Even as the first girders were laid in the mid-1960s, something about the World Trade Center — that twin-pronged erection jutting from the loins of Western commerce — inspired fantasies of lustful conquest. As James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire tells it, a mischievous French teenager was sitting in a…
Notwithstanding all the pundit-driven hot air about the horrors of being young in today’s America, I’m willing to buy the argument that it’s getting harder to survive those years, if only because there’s so much more for the poor dears to worry about — more information, more technology, more stuff…
Swing Vote is an election-themed comedy that’s about twice as smart as you expect it to be and still only half as smart as you wish it was. The clever premise, which would have seemed like pure science-fiction no more than eight years ago, concerns a U.S. presidential election whose…
Making notes in 1949 for a review of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, George Orwell wrote, “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be . . . while holding untenable opinions.” That’s a nice way of saying that Waugh, a world-class satirist of everyone from the rich down,…
I was 13 when Stephen Sommers’ 1999 remake-in-name-only of The Mummy came out. It was just about the ideal age. Sommers is definitely some kind of junk-addled auteur, and if The Mummy didn’t achieve its obvious goal of topping Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was close enough, as far…
I haven’t seen much at the movies in the past two years that has given me as much unbridled comic pleasure as the sight of Will Ferrell as the win-at-any-cost NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby, calling on Jesus, Tom Cruise, and Oprah Winfrey to put out the psychosomatic flames engulfing his…
What a brooding pleasure it is to return to Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City — if “pleasure” is the right word for a movie that gazes so deeply and sometimes despairingly into the souls of restless men. In The Dark Knight, the continuation of Nolan’s superb 2005 reboot of the Batman…
I’ve always enjoyed ABBA — not in that post-hoc, so-bad-it’s-good way, but innocently, the way I like Phil Spector. To this day, howling along in my car to that echoing, cascading, multiply overdubbed wall of sound makes me feel like a member of some dippy but joyous cathedral choir. So…
Hollywood’s Endless Superhero Summer rolls on with the arrival of Hellboy II: The Golden Army from Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro. But before this review goes any further, I must confess — head hanging low in shame — that I haven’t read a comic book since I was 12…
At the top, let’s be clear about one thing: Journey to the Center of the Earth is more a demo reel than a narrative feature. It’s a decent, if overly familiar and yawningly obvious compendium of look-at-me moments intended to show off the latest and greatest in stereo 3D filmmaking,…
The Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis as a dead man, was writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s breakthrough, but its follow-up, Unbreakable, starring Bruce Willis as the walking dead reborn as a superhero, was the filmmaker’s masterpiece. It remains the most quietly influential of all recent superhero movies, the unacknowledged template for…
Of the summer’s many revenge-of-the-nerd fulfillment fantasies, Wanted stands the best chance of dislodging Fight Club from fanboys’ Facebook pages. It has the same dizzying style, the same ultraviolence, the same undeniable appeal of punch-clock payback, and — best of all — no irony! Fed up with your shit job,…
Many will attempt to describe WALL-E with a one-liner. It’s R2-D2 in love. 2001: A Space Odyssey starring The Little Tramp. An Inconvenient Truth meets Idiocracy on its way to Toy Story. But none of them does justice to a film that’s both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate — and,…
In Kit Kittredge, all it takes to cure the Depression is a little Miss Sunshine. To my 10-year-old daughter, the term “American Girl” means “that store my meanie of a mom — unlike all the other, higher-quality moms — won’t let me go near.” Why should I? She hates dolls,…
As old Broadway shows are revived, new Broadway shows are spun from old movies so that new movies may be fashioned from ancient TV series. It’s an iron law of the culture industry that turns out to be a pleasant surprise in the case of Get Smart, the late-’60s sitcom…
You want a history lesson? Take a class. You want clanging swords, sneering villains, storybook romance, and bloody vengeance? Here’s a brawny old-school epic to make the CGI tumult of 300, Alexander, and Troy look like sissy-boy slap parties. Mongol, alias Genghis Khan: The Early Years, may compress, elide, and…
Just over a decade ago, Russian director Sergei Bodrov made his mark on the West with his Academy Award-nominated movie Prisoner of the Mountains, which transplanted a Tolstoy novella for children to Russia’s war with Chechnya. Though Prisoner seemed an unlikely calling card for Hollywood, its blend of commercial technique…
Screenwriter Steven Conrad writes movies about success and self-fulfillment in America — how we define it, the price we pay for it, and what it looks like depending on where you’re standing. In Conrad’s The Weather Man, the central figure was a vain TV news personality who had everything that…
The Foot Fist Way has been trying to break into theaters since clawing its way down film-fest row, beginning at Sundance in ’06. It took Will Ferrell and his comedy life partner Adam McKay to get distributors interested; notes the trailer: The men behind Anchorman’s desk and Talladega Nights’ wheel…
In recent days, Universal’s been running a TV spot for The Incredible Hulk that gives away what should come as no surprise to any fanboy worth his action figure collection: the appearance of Robert Downey Jr. as, natch, Tony Stark. From the delighted, deafening squeals of at least one sneak-preview…
Behold Adam Sandler, in a passable Israeli accent and outsize codpiece, as Zohan the Mossad super-heavy: catching barbecued fish in his butt crack on a Tel Aviv beach, repelling bullets with his nostril, sculpting hand grenades into toy poodles for delighted Palestinian children while making mincemeat of an Arab terrorist…
It’s been 20 years since Errol Morris made The Thin Blue Line — a found “noir” that served to free an innocent man convicted of murder. Gathering evidence and dramatizing testimony, Morris’s movie circled around a single, unrepresentable event — the death of a cop on a lonely stretch of…
