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…
Toward the end of Born into Brothels, a superb and piercing documentary by directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, a twelve-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…
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…
First, the good news. Uncharacteristically for a February release targeting African-American viewers, Diary of a Mad Black Woman is not a yuppie romantic comedy featuring Gabrielle Union and Morris Chestnut. Anthony Anderson and Eddie Griffin are nowhere to be seen, and despite the fact that the most memorable character is…
Beautiful Boxer, the true story of a Thai transgender kickboxer, is a well-intentioned film with a heart of gold. Unfortunately, it also has a brain of lead, a stomach of iron, and legs of jelly. A student at the beat-you-over-the-head school of moviemaking, its sensibilities are crude, its sentiments super-sweet,…
At first (and second and maybe even third) glance, it’s all so familiar: Keanu Reeves shrouded in a black trench coat that flaps behind him like a superhero’s wings, moving between real worlds used as battlegrounds, breeding grounds, and playgrounds for higher beings amused and appalled by the doings of…
It’s hard to know what to expect from Wayne Wang. The Hong Kong-raised director has made one gorgeous mood movie (Chinese Box) and two intelligent literary adaptations (Smoke and Anywhere But Here); he was also responsible, in his early days, for the overwrought sobfest Joy Luck Club. Then, in 2002,…
When we first see Tony Fingleton, the plucky Australian hero of Swimming Upstream, he’s a cute little guy getting cuffed around by his vile big brother, Harold Jr. That’s just the beginning of a long ordeal. For the next two hours of screen time, Tony (played as a teenager by…
One should expect little from the man who has directed an Olsen Twins movie (It Takes Two, the one with Steve Guttenberg, no less), Matthew Perry’s first Friends-to-film entry (Fools Rush In, its title an apparent nod to audiences who went to see it), and Sweet Home Alabama, one of…
The buzz is golden, the word is out, and this festival is going to be big. The opening night screening of Andy Garcia’s Modigliani at Gusman sold out so fast a second showing was added at the Regal Cinema in South Beach for the following afternoon. And so it goes…
When did we first encounter a feel-good film that united delinquent kids, a devoted (if professionally frustrated) teacher, and the transformative power of music? Was it Julie Andrews? Could it have been the spirited, soft-hearted Maria and her Austrian brood, trilling their way up the hills above the abbey? Whether…
You have to hand it to Sean Penn. Okay, you don’t absolutely have to, and if you’re a Red Stater through-and-through, you certainly won’t want to, but give him some credit. After being pilloried in the press for visiting Iraq under Saddam’s reign, torn apart by house cats in a…
Twenty-four hours. Three hundred fifty miles. His girlfriend’s kids. What could possibly go wrong? In the case of Are We There Yet?, here’s the short answer: a flaccid screenplay, bratty kids stripped of depth and personality, a single joke replayed in every scene, unearned attempts at sentiment, and a bizarrely…
In her first stab at narrative drama, writer/director Shainee Gabel has managed to assemble a superstar cast and a seasoned technical team. She spent five years on the project, adapting an unpublished novel written by the father of a friend, working with a clarity of vision and an admirable goal:…
A bit of advice when considering whether to see Bear Cub, a lovely new drama from Spanish director Miguel Albaladejo: Ignore the title. Also, if you would, please bypass the cringe-worthy pun of the tagline, “Parenthood is about to get a little hairier.” Because quite apart from those cutesy and…
The grim little green-walled apartment where Walter finds himself after his release has the look of a jail cell — with one apparent easement. What seems to be the only window in the place faces a school playground across the street. When Walter looks outside, he often sees kids running…
The story is simple enough: Sometime during the dying days of the Tang Dynasty in China, though it could really be any time and any place, two cops named Leo (Andy Lau) and Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) sit in a station house drinking tea. They decide one of them will go…
Clint Eastwood began digging into the third act of his career — the one that reveals the mature, deep-thinking artist … with a little jazz piano on the side — a dozen years ago, with the discomfiting anti-western Unforgiven. Since then, he’s hardly come up for air or given himself…
Over a three-month period in 1994, machete-wielding Hutu tribesmen in Rwanda hacked to death 800,000 Tutsi men, women, and children. News reports, including film footage of the unfolding carnage, were broadcast around the globe. In the face of such unremitting acts of inhumanity, the world community did nothing. It wasn’t…
When your movie gets riotous laughter out of endless utterances of the word “Focker,” it doesn’t have to try very hard. So it’s no surprise that much of Meet the Fockers, the inevitable sequel to the 2000 hit Meet the Parents, barely breaks a sweat. When in doubt, after all,…
By all accounts, the only living creatures who’ve never taken in a stage production of The Phantom of the Opera are Osama bin Laden and Uncle Elmer’s deaf hound dog Bart — which means that everyone else on the planet has an opinion about how Joel Schumacher’s zillion-dollar movie version…
