The critic who takes notes during The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou will ultimately fill a notepad only with scribbled details: “All the crewmen wear red stocking caps with their tuxedos,” “some names of Zissou’s movies: The Battling Eels of Antibes, Shadow Creatures of the Lurisia Archipelago, Island Cats!,” “one…
Bad Education, the new film by the flamboyant Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, opens on a man sitting at a table, poring over the tabloids for stories of interest. When he finds something he likes, he reads it to his lover: Isn’t this an arresting image? Could we generate drama from…
This much can be said for the movie version of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: Its villain, Count Olaf, just might be Jim Carrey’s finest screen role. A bitter, would-be master thespian who delights in donning ridiculous disguises and adopting funny accents, he doesn’t seem that far removed…
If you’ve already decided to see Ocean’s Twelve, it’s probably best not to read much about it. Unlike its predecessor, a remake that clung to a hoary heist formula, the sequel contains ample pleasures, most of which amuse as the result of surprises both great and small. There’s no one…
They walk among us. They resemble people, approximate our words and actions, present themselves more or less as human. And yet they are more — a different species, with their own dark legends, their own clandestine meeting places. They are dorks, and they are going to be pretty okay with…
Mike Nichols’s new film Closer is a boiling pot of lust, mistrust, and double-dealing that might well be taken for outright soap opera — or, in quite a few places, soft-core porn — were it not for the sophisticated gleam of its well-heeled London desperadoes and the vicious dazzle of…
When shot with verve and skill, so that we can feel the heat and passion of the moment, a concert film is the next best thing to being there. That’s the way it is with Lightning in a Bottle, a Martin Scorsese-produced documentary that captures an extraordinary evening in February…
If you’ve ever gone line-dancing with a gaggle of amputees on crank and hallucinogens, you know something of the feeling engendered by viewing Alexander. This broad, bold, and ambitious film by Oliver Stone presents itself as a fairly straightforward endeavor, but its rhythms quickly go strange while its participants hobble…
s the year stumbles toward its conclusion and critics begin penning their best-and-worst compendiums, here’s a holiday contender fit for the all-time Naughty List. Based on the John Grisham novel Skipping Christmas — which, face it, is less a novel than an impulse item stacked on bookstore checkout counters –…
Whatever else can be said about Tarnation — and there is plenty to say — there is no denying this: It is a very brave movie. Rarely is the subject of a documentary willing to lay himself bare before the camera, exposing his very consciousness to the audience, and it’s…
A week after having seen Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, no memory of it remains save some scribblings in my notepad, such is the slight nature of this woeful, forgettable sequel. Squandering the goodwill that lingers from the original, now a beloved relic among the singletons and smug marrieds…
When was the last time you saw Paul Giamatti? And when the film ended, did you realize how much you would miss him? It was just last year that Giamatti played the hilariously beleaguered Harvey Pekar in American Splendor, a role that he occupied with slumped, head-hanging perfection. Yet as…
I’m not for sale. I’m fucking love. I give it away.” So says Anton Newcombe, the raging megalomaniac who heads the Brian Jonestown Massacre, an underground rock band determined to take over the world. First he hurls the words at the audience. Then he informs the crowd that they bought…
Ray, director Taylor Hackford’s fifteen-years-in-the-making biography of Ray Charles, begins as you might hope: with 1959’s “What’d I Say (Part 1)” pulsing on the soundtrack, the organ’s low moans building toward that familiar, funky frenzy. It almost serves as an early climax, a bracing thrill served up before a word…
Even before the movie begins, as the New Line logo is still coalescing on a dark screen, a man speaks on the soundtrack. He’s talking about reincarnation and about what he would do if his wife, named Anna, were to die and return as a bird insisting it was indeed…
It takes mighty big stones to name your horror movie Saw, knowing full well that that’s popular fan-slang for Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a movie worshiped by gorehounds worldwide. When you take that name for your own, you had damn well better deliver a memorable, worthy contender. First-time feature…
How does Mike Leigh do it? The years pass; film fashions come and go; Hollywood churns its commercial pap. Careers sparkle; others fizz; whom the gods would destroy, they first make famous. Meanwhile, over in England, Leigh makes his films, tracking the intricacies of the lower-class family with the patience…
Brassbound skeptics may see the complex, provocative docudrama What the #$*! Do We Know!?, which poses the Big Questions of Life, as just another product of new-age self-absorption, an act of pompous navel-gazing that might best be confined to screenings at the local ashram. Certainly, these 108 minutes are singularly…
The Czech drama Zelary brings to mind Bertolt Brecht’s pointed observation that “war is like love; it always finds a way.” In this instance, war creates the atmosphere in which an unlikely love flourishes, then overwhelms that love. Only a fool would try to improve on Brecht, but after absorbing…
The presidential election is near, and the Florida Room folks have a lot on their minds. Nuclear proliferation, for starters, as well as the Iraq War. Also the memory of butterfly ballots and hanging chads, electronic voting machines, Al Jazeera and Fox News, political cartoons and cartoonish politicians, Will Ferrell…
Maybe it’s the mark of a great film that it can affect an audience member even when he sleeps through the entire thing. Such was the case with my father at a recent preview of David O. Russell’s I Huckabees, a philosophy lecture masquerading as a comedy in which shrill…
Revolutionary idolatry is an odd business. Just ask unruly pop singer Stew, of the unruly pop group the Negro Problem. On his Naked Dutch Painter album, the melodic rebel dares to challenge a very sacred image. “Don’t you wish there was, like, another picture of Che Guevara?” he inquires. “Like,…
