Summer movies don’t get much sillier or more empty-headed than Without a Paddle, and that includes Catwoman and King Arthur. What we have here is a low-wattage buddy flick proposing that a trio of boyhood friends, now 30 years old, can shed the last vestiges of their adolescence by traipsing…
Although most people in the moviegoing universe by now know the differences between an “Alien” and a “Predator,” putting the two critters together in one movie really ought to necessitate more specific species names for each, since both are technically aliens and predators (they’re from outer space and they hunt…
A good friend likes to say that there’s only one kind of great pop song — the song that someone had to create, as though the writer and performer had no choice. The song can be corny or cynical, upbeat or downhearted; it doesn’t matter. All that counts is that…
Garry Marshall is at it again. The director of Pretty Woman, Beaches and the original Princess Diaries has returned to peddle his particular brand of überschmaltz in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, in which he disguises an insidious worship of wealth and privilege as a “feel-good” comedy about a…
Most boys seem to tumble down the assembly line with their main switch factory-preset to Aggression. Toys are for throwing, army men are for melting, and eventually grown males consider punching each other senseless, hurling deadly bombs, or surreptitiously undermining one another to be completely reasonable forms of discourse. But…
As a reviewer, it can be very tempting to want in on the ground floor of a phenomenon, to say you were there first when some low-budget feature with a nifty premise made its festival debut, only to be picked up by a big studio and become a national phenomenon…
Sheathed in a custom-tailored gray suit and sporting expensively barbered silver hair, Tom Cruise looks like an older, harder version of the self-absorbed L.A. sharpie he played 16 years ago in Rain Man. But in Collateral, a frenetic Michael Mann thriller that runs up a Baghdad-level body count, Cruise’s character…
Deep in the dangerous wasteland of America, far removed from civilization, there exists a community driven by fear, sworn to isolationism. They loathe outsiders, whom they regard as terrifying monsters. They make up strange rituals to guard themselves against the vast world beyond their borders. And while they may feast…
Little Black Book, with its Carly Simon soundtrack all but daring you to tune it out before it begins, is being marketed as a daffy romantic comedy in which a woman plows through her boyfriend’s Palm to uncover his past relationships. In truth, the movie’s anything but light and frothy;…
You may have already heard the stories about A Home at the End of the World. In what many viewers have deemed a big loss, Colin Farrell’s penis no longer appears in the film. The official line is that test audiences found it too distracting, though that seems unlikely, given…
Perhaps the most unlikely thing to capture on film is the creative process — the spinning of gears, the tripping of wires, the breaking of hearts, and the snapping of tempers that goes into the making of art. Movies about writers and painters and musicians seldom collapse the barrier between…
Jonathan Demme’s gutsy The Manchurian Candidate, which dares to rear its head just after the Democratic National Convention in Boston, is the anti-Bush-administration movie for those who refuse to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 or Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed because, well, they just ain’t Right. It’s less a remake of director…
Moviegoers who know the tides of recent Brazilian history likely will get more from Hector Babenco’s new prison movie, Carandiru, than the rest of us, because the filmmaker tells us so little about the society beyond the walls that helped shape the violent yet carefully ordered world within them. On…
If you’re, oh, 11 years old and you’ve had it up to here with Spider-Man’s current case of existential angst, it’s time to blow your weekly allowance on Thunderbirds. This special-effects-crammed action blockbuster aims a bit lower, age-wise, which is to say its hyperactive young hero wears a retainer on…
The opening moments of The Door in the Floor are not promising. A little girl stands on a chair in a hallway of photos, pointing at the images and speaking about them. Soon, she is joined by a middle-aged man, probably her father, who takes her on a tour through…
Without risking much critical credibility, it can be said that Catwoman succeeds on its own feline terms. Much like a cat, the movie is a superfluous gob of fluff with an attitude ranging from idiotic to nasty. It’s a sleek and self-absorbed animal, adoring itself so ardently that those of…
“Memory is a wonderful thing, if you don’t have to deal with the past,” declares the French Celine (Julie Delpy) to her erstwhile American one-night stand Jesse (Ethan Hawke) in Before Sunset, the meandering but reasonably charming follow-up to the duo’s 1995 Euromance, Before Sunrise. In the movies, as in…
Fair warning: If the behavior of camels in the Gobi Desert during the spring birthing season is not high on your things-to-learn-about list, and you don’t hunger to know everything about southern Mongolian herdsmen, then The Story of the Weeping Camel probably isn’t your kind of movie. Saying they were…
Behold what is, in theory, the thinking person’s ideal summer blockbuster. King Arthur features some of the planet’s most beautiful people, dressed way sexily, gallantly galloping and bashing each other with all manner of implements amid lush vistas and robustly appointed sets. Add an intriguing historical pedigree and apparently unprecedented…
It’s one of the oldest stories in cinema, and possibly the history of storytelling: A man is kidnapped by a baddie wielding a deadly weapon. His family waits at home to hear word while law enforcement types try to figure out what’s going on. A plan is developed to deal…
All you need to know about Spider-Man 2 is revealed in the opening credits, in which comic-book artist Alex Ross recaps the 2002 original in lovingly, lavishly painted panels. Spidey and Mary Jane Watson are once again entangled in that now-iconic upside-down kiss; nutty Norman Osborn, out of Green Goblin…
It’s charming. It’s hilarious. It is perhaps the most beautifully crafted, lovingly rendered portrait of extreme geekitude ever to grace the screen. It’s Napoleon Dynamite — the first feature film from 24-year-old Brigham Young University student Jared Hess — and, if there is any justice, it’s going to be huge…
