When a pleasant Italian comedy called Mediterraneo won the 1992 Academy Award for best foreign language film, a lot of observant American moviegoers scratched their heads. Gabriele Salvatores’s fairy tale of Italian soldiers happily stranded on a gorgeous Greek island during World War II was an outright charmer, but it…
“We must keep the atmosphere electrified!” announces creepy Igor in reference to an abominable experiment in Van Helsing, but he could be appraising the entirety of this enormous event movie. Breathless cutting, nonstop special effects, and a pummeling soundtrack camouflage very silly plotting and mediocre-to-sappy dialogue — and yet the…
That sound you hear is the stampeding feet of millions of pubescent and pre-pubescent girls, racing to movie theaters this weekend to catch sisters Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen in their first feature film since 1995’s It Takes Two. The Olsen twins began their acting careers at the age of nine…
One thing few may mention about Mean Girls is that it could have been unrelentingly terrible. It isn’t — it’s actually pretty fabulous on its own terms — but consider: a rush-job comedy (hastily lensed a few months ago), constructed around a high-concept title with built-in ka-ching and endless potential…
Every once in a while, you encounter a person who seems to have been born under an urgent, righteous star — a person who is both a fiery activist lit with the passion of his convictions and a dramatic storyteller who naturally occupies a place in the public eye. When…
Pour a couple of old-fashioneds into the average golf historian, and it won’t be long until he gets misty-eyed over Robert Tyre Jones, Jr. Jones not only ruled golf in the 1920s, the fellow will tell you; he also epitomized the gentlemanly ideal of the old Scottish game, transplanted to…
Laws of Attraction is the kind of film you might mistake for “cute” or “charming” at first glance. Maybe you will open the paper and spot the ad with Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore canoodling and think to yourself how nice it would be to see James Bond defrosting indie…
A lot can happen in six years. And it seems just about everything has for the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Drama, intrigue, tragicomedy with plot twists and turns to keep followers of the event, especially the internal politics of it, on the edge of their seats, with a…
I am going to give 13 Going on 30 too much credit, though it is hardly worth the effort; Lord knows the filmmakers didn’t put much into it. It’s a shame, as far as these things go, because what could have been an engaging, maybe even enlightening story about the…
If only Dogville were at least involving enough to be perplexing. Sigh. In simplest terms — which it definitely deserves — Lars von Trier’s latest thingamabob is a large, pretentious blob of coulda-been. As in, it coulda been deep and insightful. It coulda been sociologically challenging. It coulda been formalistically…
In Israeli writer-director Nir Bergman’s Broken Wings, we never see an automatic weapon, a military roadblock or a horrific explosion on a city street. Rather than dealing with the volatile politics of the Middle East, this quiet, soul-wrenching film examines the unresolved traumas of one middle-class family trying to cope…
The six-month intermission is over; those of you left in the lobby, wondering if Uma Thurman ever did kill Bill, may now return to your seats and unbuckle your belts and resume your gorging. Rest assured that Kill Bill Vol. 2, the final half of Quentin Tarantino’s fifth movie, offers…
When the lights first flickered on for Cinema Vortex back in 1993, it was little more than a cool name with the occasional screenings to go with it. Repertory and experimental art films were its trade, playing to small audiences of mostly hard-core cinephiles. The event chugged along in the…
Here’s a subject with which no one should ever have to grapple: Is this new version of The Punisher, starring Thomas Jane as the comic-book assassin, better than the 1989 adaptation with Dolph Lundgren? They both offer slight variations on a tale first told in a 1974 Spider-Man comic, where…
When we first see the title characters of Connie and Carla, a penny-dreadful imitation of one of Hollywood’s most inimitable comedies, they are loud-mouthed junior high girls mugging in the school cafeteria. A minute later, they are loud-mouthed grownups (well, they’re the size of grownups) screaming out show tunes in…
The most notable thing about The United States of Leland, a youth violence drama from writer-director Matthew Ryan Hoge, is its earnestness. This is a film that wants to be good. It wants to mean something, it wants to move you, and it wants to ask (if not answer) some…
As a professional wrestler, the Rock faced down giants like Hulk Hogan, the Undertaker, and the seven-foot-four Big Show. As an actor, in a relatively short period of time, he’s held his own onscreen with Oscar-nominated Michael Clarke Duncan and Oscar winner Christopher Walken (whom he describes as “geniusly insane”)…
She’s a premed farm girl intent on administering to the world’s suffering children. He’s a car-racing Danish prince looking to shed the burdens of royal duty. They’re both in America’s heartland, where they share a chem lab, an employer, and a penchant for driving fast. What, pray tell, is going…
DMX fans expecting the next installment of Exit Wounds or Cradle 2 the Grave may be in for a shock when they sit down to watch his latest cinematic outing, Never Die Alone. For one thing, the movie opens with their hero lying dead in a coffin, and it’s no…
The Ladykillers is the second film in as many years made by Joel and Ethan Coen to fill space between pet projects that seem to run off leash; it’s their time-killer, if you will. But even their recent paychecks reflect the brothers’ restlessness: Their movies have grown more manic and…
Jersey Girl, the sixth film by writer-director Kevin Smith, is the least Kevin Smith-y film he’s ever made, which will be welcome news to those exhausted by Smith’s everlasting obsession with his dick, fart jokes, and stack of comic books; and bad news to those enamored of Smith’s everlasting obsession…
It’s a bit unorthodox to ladle superlatives all over a film in the opening paragraph, but The Reckoning deserves them. Moving, gripping, and powerful; suspenseful, stylish, and literate, this exploration of justice and art may be set in 1390s England, but its resonance is fully relatable and significant today. This…
