In “Fatso,” a short story by Israeli writer Etgar Keret, monogamy takes a bizarre vacation when the narrator’s pretty girlfriend morphs, every night, into a hairy, beer-guzzling macho soccer fanatic who takes her lover to steak restaurants and sleazy bars — an experience as unexpectedly delightful to him as the…
Oh, please — spoiler alert? Fine, I won’t tell you whether Carrie Bradshaw ties the knot with Mr. Big, even though you’ve already seen that gown winging its way around the Web. Given the Sex and the City vibe, some fans might be more interested in whether the frock —…
CANNES, France — The competition for the Palme d’Or is ongoing as I write, yet the red carpet has been rolled up as you read. You will know, as I can’t, whether my comrade journalists agree that the second-week story of the 61st Cannes Film Festival is Steven Soderbergh’s two-part…
Here’s your hat, Indy. But, really, what’s your hurry? Because 19 years after the Last Crusade that clearly wasn’t, and 15 years after the old man joined Young Indiana Jones on the small screen to recount his glory days blowing horns with Sidney Bechet, it’s almost unfathomable that this hoary…
CANNES, France — No need for dreaming here. Each Cannes Film Festival generates its own metaphors for a 10-day regimen of visions in the dark. It’s impossible to forget, let alone transcend, one’s unnatural situation here. The opening film of Cannes’ 2008 edition clobbered participants with a cautionary allegory. Regardez:…
Call them the comeback kids: In its early days, the 2008 Cannes Film Festival has served as a staging ground for a number of unlikely returns, beginning with that of Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, who’s been absent from movie screens (except as an occasional actor) for nearly as long as…
CANNES, France—The competition for the Palme d’Or is ongoing as I write, but the story of the 61st Cannes Film Festival is Steven Soderbergh’s two-part, four-and-a-half-hour Che—an epic non-biopic that might well have been approved by Roberto Rossellini, envied by Francis Coppola, and even appreciated by its subject. (And the…
CANNES, France—Wading through 20-odd movies in half as many languages, each Cannes jury supplies its own dramatic narrative, to be interpreted according to its president’s presumed taste. Days before the 61st Cannes Film Festival ended, rumors were rife that the jury was having difficulties reaching consensus. As the award ceremony…
“Things never happen the same way twice.” Thus boometh Aslan the lion (Liam Neeson), alias the Son of God, popping his computer-generated shaggy head briefly into The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian to pep-talk a bunch of discouraged Brits into fighting the good fight again. As in life, so in…
Converting a fondly remembered cartoon series — one of the first Japanese animes syndicated on American TV — into a prospective franchise, the Matrix masters, Larry and Andy Wachowski, have taken another step toward the total cyborganization of the cinema. Even more than most summer-season F/X fests, Speed Racer is…
Canadian poet Anne Michaels’ beautiful 1996 novel, Fugitive Pieces — about a Jewish writer immobilized by the memory of his Polish family’s murder at the hands of the Nazis — distills tragedy into grief, terror, and a wary romance built on the redemptive power of love and art, and set…
David Mamet’s Redbelt is a tricky bar brawl — call it the Roundhouse of Games. The writer-director has scarcely abandoned his sense of the movies as an innately duplicitous medium, one best suited to stories that play out as conspiratorial chess matches. But, with his 10th feature — an entertaining…
No adult has ever been able to codify what separates a good movie from a classic. In kid terms, though — those favored by Son of Rambow, a chipper tribute to the cinema as both supplier and repository of dreams — a good movie merely sends you bounding home from…
Chalk it up to personal preference, but I’ve always been fonder of those comic-book heroes who emerge by intent rather than happenstance. Like Bruce Wayne, whose transformation from average Joe into masked crusader is an act of will instead of the unintended result of a genetic mutation, a spider bite,…
In Made of Honor, Patrick Dempsey plays a conveniently rich and willfully single serial “fornicator” who is, slowly but surely, domesticated by his unspoken love for longtime BFF Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), who’s on her way to Scotland to marry Mr. Right Now since Mr. Right’s too chickenshit to say boo…
Watching Marilyn Monroe in Cinemascope, a critic once wrote, is “like being smothered in baked Alaska.” Reading that as a teenager raised some thrilling questions: Is that good or bad? What is “baked Alaska”? And then a realization: How singular it must be for a woman — or a filmmaker…
Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg wrote Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle with the novel idea: What if you made a John Hughes movie, but instead of writing garishly caricatured bit players with names like Long Duk Dong, you cast an Asian actor as the smart, handsome, upwardly mobile…
Could have sworn I’ve seen this episode of Baby Mama before — like sometime in January 2007, when it was originally titled “The Baby Show” and aired on the other prime-time series starring Tina Fey, 30 Rock. (Waitaminute — you say Baby Mama’s a movie and not a TV show?…
Earnest, sad, and righteous, they are not. More inspired by M*A*S*H or Dr. Strangelove than The Deer Hunter or Coming Home, a new pack of political films that defy the clichés of the post-9/11 Iraq War cinema has arrived. Notwithstanding a few holdovers of moral outrage (Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss, Nick…
Morgan Spurlock, the daredevil documentarian who lived on Big Macs for a month and turned this exercise in “body art” into the 2004 hit Super Size Me, returns — this time expanding his horizons rather than his girth. Paraphrasing the title of a venerable computer game, Where in the World…
Jason Segel is responsible for two of the most cringe-inducing, hands-in-front-of-your-face moments in the recent history of television, both of which occurred during the sole season of NBC’s Freaks and Geeks, on which Segel played bright-eyed burnout Nick Andopolis. On the episode “I’m With the Band,” Nick imagined himself an…
Jon Avnet’s cheesy new thriller, 88 Minutes, is 105 minutes long. Going in, I feared that 100 of them would be eaten up by Al Pacino chewing the furniture. Alas, it’s worse than that. Pacino plays a Seattle forensic psychiatrist in symbiotic thrall to the serial killer he helped put…
