The Darwinian theory that schlocksploitation must tighten its twist of the nuts with each new release will be tested strenuously for years — or at least several weeks — by Hard Candy. A pointedly s(l)ick cross between Oleanna and I Spit on Your Grave, thrown like raw meat to Lions…
Criticizing an action movie for being empty-headed is like calling out Brokeback Mountain for its lack of car chases. Likewise, when a teen gymnastics movie is derided as formulaic and dumb, one might logically wonder compared to what? Very well: Stick It sucks it compared to the modestly charming Kirsten…
Every year, when ESPN broadcasts the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a tiny flutter of hope rises in anyone who cherishes the life of the mind. Spelling is a sport? Sweet Jesus! For the duration of the competition, the brainy kid who gets his glasses stomped by knuckle-draggers on the playground…
If you’re a regular moviegoer with a gift for remembering unusual names, chances are you’ve started paying attention to Chiwetel Ejiofor, the black English actor with a chameleon’s talent for disappearing into a role. You may not have caught his breakthrough performance in Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things, but you…
Vast legions embrace the thing as gospel. Skeptics dismiss it as ecstatic nonsense. In any event, James Redfield’s peculiar novel The Celestine Prophecy has been a bulwark of New Age metaphysics since it first hit the best-seller lists back in 1993. By recent estimates, there are 14 million copies in…
Wanna knock the prez? Let’s make a show . . . preferably on television. Paul Weitz’s new satire American Dreamz imagines the Bush regime as an episode in the history of American entertainment and American Idol as the quintessence of U.S. democracy. So what else is new? The vision of…
Calling Rian Johnson’s teen indie drama Brick a piece of stuntwork might seem tantamount to hitting it with a pie, but it’s a high-speed wheelie of a strangely daring variety. Try this thumbnail definition on for size: a high school noir, complete with a Dashiell Hammett-derived plot line and a…
For most of January 2005, Michael Keaton was on the road pimping White Noise, the psychological thriller during which he stared at TV screens and pretended to be scared of static. Little wonder, then, that Keaton spent most of that couch time selling not his big-studio comeback, but his tiny-budgeted…
In Nicole Holofcener’s first feature, 1996’s Walking and Talking, the writer/director warmly portrayed an adult female friendship, nudging at emotional issues without resorting to shtick or melodrama. Five years later, Holofcener’s Lovely & Amazing attempted to do the same for a family of women, but with wildly different results: Virtually…
The brain is a beguiling thing. One evening, you’re talking to a friend on the phone. Sometime later, you find yourself in a subway car, passing through an urban landscape. You don’t recognize the buildings, the neighborhood, or the city. Don’t know why you’re on the train. Don’t even know…
Believe it or not, The Benchwarmers is so lame that it can’t even lay claim to being the best Adam Sandler-produced movie not screened for critics in 2006; that dubious honor would go to Grandma’s Boy, which was by no means good but at least featured a kung-fu chimp and…
There’s a certain exuberance, a “you go, girl” spirit of defiance and self-reliance to the new Mo’Nique vehicle Phat Girlz that’s undeniably appealing — and likely to be especially so for its target audience of overweight women. (This is assuming they see it, which the box-office numbers so far seem…
It’s difficult to tell from the image on the poster for Take the Lead, but that’s not star Antonio Banderas dancing in blue silhouette. In fact, the movie isn’t even about Banderas dancing — it’s about Banderas teaching teenagers to dance. You’d think that might be a dream come true…
You may not yet have lost your ardor and respect for the pressure-point hammer blow Quentin Tarantino executed on American movies, but it’s difficult at this late date not to view him as an imperative inoculation with unfortunate side effects: gas, bloating, dizziness, delusions of cleverness. Imitators flock when coolness…
There’s imported-film minimalism, and then there’s this: Fernando Eimbcke’s feature debut Duck Season, a daringly banal comedy of ennui set almost entirely in a middle-class Mexico City flat. Knocking them dead at festivals and at the Mexican Ariel Awards, where it enjoyed a Ben-Hur-like sweep, Eimbcke’s movie could become the…
We are in the middle of a B-movie renaissance, if you haven’t noticed. For years now, the politics of the multiplex have forced films to be either big-budget, Burger King-cup blockbusters or tiny “indie” projects about college-educated Caucasians with emotional problems (and viewed by college-educated Caucasians with emotional problems). But…
In his 1961 farewell address, President Eisenhower warned Americans that an insidious new force was taking hold in the country. He called it the “military-industrial complex.” Born of necessity during the Second World War, this once valuable conjunction of the military, the federal government, and the armaments industry was suddenly…
A gritty portrait of ghetto life in contemporary South Africa, Tsotsi packs an unexpected emotional wallop. Gavin Hood’s film tells a story of violence and redemption that’s even more remarkable when you consider that neither of the lead performers had ever acted in a movie previously. It’s little wonder that…
“You want an easy job, go join the Red Cross,” someone says well into Thank You for Smoking, a gleeful farce about capitalist mendacity based on Christopher Buckley’s 1994 bestseller. The implication, made drummingly plain in the film’s every bon mot, is that our ethical barometers skew lazily toward goodness,…
Given Inside Man’s bullpen (director Spike Lee, stars Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster), moment in political history, and advertising, you could be forgiven for anticipating some kind of socially relevant, perhaps even politically volatile dramatic smashup — something with teeth, ambition, a functioning cerebrum, and a lusty relationship with reality…
The posters for V for Vendetta read “An uncompromising vision of the future from the creators of The Matrix trilogy.” Uncompromising? It simply isn’t possible to translate Alan Moore’s multilayered comic-book masterpiece into a two-hour movie without making cuts that oversimplify, and it’s certainly not feasible to expect producer Joel…
So wait. It’s a movie about the longest criminal trial in U.S. history, it’s directed by the legendary Sidney Lumet, and it stars . . . Vin Diesel in a wig? In a role originally intended for Joe Pesci? Can Lumet be serious? Actually, no. The characters may be based…
