Toward the end of Saraband, the uneven new film from legendary director Ingmar Bergman, a character sits down with his daughter, a taut girl obviously under emotional distress. “I have the feeling that some sort of discussion is coming on,” he says. Indeed it is — as it has been…
And so, once more, the cineplex emits the stink of the network rerun, this week offering yet another worthless big-screen take on small-screen detritus. As Hollywood wonders — cries, actually, over spilt spoiled milk — why audiences are staying away from theaters, offering theories ranging from the absence of such…
Must Love Dogs, it should be clearly stated, is not the greatest romantic comedy ever made about a quirky couple who meet at a dog park. That honor goes to Dog Park, the oddball 1998 flick starring Luke Wilson and Natasha Henstridge, written and directed by former Kids in the…
Hit me,” says Mark Zupan — begs, actually, like a child clamoring for a new toy. “I’ll hit you back.” He means it too, and his ripped pecs and buzzed scalp and tattooed back and arms and bushy gangster goatee promise just as much menace. The dude is bad and…
British indie filmmaker Sally Potter, a former dancer, lyricist, and performance artist, clearly has a taste for adventure. In 1992 that led her to Orlando, a screen adaptation of the experimental Virginia Woolf novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who hangs around for 400 years, eventually morphing into a hip twentieth-century…
No, it’s not the big one. But the Summer Mini-Fest presented by the Miami Jewish Film Festival does offer a welcome respite from the blockbuster madness that rules at your local multiplex. True, this time around there is nothing here on the level of previous festival discoveries such as Walk…
If you’re short on reasons to be grateful these days, look no further than March of the Penguins, the astonishing if imperfect nature documentary from first-time director Luc Jacquet. Hard times may have befallen you, but at least you are not a penguin, an animal destined to repeat a devastating…
Roald Dahl’s inner child was evidently a contrary lad — precocious, dark-minded, contemptuous of adult supervision, and fueled by a sense of justice that often proceeded via cruel whim. In Dahl’s twisted children’s stories, villains throw kids out of windows, beautiful women turn out to be hideous witches in disguise,…
If Vince Vaughn puts any effort into what he’s doing, it doesn’t show, which is perhaps one of the benefits of always appearing to be hung-over. The man probably has to check the bags under his eyes at the airport, and he’s about as in shape as a toddler’s fistful…
So little time, so much trouble. In the 24-hour period that’s dissected in Heights, the first feature from Harvard/Cambridge/USC film-school-educated Chris Terrio, an aspiring Manhattan photographer named Isabel (Elizabeth Banks) gets cold feet about her upcoming marriage to a dull but pleasant lawyer named Jonathan (James Marsden); a needy Broadway…
Quite simply and quite literally, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds is Close Encounters of the Third Kind turned inside-out: They’re still out there, only this time the aliens are out for our blood, which they spray all over the countryside like so much red paint…
Bewitched may go down as the first movie about a fictional failed actor that creates a real-life failed actor. This hackneyed, hapless, and utterly useless redo of an overrated Sixties sitcom is excruciating to sit through for a dozen reasons. But nothing is more intolerable than the sight of Will…
Anyone who would insist that movie reviewing is not a real job (‘Sup, Mom) hasn’t been forced to sit through screenings of Bewitched and Herbie: Fully Loaded in the span of five days — and by forced, I mean either you see both movies, write 800 words about each, or…
Forget Mad Hot Ballroom. The real dance documentary hit of the summer is more likely to be Rize. After all, which do you think the kids are going to find more appealing: Formal steps that require suits, partners, and schoolteachers; or shaking the booty and slamming into fellow dancers while…
Not many people saw Lost and Delirious, the 2001 boarding-school drama about two girls in obsessive love, and that was probably for the best. Yes, Piper Perabo (Coyote Ugly) made a stunning androgynous rebel, but she couldn’t rescue the film from its unctuous self-importance. My Summer of Love, a bewitching…
For all of their exceptionality, there is also a numbing sameness to the movies of Hayao Miyazaki, the revered animator who has bewitched Japanese audiences since the late Seventies and bewildered American ones since 1999, when Princess Mononoke was among the first of his movies to receive significant stateside release…
DC Comics has kept its superheroes locked in a fortress of solitude for almost a decade, forcing the likes of Superman and Batman to warm the bench while long-time rival Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man, the Hulk, X-Men, and Blade galloped up and down the playing field. Not counting Catwoman, which is…
It’s been a great season for movie lovers in South Florida, with a string of major festivals more than making up in both quantity and quality for the multiplexing of America. There have been major discoveries all over, not just in the vast Miami International Film Festival but also at…
Before there was School of Rock, the 2003 movie in which Jack Black awakened a class of subdued elementary school students with lessons in America’s loudest subject, there was rock school. Students of the Paul Green School of Rock Music in Philadelphia have been worshipping at rock’s altar — and…
Ten is a magical age, when children are old enough to make articulate statements about their experiences and young enough to express their feelings without shame. In a couple of years, excitement will go the way of the bag lunch and become uncool, and acceptable poses will dwindle to a…
Lords of Dogtown is an odd, disorienting commodity — a fictional version of a documentary (Dogtown and Z-Boys) about the birth of skateboarding in 1970s Venice, California, that was written by the man who directed said doc, in which he was a central figure. Stacy Peralta, whose Dogtown and Z-Boys…
Layer Cake, the new British crime drama from first-time director Matthew Vaughn, is a block of granite struggling to liberate the statue inside it. Vaughn (producer of Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) has plenty of dark threat and compelling visual style, but his ambitious trip into the…
