A strong toxin requires a strong antidote. In the case of the Bush administration, the cure is being served in significant part by Michael Moore, he of the Peter Jackson Diet (and similar pop culture ambition), who previously delivered the rousing documentaries Roger & Me and Bowling for Columbine. This…
Ah, the peculiar genius that is Guy Maddin. Who else but the morose Canadian director, born and raised in one of the coldest cities in the world, would marry silent film, 1930s movie musicals, Prohibition, family melodrama, critique of capitalist zeal, and monster-movie gore in a surreal montage about sorrow…
Getting stranded at snowbound O’Hare for the night is one thing. You call home, maybe knock down a couple of martinis, then grab a blanket. A century ago, being quarantined at Ellis Island for eight months because you were, say, a part-time anarchist from Campobasso with a big mustache and…
You might think that with the technological advances in moviemaking since 1956, this new version of Around the World in 80 Days would at least look better than its predecessor did. You could not be faulted for believing you’d be wowed by the Rube Goldberg gadgets of inventor Phileas Fogg,…
It’s a sign that a nation may be losing its collective mind when it grants a nutty hack like Quentin Tarantino an exalted title like Officer of Arts and Letters, but there’s France for you. Whether Gallic pop culture is rousingly progressive or embarrassingly adolescent is anyone’s call, but few…
Beware the exclamation point. When found at the end of a title, it almost inevitably signals a level of self-hype rarely justified by the content of whatever it hopes to name. In the case of the movie Saved! — an amusing, if facile comedy about a good Christian girl gone…
So let’s get this straight: You’re a much-loved comedian who just did a low-budget, multi-award-winning film with an acclaimed up-and-coming director. In recent years, thanks in part to your work with the younger, edgier filmmaking set, you’re starting to be taken seriously as an actor. You even managed to score…
With any luck, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, himself, will make an appearance at the Brazilian Film Festival. Indeed Lula would make a jolly addition to the films which, this year, express a bent toward the left-leaning policies Lula himself personifies. The charismatic former labor leader who rose to…
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron. Screenplay by Alfonso Cuaron, based on a novel by J.K. Rowling. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, David Thewlis, and Michael Gambon. Rated PG.
Those people who live in small towns, they’re not like you and me. So naive, so innocent. And adorably quirky. Why, they’ve got so many lovable quirks you just want to run up and hug ’em. Or, if you’re a filmmaker, perhaps you can make a movie about these simple…
Sitting through Raising Helen is an exercise in frustration, because somewhere inside this big heap of Hollywood nothing is a something (someone, actually) worth saving and savoring. Her name is Joan Cusack, always a supporting player but never a star, no matter her grace and warmth and charm even in…
In the mood to launch a thousand ships? Fine, but it’s gonna cost you. Feel like sacking the Temple of Apollo? Okay, but bring drachmas. Depending on who’s counting, Warner Brothers’ presummer blockbuster Troy budgeted out at anywhere between $175 million and $250 million, including the big wooden horse, assorted…
Those seeking a spiritual counterpart to the yin of Lynne Ramsay’s masterfully moody Morvern Callar will find their yang in David Mackenzie’s exquisitely sorrowful Young Adam. Art-house aficionados may recall that in Ramsay’s recent film, a young male writer commits suicide, leaving his simple girlfriend to absorb his very being…
Ever-evolving, always changing, the universe nonetheless sustains many constants: Hair metal never really goes away. British women inevitably become besotted grumps. And short men always turn into intolerable control freaks. Another “true generality” holds that males of all statures develop their innate behavioral characteristics within patriarchal cultures that, while aiming…
That sound you hear is the stampeding feet of millions of pubescent and prepubescent girls, racing to movie theaters this weekend to catch sisters Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen in their first feature film since 1995’s It Takes Two. The Olsen twins began their acting careers at the age of nine…
When a pleasant Italian comedy called Mediterraneo won the 1992 Academy Award for best foreign language film, a lot of observant American moviegoers scratched their heads. Gabriele Salvatores’s fairy tale of Italian soldiers happily stranded on a gorgeous Greek island during World War II was an outright charmer, but it…
“We must keep the atmosphere electrified!” announces creepy Igor in reference to an abominable experiment in Van Helsing, but he could be appraising the entirety of this enormous event movie. Breathless cutting, nonstop special effects, and a pummeling soundtrack camouflage very silly plotting and mediocre-to-sappy dialogue — and yet the…
That sound you hear is the stampeding feet of millions of pubescent and pre-pubescent girls, racing to movie theaters this weekend to catch sisters Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen in their first feature film since 1995’s It Takes Two. The Olsen twins began their acting careers at the age of nine…
One thing few may mention about Mean Girls is that it could have been unrelentingly terrible. It isn’t — it’s actually pretty fabulous on its own terms — but consider: a rush-job comedy (hastily lensed a few months ago), constructed around a high-concept title with built-in ka-ching and endless potential…
Every once in a while, you encounter a person who seems to have been born under an urgent, righteous star — a person who is both a fiery activist lit with the passion of his convictions and a dramatic storyteller who naturally occupies a place in the public eye. When…
Pour a couple of old-fashioneds into the average golf historian, and it won’t be long until he gets misty-eyed over Robert Tyre Jones, Jr. Jones not only ruled golf in the 1920s, the fellow will tell you; he also epitomized the gentlemanly ideal of the old Scottish game, transplanted to…
Laws of Attraction is the kind of film you might mistake for “cute” or “charming” at first glance. Maybe you will open the paper and spot the ad with Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore canoodling and think to yourself how nice it would be to see James Bond defrosting indie…
