Red Eye may not seem to be your typical Wes Craven movie. It’s not really horror, there are no marketable monsters, and unlike Cursed, Scream 3, and other recent Craven offerings, it’s actually an enjoyable time at the movies. But heroine Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is very much in the…
Some art-house programmer would be wise to schedule a double bill of The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza’s talkumentary about the dirtiest joke ever told, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, writer-director Judd Apatow’s near-brilliant movie about a grown-up geek who simply lost interest in trying to get laid. Both offer countless giddy variations…
Even today, British kids grow up listening to stories about life during the London Blitz and the hardships their parents and grandparents endured during the Second World War. American children, by comparison, would be hard-pressed to tell you what nations fought on which side. It’s one of the many weaknesses…
Ain’t nothing in this world more tedious than highbrow erotica, which works itself into a lather and then wipes off the sweat before anyone notices how awfully and inappropriately worked up it got. Asylum, adapted by Closer’s Patrick Marber and Chrysanthy Balis from the novel by Patrick McGrath, is just…
Matthew Parkhill’s Dot the I is the kind of tricked-up mental exercise that may intrigue the most impressionable film school students and a philosophy major here and there. But anyone who’s gotten through sophomore year without declaring him the next great thinker of the Western Hemisphere is more likely to…
The British indie filmmaker Sally Potter, a former dancer, lyricist and performance artist, clearly has a taste for adventure. In 1992, that led her to Orlando, a screen adaptation of the experimental Virginia Woolf novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who hangs around for 400 years, eventually morphing into a hip…
Surfers, skateboarders and desert racers have all had their moment at the movies recently. Now the motocross crowd gets its turn. Supercross: The Movie, which provides a glimpse at what its makers call “the second-fastest-growing motor sport in the U.S., behind only NASCAR,” is anything but a dramatic masterpiece. But…
If for no other reason, Happy Endings deserves its soft spot in our collective hearts for rescuing Tom Arnold from the why-are-they-now? scrap heap. The former Mr. Roseanne Barr plays Frank, a widower who falls for and sleeps with his son’s conniving would-be girlfriend Jude, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. And…
The old John Wayne-Dean Martin hayburner The Sons of Katie Elder wasn’t a very good movie the first time around — Dino and a cowboy hat go together about as well as Sinatra and bib overalls — and John Singleton’s jokey, urbanized rehash isn’t likely to snow the Oscar voters,…
The Aristocrats may be the most foul-mouthed movie of the summer, but Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo is the foulest in deed, actually depicting some of the nigh-unspeakable acts that are merely hypothetically talked about in the former film. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a big-time gross-out comedy, and…
The Skeleton Key ranks high on the list of 2005’s funniest films, bested only by the first two-thirds of Wedding Crashers, all of The Aristocrats, and that part in Stealth where the airplane starts sassing Josh Lucas. Doubtful that was the intention of director Iain Softley (K-PAX, an inexplicably well-regarded…
You will be forgiven for believing Brian Herzlinger is something of a creepy guy. Certainly, at first (and 23rd) glance, the man seems to be covered in the icky residue of the stunted, the pathetic and the desperate, which makes him like most hopeful young men who move to Los…
Once you get past its negligible plot, scant dialogue, and almost zero action, Gus Van Sant’s elliptical rendering of the final hours in the troubled life of a grunge musician is rarely boring. That may seem like a backhanded compliment, but, given the absence of such customary cinematic conventions as…
“The most daring rescue mission of our time is a story that has never been told,” boasts the poster for The Great Raid. The credits of the film, however, reveal that it’s based on not one, but two books about the 6th Ranger Battalion, which ventured 30 miles into enemy…
And so, once more, the googolplex emits the stink of the network rerun, this week offering yet another worthless big-screen take on small-screen detritus. As Hollywood wonders — cries, actually, over spilt spoiled milk — why audiences are staying away from theaters, offering theories ranging from the absence of such…
The contentedly independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has brought his restless energy to a series of surreal road movies that move nicely along on the strength of rare characters, quirky humor, and a willing embrace of chance adventure. These quest stories for hipsters have transported Jarmusch’s fiercely loyal audience from New…
So how about those suburbs, eh? Boy, they sure do suck. All full of bored teens, inattentive parents, alcoholic housewives, middle-aged guys who suddenly realize they’ve been wasting their lives, and lots of mind-numbing psychoactive drugs. Also, people who live there are conformist! Why, someone really oughta make a movie…
Toward the end of Saraband, the uneven new film from legendary director Ingmar Bergman, a character sits down with his daughter, a taut girl who is obviously undergoing emotional distress. “I have the feeling that some sort of discussion is coming on,” he says. Indeed it is — as it…
If the Navy is looking for splashy recruiting tools, it could do worse than Stealth, a zillion-dollar action movie stuffed with futuristic jet fighters, glamorous carrier pilots, and an overload of explosive, mostly digital derring-do. Here is Top Gun revised and updated, complete with a new array of enemies –…
Must Love Dogs, it should be clearly stated, is not the greatest romantic comedy ever made about a quirky couple who meet at a dog park. That honor goes to Dog Park, the oddball 1998 flick starring Luke Wilson and Natasha Henstridge, written and directed by former Kids in the…
So little time, so much trouble. In the 24-hour period that’s dissected in Heights, the first feature from Harvard/Cambridge/USC Film School-educated Chris Terrio, an aspiring Manhattan photographer named Isabel (Elizabeth Banks) gets cold feet about her upcoming marriage to a dull but pleasant lawyer named Jonathan (James Marsden); a needy…
Remember the scene in X2 where Wolverine grabs a Dr Pepper and enlists the aid of Iceman to make it cold? Take the tone of that scene and stretch it out to feature length and you get Sky High, a less angsty, more kid-friendly movie about teenagers attending a school…
