Visualize Tokyo. Got it? Now add popular favorite Bill Murray, doing his “lovable schmo” shtick. Toss in American Rhapsody’s up-and-comer Scarlett Johansson, doing her standard “like, duh” face. Dip them both into emotional torpor in the sleek Park Hyatt, add local color, stir. Et voila: Lost in Translation. For Sofia…
In a full-spectrum festival that screens films as short as three minutes, documentaries from first-time directors, and experimental videos from San Francisco-based artist Tony Labat, you would naturally expect to find a full-length feature of the highest order. Which is exactly what you get in director Orlando Rojas’s thoroughly entertaining…
Tidy little Montecarlo, Georgia, which is the setting for Jonathan Lynn’s The Fighting Temptations, is a perfect movie fantasy town. At the picturesque train station, the ticket agent will call you a taxi or serve you a plate of Southern fried chicken. The house band at the local nightclub is…
God bless Johnny Depp. For the second time this year, the man has almost single-handedly redeemed an action movie that would otherwise be indistinguishable from the pack. Introduced right up front in Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico, he’s first seen dressed up like Prince in purple glasses…
It’s no given that audiences will embrace a passionately homosexual, drug-abusing male prostitute-cum-drag-queen, especially if he happens not to be a particularly nice person to boot. The cinematic tale of Madame Satã, however, has two big points in its favor. One — the most obvious one — is a dynamite…
Most will deny it, but inside every grown man lurks a hypersensitive adolescent girl. Allow me to tell you all about mine and to share some of my poetry … Whoa! Relax. Put away that gun. Just seeking to emphasize that in the case of director Catherine Hardwicke’s debut feature,…
Modern-day Miami Beach, where condo canyons stretch skyward, slick shops expand along Lincoln Road Mall (emphasis on “mall”), and overstuffed SUVs jockey for position on overcrowded causeways. Not an ideal milieu for going small and artsy. But bucking the trend for the ever bigger and, uh, bigger, is the newly…
Harvey Pekar, star of a long-running comic-book series he writes and others illustrate, is reminded early in American Splendor that he’s no superhero. It’s Halloween, and the eleven-year-old Harvey, played by a bent-over, sneering Daniel Tay, stands on a stoop seeking tricks and treats from a woman who recognizes the…
“A film starring Bob Dylan” — five more frightening words you’d be hard-pressed to put into the same sentence, even among those who forgave the man for his grotesquely indulgent 1970 album Self-Portrait or sat through his disjointed home movie Renaldo and Clara in 1978. The apologists, of course, will…
The last thing the Roman Catholic Church needs at this point is another exposé of its misdeeds. The shock of the pedophilia scandals and of the official coverups isn’t going away anytime soon, and when last we looked the former bishop of the Phoenix Diocese was out on $45,000 bail…
Ah, Paris — City of Light, of Love, of Liver Damage and Lung Cancer. C’est formidable, non? Who in need of a posh vacation would turn down the opportunity to luxuriate in its finest hotels, to stuff oneself with sumptuous snails, and to work on a terribly flat romantic drama…
Maverick Russian director Alexander Rogozhkin hit upon a clever idea for his idiosyncratic antiwar fable, The Cuckoo (Kukushka in Russian). The three main characters, marooned together on a remote reindeer farm in northernmost Scandinavia, all speak different languages. The Russian speaks and understands only Russian, the Finn knows only Finnish,…
Chiwetel Ejiofor is phoning in from Montreal. Sounds like a Tom Waits lyric, but it’s true: The fresh, gifted actor with the tricky handle is too busy at present (just finished doing The Canterbury Tales for BBC-TV, currently working on the feature Slow Burn with LL Cool J and Jolene…
When was the last time you said to yourself: “Y’know, what I seek for my viewing pleasure is a boring, obscenely diluted remake of Fight Club set in the fascinating world of dentistry”? Indeed it is a grave displeasure to announce that stellar director Alan Rudolph (The Moderns) has delivered…
Military clerk Ray Elwood (Joaquin Phoenix) is something of a modern-day Sergeant Bilko. Anything you need, he can get. Any scam that’s possible, he’ll run. Never mind the bumbling Colonel Berman (Ed Harris) who ostensibly runs the unit — Elwood has him wrapped around his finger. There’s just one major…
Those who remember Javier Bardem as the heartthrob poet from Before Night Falls, or the distinguished detective in The Dancer Upstairs, may be shocked to find that in his latest film to reach these shores, Mondays in the Sun, the Latin hunk is balding, bearded, and fat. Admittedly, he may…
From the lofty American vantage point, Mexico’s New Wave filmmakers have materialized like magic, the unexpected fruit of a renaissance that even many cinematically alert Yanquis hardly took the trouble to notice. Meanwhile these new directors have fashioned a vivid style that combines, in various proportions, Latin American literary experimentation,…
There’s magic in Northfork — both in the movie, by twin brothers Mark and Michael Polish, and in the Montana town soon to be drowned by the opening of the dam keeping the baptismal waters at bay. Northfork is a beguiling and bittersweet fantasy set in a netherworld where the…
“I went out to protest the traitors to the Revolution. Little did I know I was about to become one of them.” Juan Carlos Zaldivar’s words foreshadow the series of contradictions raised in his documentary 90 Miles. As a thirteen-year-old Cuban boy from the small town of Holguin, Zaldivar was…
If, in keeping with current fads, you seek movies featuring females kicking a bunch of ass, your appetite will be tended (and cultivated) at the multiplex all summer long. Wander into your local art-house, however, and you may find a fine if somewhat challenging import called The Legend of Suriyothai…
There’s something to be said for a movie that’s honest enough to transcribe dialogue that must have emanated from the director’s mouth, and make it part of the script. “Everybody start shooting at somebody!” yells Det. Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) in the midst of a particular situation. Earlier, he gives…
So much for those crackpot theories about flighty teenagers and their short attention spans. For four long years now the bland pop star Mandy Moore has stuck in the brain pan of white adolescent America like a wad of bubblegum, and there’s no sign that she will loosen her grip…
