There are first films like Citizen Kane or Breathless, which, as radically new and fully achieved as they are, unfairly overshadow an entire oeuvre. And then there are first films, perhaps even more radical, which haunt an artist’s career not through precocious virtuosity but because they have an innocence that…
In the observation room of the spacecraft Icarus II, passengers sit on a bench in front of a large, rectangular screen displaying a view of what lies ahead. They gaze at the spectacle as you might marvel at special effects on some ostentatious plasma monitor. A seething orb of gas…
Sadly, No Reservations is not the big-screen adaptation of Anthony Bourdain’s snack-gulping, risk-taking Travel Channel show. You’ll find no monkey brains here, nor any attempts to party down in Beirut whilst Hezbollah and Israel blow each other to smithereens. This is just more of the same from the franchise factory…
Uplifted beyond its merits by a stunning performance from Marion Cotillard, the humdrum biopic of Edith Piaf, La Vie En Rose, jogs obligingly along with Piaf the legend rather than the woman. It’s not hard to do, given the fuzzy borders between Piaf’s undeniably scarred life and her relentless gift…
In his big-screen debut, Homer Simpson utters the “D’oh!” heard ’round the world — or at least as far away as Washington, D.C. (which, given the unspecified coordinates of Springfield, might not be that far at all), where President Schwarzenegger and an overzealous EPA chief (voiced by Albert Brooks) rush…
Nothing if not appropriate for summer blockbuster season, Werner Herzog’s latest feature, based on his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, offers a suitably fantastic tale of war, freedom, and fortitude, set in the jungles of Indochina and featuring an immigrant lad who turns out to be just as…
Did John Waters sell out? Or did our ever-more-metrosexual age merely render him irrelevant? Certainly long before Hairspray took up residence on the Great White Way in 2002, Waters had abdicated his throne as America’s elder statesman of underground smut in favor of a more lucrative career as a neutered…
I wanted to hate I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry. Truly I did. Two straight guys pretending to be gay (insert fiscal excuse here); been there, done that (insert all known variants on The Odd Couple here). Rampant homophobia hiding behind liberal pleas for tolerance — blech. And it’s…
The magic has returned to the Harry Potter franchise — albeit magic of the old, black variety. The darkest and most threatening, by far, of the five Potter films, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is also the only series entry outside of the third, Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry…
George Ratliff’s Joshua debuted at the Sundance Film Festival to raves from a particular breed of audience member: parents. Because no matter how hard Fox Searchlight’s trying to sell this movie as a horror picture — Rosemary’s Baby meets The Omen on the way to The Exorcist’s for a play…
Transformers twiddles its big, fat, stupid robotic thumbs for the better part of two hours before jabbing them into your eye socket and finger-fucking your brain in the last 20 minutes. Yes! It’s torture enough waiting for the iPhone and the second coming of Jesus without wondering when, exactly, this…
Dreams and the Internet, according to the psychotherapist superheroine of Satoshi Kon’s loopy Paprika, are “areas where the repressed conscious mind vents.” Is this not the ideal definition of movies as well? Kon’s head-tripping anime universe, which also includes Millennium Actress and Perfect Blue, is about as obsessive and personal…
“We’re Americans. We go into other countries when we need to. It’s tricky, but it works.” So declares Michael Moore in the midst of his new documentary, Sicko. Moore may be riffing on the war in Iraq, to name only our most recent intervention, but he’s actually referring to U.S…
Parked uneasily between sensitive indie and studio chick-flick, Lajos Koltai’s Evening makes star-studded hash of Susan Minot’s beautifully written, if emotionally constricted novel about a terminally ill woman trying to wrestle meaning out of the shards of her memories. Floating in and out of delirium in her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home,…
“Anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great.” So goes the personal mantra of the late celebrity chef Auguste Gusteau, whose disembodied spirit materializes, Jiminy Cricket-style, to guide the rodent hero of Brad Bird’s Ratatouille toward his goal of gastronomic excellence. He also seems to be guiding Bird,…
It takes Bruce Willis a while to get warmed up. He’s always just a bit below room temperature — a cool brother, dig, dating back to his Moonlighting days as a private dick belting out “Tighten Up” while going undercover as a man of the cloth in Wayfarer shades. He’s…
Do we need another movie about the liberal West watching in horror as something that befalls helpless bystanders all over Africa, Asia, and the Middle East happens to one of us? Yes, we do. Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was murdered by Islamic jihadists in Pakistan while researching…
Mike Enslin, the travel writer played by John Cusack in 1408, could use a better travel agent. Every hotel room in which he finds himself booked is said to be occupied by the ghost of some suicidal creep or a murderous goon who left behind a pile of bodies in…
Evan Almighty, the follow-up to Bruce Almighty, is the work of an angry God. At 89 minutes that last a lifetime, it’s a sanctimonious sitcom dolled up as the most expensive comedy ever made — $175 mil, so they say — and marks an unfortunate low point in the history…
Night Watch, you may recall, told of an ancient feud waged between the forces of Light and Dark. In the interest of maintaining a fragile détente, they organized themselves, as Russian super-combatants are wont to do, into complex bureaucracies, with the Night Watch heroes monitoring the vampiric shenanigans of the…
So lame it’s . . . cool? Nancy Drew, writer-director Andrew Fleming’s attempt to jump-start a new Warner Bros. franchise, is a movie flaunting a most obvious demographic strategy — a teen flick with a sensibility, or at least sense of humor, that’s most definitely parental. Invented in 1930 by…
Lowest Common Denominator-ism writ large and engraved in stone like the Ten Commandments according to Cecil B. DeMille, the Hollywood blockbuster is often an allegory for itself. Walt Disney, the notoriously litigious studio that successfully changed the nation’s copyright laws to protect its trademark Mickey Mouse but more recently declared,…
