As Charlie Fineman, a New York dentist who lost his wife and three young daughters in one of the September 11 plane crashes, Adam Sandler sports a mass of bedraggled locks and walks with his head hung low, the sounds of the city drowned out by The Who or Bruce…
The feature debut from South African director Sunu Gonera is straight from the sports-film playbook, the one in which an underdog team coached by an obstinate overachiever overcomes obstacles and adversity to take home the gold. It’s Hoosiers in a swimming pool — well, Glory Road, anyway, given this is…
Blood Diamond (Warner Bros.) Ed Zwick’s Blood Diamond, about the civil war over diamonds that devastated Sierra Leone in the late 1990s, plays like a guilt-ridden Jerry Bruckheimer movie. It’s little more than action-adventure pulp drenched in someone else’s blood — which it tries to wash off by proselytizing to…
Batman Beyond: Season Three (Warner Bros.) The Bridge on the River Kwai (Sony) Burning Annie (Warner Bros.) The Caine Mutiny (Sony) The Care Bears Movie: 25th Anniversary Limited Edition (MGM) Come Early Morning (Weinstein) Eragon (Fox) The Guns of Navarone (Sony) JAG: The Third Season (Paramount) Justice League Unlimited: Season…
The space-time continuum smacks the shit out of Sandra Bullock in Premonition, the latest in nonlinear nonsense, but the fun really gets going when she starts to smack back. As Linda Hanson, humdrum mom from Anywhere, U.S.A., Bullock sets things up by doing her thing, effortlessly establishing the girl next…
I Think I Love My Wife From the makers of Pootie Tang, one the greatest movies ever made, comes I Think I Love My Wife, the most unlikely remake in the history of cinema. Director, co-writer, and star, Chris Rock, claims his comedy is an update of Chloe in the…
American Cousins (BFS) Appetite for Deconstruction: A Punk Rockumentary (MVD) Barbie Fairytopia: Magic of the Rainbow (Universal) Bloody Reunion (Tartan) Blood Trails (Lions Gate) The Ed Wood Collection: A Salute to Incompetence (Passport) Favela Rising (Netflix) Fires on the Plain: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) The Gene Autry 100th Anniversary Collection…
Casino Royale (Sony) James Bond gets a stirring shake-up in the best — yeah, Goldfinger fans, the best — film in the series’ 44-year history. Daniel Craig’s 007 has more going on above the neck and below the waist than even Sean Connery’s. He’s a genuinely compelling character — a…
Long ago there reigned a clan of Speedo-wearing militaristic psychopaths called the Spartans. They lived beneath a copper-colored sky, on a copper-colored land, amid copper-colored fields, in copper-colored homes made from copper-colored stone. Legend has it they would outline their copper-colored pecs and abs with ash to enhance their manly…
When the editorial-cartoonist-turned-amateur-sleuth Robert Graysmith published Zodiac, his sprawling, meticulously researched account of the eponymous San Francisco serial killer, he wrote that the tale was “the most frightening story I know.” It was easy to understand why. Graysmith was writing in 1985, some 16 years after the Zodiac killer’s last…
In the Heart of the Earth This Spanish period piece is set in 1888 Huelva, an Andalusian mining town run by the British-backed Rio Tinto mining company, where conflict erupts between local Spanish workers and their employers. The story is framed by a friendship between Blanca (Catalina Sandino Moreno, a…
Revenge of the Nerds: Panty Raid Edition (Fox) Revenge of the Nerds is a great movie. No, really. It’s got a bitching new-wave soundtrack and some truly inspired performances — memorable enough to wreck the careers of Robert Carradine (Lewis) and Curtis Armstrong (Booger). But mostly it’s the mix of…
A Brush With Death (New Light) Buster Crabbe Collection (St. Clair Vision) Captain Horatio Hornblower (Warner Bros.) Care Bears: Friends Forever (Lions Gate) Commissar (Kino) Confetti (Fox) Death Row (Anchor Bay) The Electric Company’s Greatest Hits & Bits (Shout) Fast Food Nation (Fox) The Full Monty: Fully Exposed Edition (Fox)…
Every film festival wants to be mentioned in the same breath as Sundance. After spending five years trying to earn the Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) the kind of global recognition it takes to attract the best in world cinema, festival director Nicole Guillemet now leaves the MIFF closer than…
In 2003 Mark and Michael Polish made Northfork, though just barely. The brothers, also responsible for art-house fave Twin Falls Idaho (about conjoined twins who fall for the same woman), lost funding for the project just before shooting began, and had to beg for money to finish their reverie about…
The Number 23 grips hold of one stupid idea and runs so far with it, in so many directions, to such little purpose, that it nearly won me over from sheer berserkoid effort. In a nutshell, this nutso movie observes what happens to a man (Jim Carrey) under the impression…
Reno 911!: Miami Norbit has nothing on Niecy Nash, who proudly parades her prosthetic ass along Miami Beach, lowering oceanside property values with each thunderous step. The joke here is that the snooty pastel metropolis needs to be taken down a few rungs by Nash and her law enforcement crew…
In December 2002, ABC’s 20/20 ran a story on Eric O’Neill, an undercover surveillance specialist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The piece was titled “Spy Catcher,” because it was O’Neill who, at a mere 27 years old, helped bring down Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who, for more than…
You remember Andrew Ridgeley, don’t you? He was the other guy in Wham!, the one who found himself stranded in 1986, after George Michael had faith enough in his own talents to break up the act. Ridgeley went on to record one solo record, before CBS Records decided, yeah, no…
Close to Home With at least the virtue of novelty on its side, Vidi Bilu and Dalia Hager’s debut outing as writer-directors may be the first feature to tackle the claustrophobic world of Israeli women soldiers who work out their mandatory military service patrolling the streets and buses of Jerusalem,…
Marie Antoinette (Sony) Sofia Coppola’s third feature grabs you by your frilly lapels from the jump, with Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not in It” showering guitar chords all over the credits as Kirsten Dunst nods to the audience, as if to say, Hang tight — this thing’s gonna be a…
Bicycle Thieves: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) The Boy From Lebanon (Picture This) The Butcher Boy (Warner Bros.) The Cave of the Yellow Dog (Tartan) The Departed (Warner Bros.) Devil’s Den (Starz) F**K (ThinkFilm) Green for Danger: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) The Hills: The Complete First Season (Paramount) Hustle: Complete Season…
