxembourg, Italy, the Netherlands,…
Everyone with a TV set remembers President Bush in the flight suit, landing on that aircraft carrier, standing in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner, and triumphantly declaring that major combat operations in Iraq were over. Two years on, many feel like asking what exactly he meant by that. Gunner…
If you’re looking for an escapist shoot-’em-up action adventure and figure a Bruce Willis flick is a reliable option, think twice. Hostage certainly delivers violence and heroics, but not in a way everyone will enjoy. Children and dogs die brutally, and the villains are so thoroughly hateful that even the…
Toward the end of Born into Brothels, a superb and piercing documentary by directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, a twelve-year-old child examines a photograph. It’s beautiful, he says, because it shows us how its subjects live. Yes, they’re very poor, and the shot is hard to look at, because…
The novel Be Cool, written by Elmore Leonard in 1999 while the ink was still wet on the publisher’s advance, existed only because the beloved writer of seedy thrillers and Westerns knew it was guaranteed gold — the sequel to the 1991 hit novel Get Shorty that, in 1995, became…
Come this time next year, The Jacket may well occupy the slot in movie discourse that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does now — that of the film that coulda-shoulda-woulda gotten more Oscar nominations if only it hadn’t come out so early in the year and been forgotten by…
First, the good news. Uncharacteristically for a February release targeting African-American viewers, Diary of a Mad Black Woman is not a yuppie romantic comedy featuring Gabrielle Union and Morris Chestnut. Anthony Anderson and Eddie Griffin are nowhere to be seen, and despite the fact that the most memorable character is…
Beautiful Boxer, the true story of a Thai transgender kickboxer, is a well-intentioned film with a heart of gold. Unfortunately, it also has a brain of lead, a stomach of iron, and legs of jelly. A student at the beat-you-over-the-head school of moviemaking, its sensibilities are crude, its sentiments super-sweet,…
At first (and second and maybe even third) glance, it’s all so familiar: Keanu Reeves shrouded in a black trench coat that flaps behind him like a superhero’s wings, moving between real worlds used as battlegrounds, breeding grounds, and playgrounds for higher beings amused and appalled by the doings of…
