If you can tell a society by its smut, America in the 1950s couldn’t have been just a Frigidaire of repressive hysteria. Hidden somewhere in the closets of Pleasantville and Peyton Place, after all, was a stack of fetish mags bearing the face and hourglass figure of Bettie Page, and…
In 1817, a Tennessee landowner named John Bell was startled by a bizarre creature, described as a dog with a rabbit’s head, which materialized in a cornfield and vanished when fired upon. That night, an unexplained pounding shook the walls of the Bell home. Over the next four years, these…
Mission: Impossible III finds Tom Cruise downplaying the world’s single greatest piece of action music in deference to an Age of Fear vibe that’s a lot more grueling than rousing. Seems Lalo Schifrin’s adrenaline-pumping “dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum” is now as dated as the Cold War from which it sprang; maybe the star-producer…
Coming closer even than Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers to resembling the Chinese cover art for an Iron Butterfly album, Chen Kaige’s The Promise is psychedelia extremis. Hardly a minute of it passes without a concentrated dose of digital frou-frou and lavish cartoon-poetic imagery: floating ocean goddesses, flying swordsmen,…
The most important thing to know about the new movie Hoot, adapted from the children’s book by Carl Hiaasen, is that it’s co-produced by Jimmy Buffett, who also appears in a small role and provides new music for the soundtrack. Middle-aged drunks and boat owners might possibly rejoice at the…
United 93 — which uses the hijacking of one plane on September 11, 2001, to tell the story of what happened to all four aircraft seized that morning — may be the most wrenching, profound, and perfectly made movie nobody wants to see. There is no reason to think that…
The Darwinian theory that schlocksploitation must tighten its twist of the nuts with each new release will be tested strenuously for years — or at least several weeks — by Hard Candy. A pointedly s(l)ick cross between Oleanna and I Spit on Your Grave, thrown like raw meat to Lions…
Criticizing an action movie for being empty-headed is like calling out Brokeback Mountain for its lack of car chases. Likewise, when a teen gymnastics movie is derided as formulaic and dumb, one might logically wonder compared to what? Very well: Stick It sucks it compared to the modestly charming Kirsten…
Every year, when ESPN broadcasts the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a tiny flutter of hope rises in anyone who cherishes the life of the mind. Spelling is a sport? Sweet Jesus! For the duration of the competition, the brainy kid who gets his glasses stomped by knuckle-draggers on the playground…
If you’re a regular moviegoer with a gift for remembering unusual names, chances are you’ve started paying attention to Chiwetel Ejiofor, the black English actor with a chameleon’s talent for disappearing into a role. You may not have caught his breakthrough performance in Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things, but you…
Vast legions embrace the thing as gospel. Skeptics dismiss it as ecstatic nonsense. In any event, James Redfield’s peculiar novel The Celestine Prophecy has been a bulwark of New Age metaphysics since it first hit the best-seller lists back in 1993. By recent estimates, there are 14 million copies in…
Wanna knock the prez? Let’s make a show . . . preferably on television. Paul Weitz’s new satire American Dreamz imagines the Bush regime as an episode in the history of American entertainment and American Idol as the quintessence of U.S. democracy. So what else is new? The vision of…
Calling Rian Johnson’s teen indie drama Brick a piece of stuntwork might seem tantamount to hitting it with a pie, but it’s a high-speed wheelie of a strangely daring variety. Try this thumbnail definition on for size: a high school noir, complete with a Dashiell Hammett-derived plot line and a…
For most of January 2005, Michael Keaton was on the road pimping White Noise, the psychological thriller during which he stared at TV screens and pretended to be scared of static. Little wonder, then, that Keaton spent most of that couch time selling not his big-studio comeback, but his tiny-budgeted…
In Nicole Holofcener’s first feature, 1996’s Walking and Talking, the writer/director warmly portrayed an adult female friendship, nudging at emotional issues without resorting to shtick or melodrama. Five years later, Holofcener’s Lovely & Amazing attempted to do the same for a family of women, but with wildly different results: Virtually…
The brain is a beguiling thing. One evening, you’re talking to a friend on the phone. Sometime later, you find yourself in a subway car, passing through an urban landscape. You don’t recognize the buildings, the neighborhood, or the city. Don’t know why you’re on the train. Don’t even know…
Believe it or not, The Benchwarmers is so lame that it can’t even lay claim to being the best Adam Sandler-produced movie not screened for critics in 2006; that dubious honor would go to Grandma’s Boy, which was by no means good but at least featured a kung-fu chimp and…
There’s a certain exuberance, a “you go, girl” spirit of defiance and self-reliance to the new Mo’Nique vehicle Phat Girlz that’s undeniably appealing — and likely to be especially so for its target audience of overweight women. (This is assuming they see it, which the box-office numbers so far seem…
It’s difficult to tell from the image on the poster for Take the Lead, but that’s not star Antonio Banderas dancing in blue silhouette. In fact, the movie isn’t even about Banderas dancing — it’s about Banderas teaching teenagers to dance. You’d think that might be a dream come true…
You may not yet have lost your ardor and respect for the pressure-point hammer blow Quentin Tarantino executed on American movies, but it’s difficult at this late date not to view him as an imperative inoculation with unfortunate side effects: gas, bloating, dizziness, delusions of cleverness. Imitators flock when coolness…
There’s imported-film minimalism, and then there’s this: Fernando Eimbcke’s feature debut Duck Season, a daringly banal comedy of ennui set almost entirely in a middle-class Mexico City flat. Knocking them dead at festivals and at the Mexican Ariel Awards, where it enjoyed a Ben-Hur-like sweep, Eimbcke’s movie could become the…
We are in the middle of a B-movie renaissance, if you haven’t noticed. For years now, the politics of the multiplex have forced films to be either big-budget, Burger King-cup blockbusters or tiny “indie” projects about college-educated Caucasians with emotional problems (and viewed by college-educated Caucasians with emotional problems). But…
