Watching Hollywood’s endless stream of John Grisham adaptations — The Firm, The Chamber, A Time to Kill, etc. — it would be easy to assume that Grisham is the worst sort of hack writer, with simplistic morals that usually overwhelm logic and come close to contravening the very law the…
Recently ornithologists in Antarctica made a startling discovery: Female emperor penguins, being forced against their wills to endure stern patriarchal societal norms, tend to practice iffy mating habits. Close scrutiny revealed that most adult females go bonkers struggling to choose between an exciting-but-destructive “bad-boy” penguin and a dependable-but-boring “good-boy” penguin,…
The opening credits insist Kill Bill: Volume 1 is “Quentin Tarantino’s 4th film,” when it’s actually his 3.5th; it’s too incomplete to be measured as a whole, half a movie waiting for a proper ending due to arrive in the next volume in February. Till then we’ll have to contemplate…
You gotta love John Sayles. No, really — you gotta, or else a mob of indie-minded cineastes will club you into submission. Sometimes it’s easy to comply, as with City of Hope and Sunshine State, both astute portraits of uniquely American class, race, and real estate struggles boiling down to…
You see them all the time, on the sides of walls and buildings, rectangles a few square feet or more painted a shade noticeably different from the rest of the structure. They’ve become such a part of our urban landscape, like the graffiti they’re intended to cover up, that we…
Director Richard Linklater’s School of Rock imagines, sort of, what might have become of voluble rock snob Barry the morning after his grand finale in Stephen Frears’s adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity — after his Marvin Gaye impersonation had faded and been forgotten in the daylight hours, after he…
The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes’s best-selling travel memoir Under the Tuscan Sun is a virtual case study of Hollywood’s irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take. Mayes’s 1996 book is a nicely written, carefully observed meditation on buying a decrepit Italian villa…
Visualize Tokyo. Got it? Now add popular favorite Bill Murray, doing his “lovable schmo” shtick. Toss in American Rhapsody’s up-and-comer Scarlett Johansson, doing her standard “like, duh” face. Dip them both into emotional torpor in the sleek Park Hyatt, add local color, stir. Et voila: Lost in Translation. For Sofia…
In a full-spectrum festival that screens films as short as three minutes, documentaries from first-time directors, and experimental videos from San Francisco-based artist Tony Labat, you would naturally expect to find a full-length feature of the highest order. Which is exactly what you get in director Orlando Rojas’s thoroughly entertaining…
Tidy little Montecarlo, Georgia, which is the setting for Jonathan Lynn’s The Fighting Temptations, is a perfect movie fantasy town. At the picturesque train station, the ticket agent will call you a taxi or serve you a plate of Southern fried chicken. The house band at the local nightclub is…
God bless Johnny Depp. For the second time this year, the man has almost single-handedly redeemed an action movie that would otherwise be indistinguishable from the pack. Introduced right up front in Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico, he’s first seen dressed up like Prince in purple glasses…
It’s no given that audiences will embrace a passionately homosexual, drug-abusing male prostitute-cum-drag-queen, especially if he happens not to be a particularly nice person to boot. The cinematic tale of Madame Satã, however, has two big points in its favor. One — the most obvious one — is a dynamite…
Most will deny it, but inside every grown man lurks a hypersensitive adolescent girl. Allow me to tell you all about mine and to share some of my poetry … Whoa! Relax. Put away that gun. Just seeking to emphasize that in the case of director Catherine Hardwicke’s debut feature,…
Modern-day Miami Beach, where condo canyons stretch skyward, slick shops expand along Lincoln Road Mall (emphasis on “mall”), and overstuffed SUVs jockey for position on overcrowded causeways. Not an ideal milieu for going small and artsy. But bucking the trend for the ever bigger and, uh, bigger, is the newly…
Harvey Pekar, star of a long-running comic-book series he writes and others illustrate, is reminded early in American Splendor that he’s no superhero. It’s Halloween, and the eleven-year-old Harvey, played by a bent-over, sneering Daniel Tay, stands on a stoop seeking tricks and treats from a woman who recognizes the…
“A film starring Bob Dylan” — five more frightening words you’d be hard-pressed to put into the same sentence, even among those who forgave the man for his grotesquely indulgent 1970 album Self-Portrait or sat through his disjointed home movie Renaldo and Clara in 1978. The apologists, of course, will…
The last thing the Roman Catholic Church needs at this point is another exposé of its misdeeds. The shock of the pedophilia scandals and of the official coverups isn’t going away anytime soon, and when last we looked the former bishop of the Phoenix Diocese was out on $45,000 bail…
Ah, Paris — City of Light, of Love, of Liver Damage and Lung Cancer. C’est formidable, non? Who in need of a posh vacation would turn down the opportunity to luxuriate in its finest hotels, to stuff oneself with sumptuous snails, and to work on a terribly flat romantic drama…
Maverick Russian director Alexander Rogozhkin hit upon a clever idea for his idiosyncratic antiwar fable, The Cuckoo (Kukushka in Russian). The three main characters, marooned together on a remote reindeer farm in northernmost Scandinavia, all speak different languages. The Russian speaks and understands only Russian, the Finn knows only Finnish,…
Chiwetel Ejiofor is phoning in from Montreal. Sounds like a Tom Waits lyric, but it’s true: The fresh, gifted actor with the tricky handle is too busy at present (just finished doing The Canterbury Tales for BBC-TV, currently working on the feature Slow Burn with LL Cool J and Jolene…
When was the last time you said to yourself: “Y’know, what I seek for my viewing pleasure is a boring, obscenely diluted remake of Fight Club set in the fascinating world of dentistry”? Indeed it is a grave displeasure to announce that stellar director Alan Rudolph (The Moderns) has delivered…
Military clerk Ray Elwood (Joaquin Phoenix) is something of a modern-day Sergeant Bilko. Anything you need, he can get. Any scam that’s possible, he’ll run. Never mind the bumbling Colonel Berman (Ed Harris) who ostensibly runs the unit — Elwood has him wrapped around his finger. There’s just one major…
