If your name ends in a vowel and your people came over in steerage a hundred years ago, you will almost certainly find yourself in the kitchen these days, wooden spoon in hand, plum tomatoes draining in the colander, thoughts drifting between sweet nostalgia and the malaise of indefinable loss…
Out of Time, in which we’re to believe 48-year-old Denzel Washington and 32-year-old Sanaa Lathan were high school sweethearts, demands its audience ignore all manner of implausibilities. Chief among them is the behavior of Washington’s Matt Whitlock, chief of police in a tiny coastal town just outside of Miami, who…
D irector Richard Linklater’s School of Rock imagines, sort of, what might have become of voluble rock snob Barry the morning after his grand finale in Stephen Frears’ adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity — after his Marvin Gaye impersonation had faded and been forgotten in the daylight hours, after…
The script for The Rundown has lingered for more than a decade and was originally a Patrick Swayze vehicle, well before those wheels fell off. Universal Studios revived it because the studio knows what it has in Dwayne Johnson: a gold mine made of bulging biceps, a man who was…
The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes’ best-selling travel memoir Under the Tuscan Sun is a virtual case study of Hollywood’s irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take. Mayes’ 1996 book is a nicely written, carefully observed meditation on buying a decrepit Italian villa…
Somewhere in the deepest mists of Eastern Europe lies an urban hell shrouded in shadowy azure, where darkly enchanted, black-leather-clad denizens leap about to thudding techno, blurting outrageously melodramatic proclamations in randomly accented English. It’s The Crow meets The Matrix, it’s goth-core tricked out with wire stunts, and, most important,…
Secondhand Lions is cornier than the cornfields spread out in front of the dilapidated rural Texas manse inhabited by Robert Duvall and Michael Caine, playing grumpy old brothers with mismatched accents. (Caine, in fact, has accent enough for three actors — one English, another maybe Texan, another perhaps Australian.) There…
Never mind the trailers, which advertise Cold Creek Manor as some kind of horror-thriller, complete with the image of a hand emerging from the shadows to quiet (yes!) Sharon Stone. Mike Figgis, most recently a maker of unwatchable art-house fare shot on digital video (Timecode, Hotel) that suggests a fetish…
Tidy little Montecarlo, Georgia, which is the setting for Jonathan Lynn’s The Fighting Temptations, is a perfect movie fantasy town. At the picturesque train station, the ticket agent will call you a taxi or serve you a plate of Southern fried chicken. The house band at the local nightclub is…
When Nicolas Cage plays still and sullen — a man possessed by self-loathing and melancholy in Adaptation, say, or the landlocked angel in City of Angels — he comes off as drowsy. He disappears into those roles like a head plopped in a fluffy pillow, and it doesn’t quite suit…
God bless Johnny Depp. For the second time this year, the man has almost single-handedly redeemed an action movie that would otherwise be indistinguishable from the pack. Introduced right up front in Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico, he’s first seen dressed up like Prince in purple glasses…
Most will deny it, but inside every grown man lurks a hypersensitive adolescent girl. Allow me to tell you all about mine and to share some of my poetry . . . Whoa! Relax. Put away that gun. Just seeking to emphasize that in the case of director Catherine Hardwicke’s…
The 1990-’95 run of Saturday Night Live, when the show was a playground populated by the likes of Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, Chris Farley, Kevin Nealon, Mike Myers and David Spade, was a low point in a show with a longer history of making you groan…
As one who assesses creative works, you try to separate the individual artist from the output they produce. Watching Bedtime for Bonzo, you don’t want to think about Reaganomics. Viewing The Pianist tends to produce thoughts of the Holocaust, not of drugged and raped girls. Going back a little further,…
The last thing the Roman Catholic Church needs at this point is another exposé of its misdeeds. The shock of the pedophilia scandals and of the official cover-ups isn’t going away anytime soon, and when last we looked the former bishop of the Phoenix Diocese was out on $45,000 bail…
Harvey Pekar, star of a long-running comic-book series he writes and others illustrate, is reminded early in American Splendor that he’s no superhero. It’s Halloween, and the 11-year-old Harvey, played by a bent-over, sneering Daniel Tay, stands on a stoop seeking tricks and treats from a woman who recognizes the…
Maverick Russian director Alexander Rogozhkin hit upon a clever idea for his idiosyncratic anti-war fable The Cuckoo (Kukushka in Russian). The three main characters, marooned together on a remote reindeer farm in northernmost Scandinavia, all speak different languages. The Russian speaks and understands only Russian, the Finn knows only Finnish,…
If, in keeping with current fads, you seek movies featuring females kicking a bunch of ass, your appetite will be tended (and cultivated) at the multiplex all summer long. Wander into your local art house, however, and you may find a fine if somewhat challenging import called The Legend of…
The praising of Hollywood summertime cinema is the pastime of pale critics who, come late July, start to wonder what the strange yellow orb is hanging in the sky. Hence the gallons of kind ink spilled over the season’s sequels, which shipped spoiled but were guzzled nonetheless by parched writers…
It’s a great pleasure to behold a chunk of art that’s both dank and fresh at the same time, and this appraisal perfectly fits the superb Dirty Pretty Things. The latest from veteran director Stephen Frears (Gumshoe, Prick Up Your Ears, High Fidelity) immediately transports the viewer to a subjective…
Kevin Costner appeared in his first Western when he was 30 and looked to be in his early 20s. He was a slender, restless actor in Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado, the 1985 film in which Costner played the blithe brother of a somber Scott Glenn — all giggles and gunshots, a…
Ah, Paris — City of Light, of Love, of Liver Damage and Lung Cancer. C’est formidable, non? Who in need of a posh vacation would turn down the opportunity to luxuriate in its finest hotels, to stuff oneself with sumptuous snails, and to work on a terribly flat romantic drama…
