Hello, what’s this? Why, could it be another cautionary tale from Hollywood about recreational drugs being — alert the media! — not particularly good for people? (If only they could try the same with guns. Messrs. Heston and Silver: You awake yet?) Indeed, with Blow, director Ted Demme (Beautiful Girls,…
Easily the most creepy (and, by far, most interesting) thing about Along Came a Spider, yet another adaptation of one of James Patterson’s alleged mystery novels featuring beleaguered Detective Alex Cross, is how much co-star Monica Potter looks, sounds and acts like Julia Roberts. Granted, it’s hardly a startling revelation…
French director Patrice Leconte is a chameleonlike talent: Among his films to reach American screens are the psychological thriller Mr. Hire, the period satire Ridicule and the offbeat comic romance The Girl on the Bridge. But, in truth, all of Leconte’s films are romances at heart, though they are often…
Amidst the plethora of films with Freddie Prinze Jr., Mena Suvari, Chris Klein and Jason Biggs, it’s nice — in theory, at least — to see a contemporary romantic comedy, like Someone Like You, in which the characters, while hardly over the hill, are all over 30. In practice, however,…
Hollywood appears to be developing a healthy sense of humor about Valentine’s Day, which, from this cynic’s perspective, is a good thing. In the new millennium, rather than dole out romantic trifles like Return to Me as per the usual plan, we’ve seen Valentine (bitter ex-nerd cuts beautiful people to…
As its title suggests, Spy Kids is an action fantasy aimed primarily at the preteen/early-teen audience. For all its thrills — and it has plenty — it’s strictly a PG film . . . which is all the more surprising when you consider its source: Robert Rodriguez, master of bloody…
If the feature-length stuff isn’t doing it for you these days — and who could blame you if it wasn’t? — here are three pieces of short-form cinema you can take in easily this week.The short with the major Valley connection is The Steamer Cleaner, a mordant little comedy about…
Van Gogh was a lunatic who cut off his ear. Picasso was a self-absorbed cur who abused women. Warhol turned out to be a weird, desperate loner, Basquiat a doomed junkie. Try as he might, shriveled little Toulouse-Lautrec failed miserably at romance. As for El Greco’s explosive affair with that…
We can run, we can hide, we can even try switching films, but there’s just no escaping that pesky Gene Hackman. He starred in The Conversation, he is ubiquitous, and revere him we must — virtually every single time we go to the movies. (There’s even a song by Robyn…
To keep it simple, Enemy at the Gates plays like a cross between the PlayStation game Medal of Honor, a World War II Nazi-shoot-’em-up viewed through a sniper’s scope, and a Harlequin Romance novel. It’s history lesson as video game, video game as soap opera, soap opera as highbrow drama,…
Be not deceived by the Merchant/Ivory name attached to Ratcatcher; those in search of repressed emotions among the corseted well-to-do will be in for a nasty shock. For this is a Scottish working-class film, and, like its compatriots The Acid House and Orphans, it is laden with squalor and violence…
The current state of American teen romantic comedy can be tough to bring into focus. It may not even really be a genre, but rather one big über-movie, a pulsating — listlessly pulsating — mass of Freddie Prinze Jr. and Julia Stiles and Kirsten Dunst and Jody Lyn O’Keefe and…
Director John Herzfeld’s last feature, the droll and underrated 1996 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle which, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track…
With In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai solidifies his stature as the subtlest and most idiosyncratic of Hong Kong directors. In an industry best known for its accessible, crowd-pleasing comedies and action films, Wong has turned out a series of increasingly risky dramas that make little or no concession…
Let it not be said that See Spot Run is without its distinctions. For instance, it is, in all likelihood, the first movie for kids featuring comic castration. It’s also probably the first movie of any kind that subjects its leading lady to explosively ignited zebra flatulence. And then there’s…
Leave it to Hollywood to sell us the insipid romance of a thoroughly irritating white couple as the solution to an archaic Latin American mystery. As pure bang-up adventure, The Mexican is certainly more user-friendly than childish junk like The Way of the Gun, but the attempt to weave adult…
Have you heard? Beauty’s only skin deep. Pay attention now: When it comes to love, experience is the best teacher. And just in case you didn’t know: Youth is wasted on the young.Such are the banalities director Tonie Marshall dispenses, more or less, in Venus Beauty Institute, a French romantic…
It’s almost impossible to know what to make of Monkeybone after one viewing; there’s so much going on in this dreamland of stop-motion and computer-generated animation and celebrity cameos that you have trouble keeping up with it. Indeed, like a half-remembered dream, the movie’s often so overwhelming that even its…
Every year that I’ve gone to Spike & Mike’s Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation, I’ve done so with less enthusiasm, not because the fest that discovered Beavis and Butthead and South Park has gotten any worse, or any more shocking, but because I’ve become more acutely aware of the…
Sara is quirky and free-spirited. That, at least, is the premise of the hilariously wretched new weepie Sweet November, of which Sara, embodied by the breathtaking Charlize Theron, is the heroine.But if you’re smart enough to run in terror at the threat of a movie character who’s quirky and free-spirited,…
Lance Barton, thin as paper and frail as fine china, is such a horrific standup that during an amateur-night performance at the Apollo Theater, he is booed with so much force — the audience whips up its own whirlwind — he’s literally knocked off the stage. Lance’s manager insists he’s…
There he is, his eyes and body language as unmistakable as the flattened hat perched perfectly on his head. This little man in the shabby suit looks older than his 66 years — he looks ageless, actually — yet he performs physical feats beyond the capability of most people 40…
