Mr. Brooks — in which Kevin Costner plays a respectable Seattle businessman who kills for thrills, thanks to the goading of an imaginary friend who looks a lot like William Hurt — is stunningly tepid, neither the clever and poignant metaphor for addiction it strives to be nor the darkly…
The Coen brothers’ pulpy, pretentious neo-Western, No Country For Old Men, was screened early at the Cannes Film Festival and, by the end, had maintained its standing as the most widely approved Yankee feature to bow here since Pulp Fiction (though it didn’t win any awards). Once again, the appeal…
Last weekend, as Jerry Bruckheimer’s pirates were once again storming the international box office, the Cannes Film Festival (May 16-27) bestowed its two top prizes on a gut-wrenching Romanian movie about backroom abortion and a plaintive Japanese drama about a sad old man who wants to dig his own grave…
Disney’s immense, booty-busting, pro-piracy epic has come to an End. I doubt very much that Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is, in fact, the last we’ll be seeing of Captain Jack Sparrow and, you know, all those other people. How could it be? Treasure remains to be squeezed…
The most volatile, least easily psychoanalyzed of ’70s auteurs in Peter Biskind’s classic New Hollywood tell-all Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, William Friedkin may have mellowed since unleashing The Exorcist, sliding into box-office hell, and marrying a major studio boss. Indeed, the recovering bad-boy movie brat — now 71, believe it…
Once, written and directed by John Carney, is a deceptively simple movie. It’s a narrative strung together by pop songs, but without the sheen (or arrogance) of most cinematic musicals. By day, a Dublin busker (Glen Hansard) sings Van Morrison on a street corner for spare change, which, on occasion,…
“I don’t mind if you take a shot of me eating,” says William Friedkin, between bites of an avocado sandwich, to the photographer busily taking his snapshot. “People know I do that.” Friedkin and I are downing a quick dinner in the green room of west Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural…
After Shrek the Third, I asked the two smart preteen girls I had in tow what they liked about the movie. Projectile vomiting and multiple farts, they said promptly, best Shrek ever. Ordinarily, I’m not big on puke and flatulence, but, in this instance, I sympathized — there’s not much…
Jafar Panahi is a paradoxical populist. He makes crowd-pleasing art movies, often set in the midst of life — the urban crowd is one of his subjects — and is a virtuoso director of (non) actors. On the other hand, this most widely seen of Iranian filmmakers is also the…
The would-be cineastes recently seen fleeing the Museum of Modern Art’s screening of The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema in New York can’t say they weren’t warned. What exactly were these fussy museum-goers expecting from Slovenian philosopher and theorist Slavoj Zizek’s three-part shuffle through the hallowed halls of cinema? An Ebert…
Four years after “Mission Accomplished,” 28 Weeks Later reminds us that the mission, whatever the hell it was to begin with, is now officially, apocalyptically fucked. The story thus far: Seven months have gone by since the Rage virus passed from chimp fang to British bloodstream in an animal-rights intervention…
Three noisy women and a worn-out premise rattle around trying to make contact in Georgia Rule, an incoherent dramedy of rampant parental insufficiency from director Garry Marshall. Marshall’s broad comedy has always made him a soft target for critics, but along with his duds (Beaches, Runaway Bride, and Raising Helen),…
“When women tell their truth,” says Jane Fonda, “everything changes.” She is sitting on a sofa in a room on the 15th floor of the Four Seasons in Los Angeles. She is noticeably tired, having arrived from Atlanta after midnight without any clothes or shoes but the ones she’s wearing,…
In the superbly tacit chamber piece Away From Her, intolerable pressure is brought to bear on the 44-year marriage between a college professor and his homemaker spouse after she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Grant Andersson (played by veteran Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent) and his wife Fiona (an artfully wrinkled…
There’s a photograph of Sarah Polley from the Disney movie One Magic Christmas. The still is enormously endearing, less because the Canadian 4-year-old looks adorable in blond bangs and a woolly cap than because her lower lip is stuck out in an attitude of mutinous pugnacity that foretells not only…
What is it with the third installments in superhero franchises? For whatever reason — let’s just call it the lack of fresh ideas commingled with the love of money — they always strike out swinging their third time up to bat. It happened with Superman, when Richard Pryor became a…
Speaking as the new owner of a puppy, I can say definitively that a dog is both more and less annoying than the average person. Year of the Dog makes much the same point with its pack of uncontrollable pooches, including a cute beagle that rips into the wrong bag…
“10 people will fight. 9 people will die. You get to watch.” So proclaims the poster for The Condemned, a movie executive-produced by World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon, and starring self-professed “whup-ass machine” Stone Cold Steve Austin and oft-suspended former soccer star Vinnie Jones. So can someone explain where…
For all the huzzahs deservedly heaped upon 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, in which it took a good long while to discern the living from the walking deceased, the zombie-flick spoof was little more than an extended sketch taken, oh, 19 minutes beyond its breaking point. But the movie, created…
This week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Fracture, has the good sense to begin where last week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Perfect Stranger, ended — with the solution to that tedious riddle: Whodunit? The answer is Anthony Hopkins as Ted Crawford, an aeronautical engineer whose pockets of money and…
To fully appreciate the merits of Vacancy, you need to have the proper technology. Digitally projected lurid images and THX-amplified creaks and moans are all well and good, but what director Nimród Antal’s creepy cockroach of a thriller really cries out for are the shabby delights that can be found…
A reformist disciple of Dogme, that earth- and camcorder-shaking movement wherein waves are broken and celebration is cause for alarm, Danish director Susanne Bier makes what you’d call emotional disaster movies. Her Open Hearts and Brothers, melodramas at once feverishly pitched and finely tuned, deploy paralysis and war, respectively, to…
