Hollywood served up no shortage of literary adaptations in ’05, but only one of them — see Thumbsucker, as soon as possible — was an unqualified success. Even Andrew Adamson’s The Chronicles of Narnia, with its obviously digitized armies and its emotional disconnect from the material, was largely a disappointment…
It’s an unavoidable trend — if two movies make a trend, that is — so much so that if you Google the phrase “the return of the R-rated movie,” the first hit takes you to the tsk-tsking Family Media Guide’s article on the very topic, along with its list of…
What a difference a year makes. In 2004, Michael Moore’s Bush-bashing Fahrenheit 9/11 was not only the most-watched and most-debated doc in release, but also among the highest-grossing movies of the year. This past year’s most-watched and highest-grossing documentary was, of course, March of the Penguins, which was about as…
Until this year, nature documentaries generally found their homes at PBS and Animal Planet, enjoying modest audiences made up of children and scientists. Then came March of the Penguins, which earned close to $80 million at the box office and is still playing in some areas six months after its…
When Cedric the Entertainer makes a lousy movie, he’s delivering no less than we expect of him. But how long must we keep praising promising actors who consistently run on autopilot in mediocre crap, though we’ve seen that they’re capable of much more? Following are the top three sandbaggers of…
Social conservatives may have put the brakes on gay marriage, but there isn’t much they can do about gay movies, which arrived like some biblical flood in the last months of 2005. Along with Capote, a vivid portrait of the most celebrated gay writer of the 1960s, Ang Lee’s romantic…
Some of us go to the movies to escape into fantasy, others to cry at tragic drama. Then there are those who just enjoy a couple hours of shock treatment. Maybe it’s cathartic, or maybe it’s just sick, but it was unquestionably a good year for connoisseurs of the grotesque…
In September, UPN insisted that World Wrestling Entertainment remove the controversial Arab-American character Muhammad Hassan from its Smackdown broadcasts. One might have expected Hassan (in real life an Italian-American named Mark Copani) to resurface on USA Network’s Raw. Instead, Copani quit the business altogether to pursue movie stardom. Blame The…
The gifted Irish novelist and filmmaker Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Michael Collins) says that his overriding concern is “how individuals work with what they’ve been given.” Case in point: Jordan’s new feature, Breakfast on Pluto. This bittersweet, gender-bending drama takes a page from Candide — its beleaguered hero, too,…
Deception, betrayal, and revenge. In his film directorial debut, acclaimed playwright/screenwriter/theater director Craig Lucas is done in by his own script, which becomes so excessively icy and cruel that it breaks, rather than solidifies, any bond it could hope to establish with its audience. A modern-day Greek tragedy — complete…
All in the Family: The Complete Fifth Season (Columbia/Tristar) Annie Duke’s Beginner’s Guide to Texas Hold ‘Em (Big Vision) As Time Goes By: Reunion Special (PBS) The Cave (Sony) Dumb and Dumber: Unrated (New Line) Football Collection: Radio, Jerry Maguire, and Rudy (Sony) The Gospel (Sony) Green River Killer (Lions…
The Bombay-born film producer Ismail Merchant, who died in May at age 68 after abdominal surgery, collaborated with director James Ivory on a dozen elegantly furnished period pieces over the last quarter-century, including The Remains of the Day, starring Anthony Hopkins as a repressed English butler, three E.M. Forster adaptations…
If you had a tough time keeping that shot of Cuervo down, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Imagine if it was a dram of Tabasco sauce or fish oil. Could ya handle that? You’d have to, especially if you wanna survive “Wheel of Fear Factor” — the weekly bar battle…
Finding parking in Tempe is hard, driving down Mill Avenue is frustrating, and we’re pretty sure that Arizona State University is building something to create more roadblocks. City officials encourage Tempeans to “bus, bike or walk,” and at least one group is taking them to heart. Critical Mass, a bicycling…
One of the perks of being an artist is that you usually end up with a fabulous art collection, compensation for all those years of living in an unheated studio and subsisting on beans and ramen noodles. An artist’s private stash is generally the product of a good eye, good…
British sculptor Anthony Caro is most famous for the lean, linear metal abstractions he made in the 1960s, playful pieces that seemed to float in the air. So it’s surprising to see the lumpy, earthbound assemblages of clay and steel in “A Life in Sculpture: The Kenwood Series,” an exhibition…
With a Blade TV show in the works from Spike TV and powder-faced My Chemical Romance fans carrying the goth torch at Hot Topic, this would seem the perfect time to resurrect the Castlevania franchise. Castlevania debuted 20 years ago on the Nintendo Entertainment System and was an instant classic,…
Nowhere Man (Image Entertainment) There’s good reason why you’ve never heard of this UPN show from the mid-’90s, which lasted 25 episodes before getting shuttled off to, well, nowhere. It’s a convoluted mind-fuck that owes its existence as much to The Prisoner as The Fugitive, and if you missed one…
In 1968 it was a movie. In 2001 it became a musical. Now it’s a movie again? Yep, and there’s actually pretty good reason to return The Producers to the screen. The original film, though intermittently inspired, was slow and often boring, and its homophobic, misogynistic humor no longer plays…
For your Heath Ledger holiday-movie options, you have a) a cowboy in love with another man, and b) history’s most infamous womanizer. Since the name Casanova is synonymous with an unquenchable thirst for straight sex with women (or at least boasting about it), the role might seem to be a…
The notion that Wolf Creek is opening nationwide on Christmas Day brings to mind the scene from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, in which a young boy opens up his holiday gift and finds a severed head. The movie is about as diametrically opposed to the concept of “goodwill…
Buck Henry walks into a studio boss’s office and pitches him a movie. Says it’s gonna be a sequel to a movie he wrote called The Graduate, the beloved Mike Nichols film that starred Dustin Hoffman as 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock, and Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross as the mother and…
