I might as well just come out and say it: Spirited Away is the best movie I’ve seen all year. Though it would be a masterpiece in any language, Hayao Miyazaki’s animated spectacular (and Japan’s highest-grossing film ever) is being released by Disney simultaneously in two versions — one in…
Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is released from a mental institution the day of her older sister’s wedding. One afternoon with her dysfunctional family and she’s ready for rehab again. No such luck, however, so instead, Lee turns — or returns — to her favorite pastime: self-mutilation. Based on a short…
So there’s no confusion, the star of Sweet Home Alabama is Reese Witherspoon, who graces the film’s poster in full-body pout and appears on the press kit in close-up mug-shot smirk; any closer, and we’d shoot up her nostrils and exit through her pores. Of course, there’s a great deal…
Although his name sounds like an inventory notebook for candy bars, Heath Ledger is presently overcoming this confusion — as well as the plight of the pretty boy — to become one of contemporary cinema’s more vital actors. In The Four Feathers — as in The Patriot, A Knight’s Tale…
Among the more preposterous rumors spread by Harry Knowles, whose Ain’t It Cool News movie-biz gossip Web site garners undue attention from studios too craven to do their own thinking, was one from this year’s beginning: Terrence Malick, Knowles “reported,” was working on an adaptation of The Catcher in the…
In The Banger Sisters, Goldie Hawn plays Suzette, an aging groupie too stuck in a gloriously seedy past to move into the future. It’s 2002, yet she acts as though it’s 1969 and nothing’s changed — not the Sunset Strip’s Whisky A Go-Go, where she still tends bar behind sunglasses…
For those with any kind of pop cultural memory, it’s more than a little surprising to see Ice Cube in a movie like Barbershop. Not because it’s a light comedy — Friday was, too, and that was certainly in character. What’s odd about Barbershop is its seeming embrace of positions…
Read My Lips (Sur Mes Lèvres) puts forth the fascinating and heretofore unexamined theory that being deaf offers estimable rewards. It allows one the chance to tune out the world, to ignore everything and everyone. To the deaf, chaos can feel like soothing calm, and madness comes with its own…
Like Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro is one of those guys who can make just about any material inherently enjoyable. Also like Clint, he will sometimes make you wish he’d pick roles that are a little more challenging. His recent record of relatively disposable films speaks for itself: Tough-yet-sensitive cop…
To misappropriate a choice comment from TV journalist turned music-biz impresario Tony Wilson, I’ll just say, “Ian Curtis.” If you know what I mean, great; if you don’t, it doesn’t matter, but you should probably read more. That is, one need not be a fan of the late Ian Curtis,…
When Robin Williams was America’s favorite funnyman in films like Mrs. Doubtfire, it always felt a little strange admitting that the guy seemed kinda creepy. When he “got serious” in irritating tear-jerkers like Hook and What Dreams May Come, it was certainly in vogue to proclaim him annoying, but few…
If you’re looking for a horror film to revitalize the genre, keep looking. If you’re looking for a horror movie with believable characters . . . yes, you’re gonna have to keep looking. But if sudden loud noises, relentless strobe lights, digital hallucinations and mutilated corpses make you jump, and…
Andrew Niccol keeps making the same movie over and over again, dressing it in slightly different clothes: the sleek charcoal Hugo Boss grays of Gattaca, the crisp Crayola hues of The Truman Show and, now, the silk-and-satin Hollywood resplendency of Simone. Niccol, writer and director, is obsessed with a single…
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Citizen-soldiers eager to renew hostilities in the American culture wars can shoot a couple of spitballs at each other this week over Little Secrets, a teen-anxiety movie that leaves no doubt where it stands on “family values” and moral absolutes: It approves. The shock troops of the Cinema Without Limits…
LYT: Don’t you find it interesting that Blue Crush director John Stockwell is on this whole girl-power kick, going off on the “sexist” guys who’d rather “appreciate a cute girl in a bikini, but ain’t gonna give up a wave for them,” yet the movie’s marketing is all about appreciating…
Sometimes when a director shoots at a barn, the satisfaction comes in simply watching him hit it dead center. So it is with The Good Girl, wherein Miguel Arteta (Star Maps) targets middle American ennui with wit, compassion and no shortage of ornery malaise. Like Arteta’s second feature, Chuck &…
In case you didn’t happen to read the tag line on the ubiquitous poster, Xander Cage, also known as xXx because he’s tattooed his first initial three times on the back of his neck, is “a new breed of secret agent.” The old breed, we learn pretty quickly, is Bond,…
Blood Work, Clint Eastwood’s 23rd directorial effort, is a crime thriller in the mode of, but better than, True Crime (1999) and Absolute Power (1997), two of his last three films. More than these, however, it resembles In the Line of Fire (1993), the Eastwood vehicle directed by Wolfgang Petersen…
This time around, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan puts the surprise at the beginning of his film, and it’s a subtle, shimmering clue — one easily missed and, frankly, one that might not even be there at all. Such are the temptations offered by the maker of The Sixth Sense and…
It’s daunting to hear that John Sayles’ new film Sunshine State is almost two and a half hours long and consists mostly of calm conversations. But don’t be deterred, or you’ll miss out on a study of character, class and changing times that puts Robert Altman’s stodgy Gosford Park to…
