A young woman fights off her brutal husband; a gun goes off; a marble spins on the floor where a toddler sits unattended. From B-movie beginnings, The Secret Life of Bees, a family drama set in the civil rights-era South, chugs along pleasantly like a television special tailored for the…
The management of the movie house confiscated my cell phone at a screening of Sex Drive last week. “But I’m with the press,” I explained to the security guard who was frisking me. “I’m here to review this thing.” “Doesn’t matter,” he said as he passed a metal detector between…
A new kind of war movie for a new kind of war, Body of Lies is about the war on terror as it is being waged on the ground, in the air, but most of all in cyberspace. Directed with terrific verve by Ridley Scott (coming after the listless American…
The Duchess is the best women’s movie of the past few months. Don’t get too excited: Sex and the City, Mamma Mia!, and The Women set the bar so dismally low that almost any film with a dame in it who doesn’t channel her identity only through buying, boogieing, and/or…
The most recent example of bleak chic, Fernando Meirelles’ mostly harrowing adaptation of José Saramago’s international bestseller Blindness mixes the high-velocity pace and stylishness of the Brazilian director’s breakout City of God with the Portuguese author’s thinly metaphysical horror thriller. Unflinching at best and treacly at worst, the film unveils…
“Course he’s willing to die. You think we do this kinda work ’cause we scared to die?” So speaks Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) about his sidekick Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), as the two stare down a posse of bad guys in Appaloosa, New Mexico, circa 1882. Cole and Hitch, who…
On some level, you’ve got to hand it to Spike Lee. There are probably less than a handful of directors working in Hollywood today who could put together the financing for a three-hour war movie lacking any marquee names and performed largely in Italian and German with English subtitles. Spielberg…
There’s a whole lotta fucking going on in Choke, Clark Gregg’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s first-person novel about a sex addict named Victor Mancini with severe Mommy issues — fucking in a cramped airplane bathroom, on a barnyard’s itchy haystack, in a grimy toilet stall, in a hospital chapel even…
It takes a good while for Ricky Gervais to warm up in Ghost Town; it takes even longer for the audience to warm to Ricky Gervais. During the opening minutes of Ghost Town — an occasionally effective mash-up of Ghost, The Sixth Sense, and The Frighteners — Gervais, as Bertram…
Earlier this year, when I was assigned to jury duty on a drug-related trial at the Los Angeles Superior Court, our jury foreman turned out to be a blond, blue-eyed reality-TV producer from the bedroom community of Altadena. During the jury-selection process, when the judge asked if we had any…
Masters of the carefully crafted cheap shot, Joel and Ethan Coen have built a career on flippancy. Given their refusal to take anything seriously — least of all the enthusiasm of their fans — the brothers surely got a chuckle from an upcoming academic tome, The Philosophy of the Coen…
“What do you think this is?” cries a lady who lunches in Diane English’s remake of George Cukor’s The Women. “Some kind of ’30s movie?” Even without the 14-year struggle to get the Murphy Brown writer’s pet project past studio doubters, it would be a tall order to remake George…
Another summer movie season comes to an end, not with a bang but a whimper — what else to call four new releases (Babylon A.D., Bangkok Dangerous, College, and Disaster Movie) in the past 10 days that weren’t screened for critics by their respective distributors? These are, literally and figuratively,…
Despite his reputation as that rarest of creatures — a Hollywood intellectual — new evidence suggests that Steve Martin reads (prepare yourself) thrillers and spy novels. Or at least that’s the only conclusion one can draw from the “Story by” credit the comedian receives on Traitor, an uneven yet engrossing…
When I’d heard that Quentin Tarantino handed the Grand Jury Prize for best feature to Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, telling the audience that the movie “put my heart in a vise and proceeded to twist that vise until the last frame,” my jaw went…
A glint in his eye and a grin on his lips, artist Don Bachardy looks into the camera and explains the dynamic of his three-decade relationship with the late literary icon Christopher Isherwood as if it were a fairy tale. “His role,” says Bachardy, “could be described as that of…
The Rocker bears the decidedly unmistakable odor of something made in 1983 and left on the shelf a good 25 years. That isn’t to suggest that it’s fetid product in need of tossing out: Parts of it are genuinely delightful, and Rainn Wilson doesn’t squander his first feature-film starring role…
Some say the world will end in fire; some — like Werner Herzog — say ice. Flying in the face of global warming, this profoundly idiosyncratic filmmaker leads an expedition, alternately comic and visionary, to the heart of coldness. Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World chronicles his trip…
In its final 10 minutes, Hamlet 2 is little more than chaos, noise, and nonsense, and those are 10 perfectly enjoyable minutes. It’s hard to knock any sequence that climaxes with a musical number titled “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus,” done up nice and Grease-y. Problem is, the 80 or so…
Early buzz out of Hollywood pegged Tropic Thunder, directed and co-written by star Ben Stiller, as the end-all and be-all of movie-biz parodies — a savage beast with a rough touch featuring Tom Cruise in a career-resurrecting role as bald-headed, big-gutted, foul-mouthed studio boss Les Grossman, who does the fuck-you…
Perhaps this review should begin with a disclaimer: Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen’s 39th film as writer-director, will do little to endear itself to the happily-ever-after crowd or those who consider acts of infidelity punishable by impeachment. Leave it to Allen to make a romantic comedy in which all the…
On the surface, Pineapple Express offers precisely what it advertises: a roll-’em-up, smoke-’em-up, blow-’em-up bromantic comedy from the freaks and geeks who have made Judd Apatow’s brand of stunted-man yuks a global franchise. Once more, Seth Rogen’s red-rimmed, half-shut eyes peek out from beneath his tousled Jewfro, which sits atop…
