Everyone with a TV 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 exactly what he meant by that. Gunner Palace…
Last year, the Simmons family of Needham, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, sent Christmas cards for the first time in more than 20 years. “We send out Xmas cards about as often as the Red Sox win the World Series,” the card very cleverly proclaimed. This movie is for them. In…
Almost as wide as he is tall, with a round but unremarkable face, Schultze doesn’t look like a rebel. Truth to tell, he looks like Curly of Three Stooges fame, or, less kindly, a mass murderer (well, he does bear a passing but disturbing resemblance to John Wayne Gacy). Schultze…
Sahara is a stunning piece of work — stunningly inept, stunningly incoherent, stunningly awful in every single way imaginable. How this didn’t go directly 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…
Does the world really need a new film from Woody Allen every single year? Yes, he is one of America’s great auteurs. Yes, he’s responsible for some very fine movies, many of them comedies (Annie Hall), several of them tragedies (Crimes and Misdemeanors, Another Woman), and some hovering in that…
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 10-year period, as storyboards for the movie…
Give Dan Harris, the writer/director of Imaginary Heroes, plenty of credit for boldness and ambition. Not many kids fresh out of Columbia University would have the wherewithal to tackle a complex family-crisis drama with four or five different kinds of trouble running through it and half a dozen crucial minor…
“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…
Damian Cunningham has the face of an angel — calm and cool blue eyes perched above freckled cheeks and a benevolent grin — which is only appropriate for a 7-year-old boy who speaks with the late, great saints, among them Peter, Joseph, Claire, and, of course, Francis of Assisi. Damian…
Perhaps in honor of the fourth anniversary of Cher’s farewell tour, MGM recently released a DVD edition of Chastity, the 1969 stink bomb featuring the singer’s first dramatic role. Shot entirely in Phoenix, this long-lost indie (for which Cher’s daughter is named) was written, produced, scored, and some claim directed…
A cynic might describe movies as the most depraved and fantastic system of exploitation ever devised. After all, they trade on the greed and hubris of financiers, the beauty and allure of stars, and the trust (or, if you prefer, gullibility) of the audience. No one involved in the process…
Rated R.
Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s Steamboy will be released nationwide in both subtitled and dubbed versions. At the press screening, both were shown simultaneously in neighboring theaters, leaving the reviewer to choose which one to see. Your critic went with the subtitled cut, not purely for reasons of cinematic snobbery, but mostly because…
The Upside of Anger belongs to Joan Allen, who plays Terry Wolfmeyer, a wife abandoned by her husband and left to pick up the pieces and collect them in a giant bottle of vodka. Terry’s is the cold, composed visage of a woman struggling to keep it together; through her…
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…
Toward the end of Born Into Brothels, a superb and piercing documentary by directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, a 12-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…
“From the creators of Ice Age,” boasts the poster for Robots, which is no ringing endorsement. That 2002 animated feature, a sort of Three Mammals and a Baby in a prehistoric setting, looked and felt every bit as frigid as its snowbound scenery; it was impossible to warm to a…
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…
When was the last time you lost yourself in a Shakespeare film? It’s a testament to the success of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the sharp and brooding new version directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino), that we leave the theater without concern for the production. Instead, the response…
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…
The Pacifier, starring the human battering ram Vin Diesel as a Navy SEAL ordered to protect five kids from baddies out to steal their dead dad’s invention, was written by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, two members of the defunct MTV comedy troupe The State. Lennon, however, is best…
