Holland’s gift to world cinema, Paul Verhoeven, can be a very bad boy and a very good filmmaker. Any of his movies could have been titled Basic Instinct — not least his epic World War II thriller Black Book, in which a Jewish chanteuse who watched her family be massacred…
Grijs Verleden (Gray Past) is the title the Dutch historian Chris van der Heijden gave to his 2001 account of Holland’s morally murky landscape under Nazi occupation, and it’s the phrase director Paul Verhoeven (RoboCop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers) uses to explain why he returned to his home country after…
Writers Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth receive sole credit for the movie Disturbia, which is surprising, as the film clearly is based on both a previously published work (a 1942 short story by Cornell Woolrich titled “It Had to Be Murder”) and the John Michael Hayes-penned, Alfred Hitchcock-directed, Academy Award-nominated…
Frylock, Meatwad, and Master Shake — the three stooges inhabiting Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters — will survive should you choose to avoid their movie. Truth be told, you’ve probably never heard of them anyway, unless you’re a regular viewer of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming…
There exists some debate about audience familiarity with the term “grindhouse,” and even a certain confusion about the origins of the word itself — whether it refers to the movies that comprised a gilded age of exploitation cinema or to the all-night urban theaters in which they were regularly shown…
Lest we imagine that the publishing industry went to hell only after James Frey and J.T. Leroy clambered on board, here comes Lasse Hallström to remind us of a literary dustup emblematic of a much earlier nadir for American mendacity. The Hoax parses the rise and fall of faker Clifford…
Neutrally retitled from the more pertinent Orchestra Seats, Avenue Montaigne is a French soufflé of the old school, a romantic comedy set in Paris’ arty district, where neurotic writers and actors wring their manicured hands and — at least in flirty little numbers like this one — rub shoulders with…
At various times over the last decade, David Fincher, Sam Mendes, and Michael Mann were attached to direct Scott Frank’s screenplay for The Lookout, about a brain-damaged high-school hockey stud who’s smooth-talked by distant acquaintances into robbing a small-town bank. That Frank — best known for straightening and sharpening the…
As Charlie Fineman, a New York dentist who lost his wife and three young daughters in one of the September 11 plane crashes, Adam Sandler sports a mass of bedraggled locks and walks with his head hung low, the sounds of the city drowned out by The Who or Bruce…
Packed with female book club members, a screening of Mira Nair’s The Namesake left no doubt about the film’s target audience. If anyone’s going to flock to this warm and likable tale, it’s going to be women, yet it seems a pity to confine the movie behind the bars of…
By Monday afternoon, they had all left Austin — the A-minus-listers who flew into Texas to promote their studio releases with encroaching release dates. Among them were Shia “Is He or Isn’t He Indy Jones?” LaBeouf touting the Rear Window redo Disturbia and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Isla Fisher, and Matthew Goode…
Hardcore fantasy geeks will relish role-playing every enemy of The Last Mimzy, a family-style sci-fi adventure whose director Bob Shaye is better known to them as the evil wizard — the alien executive who peed all over the Fellowship. Shaye, in his other job as New Line Cinema topper, has…
In the same week that sees Adam Sandler playing a grieving 9/11 widower in Reign Over Me, another lone figure reeling from post-traumatic stress fills the central role in the new Antoine Fuqua-directed thriller, Shooter. Named Bob Lee Swagger and played with appropriately gruff machismo by Mark Wahlberg, he’s a…
The space-time continuum smacks the shit out of Sandra Bullock in Premonition, the latest in nonlinear nonsense, but the fun really gets going when she starts to smack back. As Linda Hanson, humdrum mom of Anywhere, U.S.A., Bullock sets things up by doing her thing, effortlessly establishing the girl next…
On January 1, one day after his 27th birthday and fresh from his honeymoon, James McAvoy slips into a coffee shop in the fashionably scruffy North London borough of Crouch End, where he’s bought a house with his bride, the actress Anne-Marie Duff. Rumpled in baggy jeans and carrying a…
Long ago, there reigned a clan of Speedo-wearing militaristic psychopaths called the Spartans. They lived beneath a copper-colored sky, on a copper-colored land, amidst copper-colored fields, in copper-colored homes made from copper-colored stone. Legend has it they would outline their copper-colored pecs and abs with ash to enhance their manly…
I am sorry to say that Peter did not feel very well that evening. His mother put him to bed and gave him a dose of chamomile tea. “One tablespoon to be taken at bedtime.” But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper. — Beatrix…
Mexico City — Less than 24 hours after the Oscars capped the remarkable year of the so-called “three amigos” by handing out three awards to Pan’s Labyrinth and one to Babel, I boarded a plane bound for Mexico City and the fourth edition of the Mexico City International Contemporary Film…
It may be hard out there for a pimp, but it ain’t too hard for a writer-director to make a movie whose marketing hinges on the lurid spectacle of Samuel L. Jackson pulling a half-naked Christina Ricci around on a chain. This sort of cheap trick is what they used…
When editorial cartoonist turned amateur sleuth Robert Graysmith published Zodiac, his sprawling, meticulously researched account of the titular San Francisco serial killer, he wrote that the tale was “the most frightening story I know,” and it was easy to understand why. Graysmith was writing in 1985, some 16 years after…
Wild Hogs — in which John Travolta, William H. Macy, Tim Allen, and Martin Lawrence play emasculated suburbanites taking a cross-country motorcycle trip to rediscover their masculinity — doesn’t even sound like a real movie when you describe it to people. They give you that yer-shittin’-me stare, as though it were even possible to make […]
In 2003, Mark and Michael Polish made Northfork, though just barely; the brothers, also responsible for the art-house fave Twin Falls Idaho, about conjoined twins who fall for the same woman, lost funding just before shooting began and had to beg for money to finish their reverie about lost souls…
