America’s Heart & Soul, the debut feature from commercial director Louis Schwartzberg, is being depicted in some quarters as the antidote to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, mostly because it’s a documentary, being released around the same time, about the USA. For more simplistic minds who equate anti-Bush sentiment with hatred…
It’s often a challenge to fairly assess a film that, by its very conception, is simply targeted to an entirely different demographic from one’s own. I am not by nature romantic, or female; for those who are, it may have to suffice that the mostly double-X-chromosomed crowd watching The Notebook…
The real Melvin Van Peebles shows up just once in Baadasssss!, a fictionalized account of his making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971, and it’s at the film’s end; he sits silent, grinning, clutching his ever-present cigar. But he’s all over this movie, in which his son Mario plays…
Everyone loves tigers, save perhaps for those actually being mauled to death by them. Men like ’em because they’re wild beasts; women like ’em cuz they’re big kitty-cats. So whatever your point of interest, Two Brothers, starring a pair of tigers named Kumal and Sangha, is the perfect date movie…
Getting stranded at snowbound O’Hare for the night is one thing. You call home, maybe knock down a couple of martinis, then grab a blanket. A century ago, being quarantined at Ellis Island for eight months because you were, say, a part-time anarchist from Campobasso with a big mustache and…
You might think that with the technological advances in moviemaking since 1956, this new version of Around the World in 80 Days would at least look better than its predecessor did. You could not be faulted for believing you’d be wowed by the gadgets of inventor Phileas Fogg, the whirligigs…
It’s a sign that a nation may be losing its collective mind when it grants a nutty hack like Quentin Tarantino an exalted title like Officer of Arts and Letters, but there’s France for ya. Whether Gallic pop culture is rousingly progressive or embarrassingly adolescent is anyone’s call, but few…
Those seeking a spiritual counterpart to the yin of Lynne Ramsay’s masterfully moody Morvern Callar will find their yang in David Mackenzie’s exquisitely sorrowful Young Adam. Art-house aficionados may recall that in Ramsay’s recent film, a young male writer commits suicide, leaving his simple girlfriend to absorb his very being…
I’ve just seen a film that is either a brilliant parody of scholarly documentaries or else final proof that I am the stupidest person on Earth. Obviously, I prefer to believe the former — that What the #$*! Do We Know: A Quantum Fable is a genius of a mockumentary…
Beware the exclamation point. When found at the end of a title, it almost inevitably signals a level of self-hype rarely justified by the content of whatever it hopes to name. In the case of the movie Saved! — an amusing, if facile, comedy about a good Christian girl gone…
So let’s get this straight: You’re a much-loved comedian who just did a low-budget, multi-award-winning film with an acclaimed up-and-coming director. In recent years, thanks in part to your work with the younger, edgier filmmaking set, you’re starting to be taken seriously as an actor. You even managed to score…
As much of the civilized world now knows, the latest Harry Potter director is Alfonso Cuarón, best known for the explicit teen sexual awakening movie Y Tu Mamá También. As such, it may come as little surprise that his Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban begins with the teenage…
Those seeking a spiritual counterpart to the yin of Lynne Ramsay’s masterfully moody Morvern Callar will find their yang in David Mackenzie’s exquisitely sorrowful Young Adam. Art-house aficionados may recall that in Ramsay’s recent film, a young male writer commits suicide, leaving his simple girlfriend to absorb his very being…
Sitting through Raising Helen is an exercise in frustration, because somewhere inside this big heap of Hollywood nothing is a something (someone, actually) worth saving and savoring. Her name is Joan Cusack, always a supporting player but never a star, no matter her grace and warmth and charm even in…
What becomes of Morgan Spurlock’s body after a month of eating and drinking nothing but McDonald’s assembly-line foodstuffs is not surprising. He bloats up, gaining nearly 30 pounds in 30 days. His sex drive peters out, among the myriad disappointments visited upon Spurlock’s vegan-chef girlfriend, who’s only too happy to…
The first time through, you might dismiss Coffee and Cigarettes as a filmmaker’s recess, playtime before the serious business of making a real feature. Jim Jarmusch never intended this new movie, a collection of 11 shorts made over the last two decades, to be a movie at all. It began…
When a pleasant Italian comedy called Mediterraneo won the 1992 Academy Award for best foreign language film, a lot of observant American moviegoers scratched their heads. Gabriele Salvatores’ fairy tale of Italian soldiers happily stranded on a gorgeous Greek island during World War II was an outright charmer, but it…
Ever-evolving, always changing, the universe nonetheless sustains many constants: Hair metal never really goes away. British women inevitably become besotted grumps. And short men always turn into intolerable control freaks. Another “true generality” holds that males of all statures develop their innate behavioral characteristics within patriarchal cultures that, while aiming…
The first few minutes of Shrek 2 are cluttered with more references to the movies than David Thompson’s thick, rich history text New Historical Dictionary of Film. Watching it is like sitting next to an ADD patient with access to a remote control and a hundred premium cable channels; you…
It’s interesting to see how conventional political assumptions get turned on their heads when it comes to the case of Tibet, a nation militarily dominated by China, which claims it as Chinese territory despite the fact that China treats the Tibetan people as a lesser class. Liberal Democrats and Greens,…
What Boogie Nights did for porn stars, What Alice Found does for truck-stop hookers. That is to say, the film takes a sleazy profession, sexes it up for the cameras, and depicts those involved in the field as a weird sort of family with truer ties than some of the…
