For all of its inspired side trips down Imagination Lane (let’s call it that, because the “memories” of protagonist Edward Bloom are too majestic to be trusted and too affecting to be discounted), Big Fish is ultimately about one thing: the relationship between a son about to become a father…
You know how it’s often the ones we love whose flaws are most apparent? Well, when it comes to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, I am smitten. This film is a miracle, an extravaganza equal to its predecessors and in some ways more stunning. It…
The Mona Lisa Smile in question belongs, of course, to its star, Julia Roberts. Why? For no particular reason, actually. It’s just what Italian professor Bill Dunbar (Dominic West) calls her — Mona Lisa, perhaps because he’s an Italian professor possessing few points of reference outside the works of da…
Remember the Farrelly brothers? Makers of Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary? Known for crossing the line of good taste and making fun of the differently abled, but with sufficient sweetness that they could be forgiven? Kinda popular until Trey Parker and Matt Stone came along and one-upped…
To get the obvious out of the way first: Something’s Gotta Give is a film designed to appeal to older women, and it very likely will. Diane Keaton gives a good performance in it as a postmenopausal playwright who gets back in touch with her libido. The movie will probably…
In his career as a Hollywood action figure, Tom Cruise has been dressed in some pretty hip outfits — a macho fighter pilot’s sleek leather jacket, a NASCAR driver’s logo-speckled fire suit, assorted silken Armani sports jackets, even black cape and fangs. So it’s a bit unsettling to see the…
Honey is one of those movies you will see, swear you’ve seen before in several other guises and incarnations, then immediately forget you ever saw to begin with. Its story, about a would-be dancer trying to plot her escape from mean streets (or mean movie sets and back lots), has…
Michael Crichton seems pretty clever. The doctor-screenwriter-novelist digs odd history (Eaters of the Dead, a.k.a. The 13th Warrior), clashing cultures (Rising Sun), and cutting-edge biotechnology (Jurassic Park, and virtually his whole canon). His 1999 novel and its inevitable new movie adaptation, Timeline, both attempt to deliver all this and more,…
In director Ron Howard’s The Missing, Tommy Lee Jones’s Samuel Jones takes his place among the oldest archetypes in the Western genre — the white man who has lived among the Indians till he has at last become one. This plot device, used in Hombre and Nevada Smith and myriad…
The spooky beauty of Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s strange take on the Columbine massacre, arises not from the shock of sudden violence but from the filmmaker’s steady gaze at the numbing routines of life inside a suburban high school. With what first looks like cool detachment, Van Sant (My Own…
If you’re hankering for a movie about an awkward yet lovable “outsider” type who wanders into a pastel mockup of Middle America and cajoles the straights to get saucy, you’re in luck. It’s called Edward Scissorhands and it’s been available on video for years. Renting it will absolve you of…
In the annals of fraud and fakery, a discredited ex-magazine reporter named Stephen Glass will likely wind up a mere footnote. The people who forge Van Goghs and the con artists who bilk naive grandmothers out of their life savings (not to mention certain fast-dancing corporate executives) even more richly…
“We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.” So said civil rights activist, Gandhi disciple, and all-around troublemaker Bayard Rustin. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, you’re not alone. Although a trusted confidant and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., his name is rarely mentioned in the…
Russell Crowe to his agent: “More Oscar-bait. Now.” Agent, considering his cut of Crowe’s $20 million payday: “Yes, sir.” A possible scenario, anyway. Thus Crowe is back in another iconic, self-serious performance, and his beefy mug will stare down upon us from this season’s heroic movie posters until Tom Cruise…
In Autumn Spring, a bittersweet comedy from the Czech Republic, an aged ex-actor, Fanda, lives in bleak, unfulfilling retirement with his dour, too-careful wife, Emilie; he is forever pestered by the complaints from his hapless, thrice-married son. As he lacks youth, money, and health, Fanda’s one pleasure is to make…
A few words of advice for those among you fortunate and/or dogged enough to have seen the original The Singing Detective miniseries that aired on the BBC in 1984: If you plan on seeing the new movie, also called The Singing Detective and also written by the late Dennis Potter,…
Even when people were watching Will Ferrell on television every Saturday night, they weren’t seeing Will Ferrell. They saw no more than a glimpse of him, beneath wigs and behind glued-on beards and buried under characters who became almost better known than he during his seven years on Saturday Night…
The nineteenth Israel Film Festival lets us see once again how diverse the troubled land in that turbulent sea is — physically, politically, and philosophically. A classic across-the-divide love story in A Trumpet in the Wadi follows the impossible relationship of a Russian immigrant and an Arab woman; in Miss…
When it comes to defining love (romantic, brotherly, erotic, platonic), no one has come up with a term to describe the complex emotions that arise when love and survival become dangerously intertwined. This is the challenge for filmmaker joshua bee alafia’s new work Cubamor, which attempts to understand love in…
Just what is it with movies about men in dresses? Sometimes they’re brilliant (Some Like It Hot, Tootsie), sometimes they’re weird (Glenn or Glenda?, Flaming Creatures), sometimes they’re utterly conventional (Charlie’s Aunt, Mrs. Doubtfire), and sometimes they’re truly “outside the box” (Trash, The Rocky Horror Picture Show). But whatever the…
“I really like the cold — it makes me feel really alive.” There are few more attractive things a woman can say, and when wunderkind Sarah Polley says this in My Life Without Me — to a gullible dork she is seducing with totally unconscious malice, no less — thinking…
If you lie down with dogs, you’ve got to expect to get up with fleas. And when you go to a movie about a coked-out former porn star who was implicated in the grisly murders of four lowlife drug dealers — a case that remains “officially” unsolved to this day…
