Morally irreproachable and flat as a pancake, Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace is set among bickering House of Commoners in late-18th-century London, but the movie belongs squarely in the currently blooming subgenre of Whites Saving Dark-skinned Victims of Empire. Or at least it would be were Apted able to bring a…
Having endured civil war, separation from their families, hunger and dehydration during a 1000-mile trek through sub-Saharan Africa, and 10 years in a U.N. refugee camp while awaiting the myriad challenges of resettlement in the United States, the three “lost boys of Sudan” in God Grew Tired of Us can…
The Number 23 grips hold of one stupid idea and runs so far with it, in so many directions, to such little purpose, that it nearly won me over from sheer berserkoid effort. In a nutshell, this nutso movie observes what happens to a man (Jim Carrey) under the impression…
We Americans complain of Big Brother’s unblinking eye in the post-Patriot Act, corporate e-mail era — as well we should. But, as The Lives of Others makes plain, things could be worse. Set in East Berlin circa 1984, when one in 100 citizens of the German Democratic Republic was a…
Ticket buyers to Factory Girl are in for a drag; not even the drag queens will like it. Cookie-cut from the biopic assembly line, this life and times of Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller) is the least-fabulous movie imaginable about the most-fabulous persona in that most fabulous of scenes, the Warhol…
Let us applaud, on principle, Anthony Minghella’s return to small-scale storytelling. Breaking and Entering marks his first original screenplay since the oddball romcom Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991), and a retreat from the jumbo-size period pieces of his Miramax-to-the-max phase. Overrated as they are, The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley,…
You remember Andrew Ridgeley, don’t you? He was the other guy in Wham!, the one who found himself stranded in 1986, after George Michael had faith enough in his own talents to break up the act. Ridgeley went on to record one solo record, before CBS Records decided, yeah, no…
In December 2002, ABC’s 20/20 ran a story on Eric O’Neill, an undercover surveillance specialist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The piece was titled “Spycatcher,” because it was O’Neill who, at a mere 27 years old, helped bring down Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who, for more than two…
Midway through last April’s press screening of Paul Greengrass’ United 93, I made a mental note to watch the end credits for the name of the actor playing the role of Ben Sliney, the National Operations Manager of the Federal Aviation Administration’s command center in Herndon, Virginia. On September 11,…
As we’ve seen from British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s guerrilla-style comedy hit Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, one actor’s deadpan dedication to heavily accented cultural naiveté in the face of unsuspecting victims can do wonders. Actor Ken Davitian, who played Borat’s bearded and…
What could be scarier than yet another PG-13 creepfest serving up pasty, staggering ghouls with stringy hair? Why, the same PG-13 creepfest set against the high-tension backdrop of . . . sunflower farming! Sorry, fear fans, if you were expecting a Ferry-Morse catalog of floral fright from The Messengers, the…
Though I’m sure it’s purely coincidental, the decision to release the Diane Keaton-Mandy Moore rom-com Because I Said So with the scent of this year’s Sundance Film Festival still fresh in the air provides us with an excellent opportunity to review the wayward career of the movie’s director, Michael Lehmann…
The Good German, directed by Steven Soderbergh from Joseph Kanon’s best seller, is as much simulation as movie. Specifically, it’s the simulation of a 1940s private eye flick. It’s not just a period film, but one that feigns being shot as it would have been in that period. Filmed for…
Park City, Utah — Even by the lacerating standards of recent Sundance docs Why We Fight and Iraq in Fragments, the nonfiction at this year’s fest felt, well, real — alarmingly so. Indeed, after doing battle with films about U.S. policies on Iraq, Darfur, and global warming, this critic was…
Park City, Utah — We all know about the cathartic power of blues music, but until the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, who knew that it could serve as a cure-all for everything from nymphomania to childhood sexual abuse? In Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, whose out-of-competition…
One morning, Gary Walkow was suddenly transformed into a successful Hollywood filmmaker. Gone were the hat-in-hand searches for financing, the deferred salaries, the long shooting days with undermanned crews, and the months upon years spent touring the festival circuit while seeking a distribution deal. For a moment, he was taking…
New-school genre junk food: Take a Tarantino wanna-be with Sundance credentials, add a large, famous-enough cast and a show-biz backdrop, season the violence with references to Sergio Leone and Takeshi Kitano, serve cool, and garnish with a cynicism beyond irony. Smokin’ Aces is writer-director Joe Carnahan’s third and most elaborate…
Maurice Russell, a septuagenarian actor facing the end of his career and life, gazes raptly at the present that fate has given him: the company of a sullen but strangely desirable teenage girl. At first, his appraising looks give her the creeps, but something about his courtliness piques her curiosity…
Park City, Utah — On the first Saturday of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, I rolled out of bed and hustled up Main Street for the 8:30 a.m. screening of Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as adult siblings caring for an irascible elderly parent…
Park City, Utah — Ten days of terse texting among professional narcissists working on little or no sleep in one of the last cold spots left on Al Gore’s inconvenient Earth: Welcome to Sundance ’07, where the wounding, home-front melodrama Grace Is Gone sells and it hardly pays to be…
Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth is something alchemical. To an astonishing degree, the 42-year-old Mexican filmmaker best known for his contribution to the Blade and Hellboy franchises has transformed the horror of mid-20th-century European history into a boldly fanciful example of what surrealists would call le…
In the new Clint Eastwood movie, ordinary young men — husbands and fathers, artisans and aristocrats — are drafted into a war whose motives many of them do not fully understand. There, on an island called Iwo Jima, they fight against an enemy who has been demonized by wartime propaganda…
