It’s possibly more ironic than Brian De Palma realizes that his latest movie, Femme Fatale, features a down-on-her-luck mother who was “replaced” seven years ago by her less benevolent, reputation-destroying, jewel-stealing doppelgänger (both are played by Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, who was apparently recommended to De Palma by Rollerball director John McTiernan)…
The current TV ad campaign for the sleeper hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding plays cleverly on the film’s cross-cultural appeal by substituting the words Italian, Jewish and Russian for Greek. The implication: A person from any ethnic or religious background will relate to this story’s characters, drama and humor…
The Santa Clause, released at the height of Home Improvement’s popularity, played like a Very Special Holiday Episode of that now-defunct television series — what might have happened if an eggnog-saturated Tim Taylor fell asleep with visions of sugarplums in his head and woke up sporting a white beard and…
Now here’s an innovative narrative: Two shticky goofs of different races get stuck with a ridiculous mission and must overcome their mutual antagonism to save the day. Been there? Done that? You bet! Yet somehow, amazingly, the new I-Spy dishes out fresh and funny antics while simultaneously spewing forth the…
If you’re a fan of the baseball-cap-wearin’, Nader-votin’, muckrakin’, best-sellin’, corporation-confrontin’ son of a gun known as Michael Moore, all you need to know about his latest film, Bowling for Columbine, is that it’s more of the same. You know, the mix of easy humor, political pot shots, attempts (some…
Punch-Drunk Love is a Paul Thomas Anderson film — Paul Thomas Anderson of Magnolia and Boogie Nights fame. It is also an Adam Sandler film — Adam Sandler of Little Nicky and The Wedding Singer fame. In terms of story, it has far more in common with Sandler’s previous work…
Once more, it all boils down to the stamps — which, if you have seen Stanley Donen’s 1963 comic-thriller Charade, nearly ruins the last 10 minutes of Jonathan Demme’s remake, The Truth About Charlie. But Demme isn’t at all concerned with such mundane things as shock-’em finales; he won’t be…
Listen up, retards: Killing time is over. Melt down your weapons, now, forever. Wouldn’t it be nice if that sentiment echoed around the world? Well, certainly it does, every day, but weapons have a nasty tendency of drowning out sensible words. For this reason — now more than ever –…
Much like a psychic, a cinema critic must look throug h a movie and see the other side. In the case of the new thriller The Ring — a remake of the 1998 Japanese hit Ringu — the formative forces swim into focus without effort. There’s a DreamWorks boardroom, some…
Honestly, I’ve never been much into schmaltzy movies about the old neighborhood. The whole scene seems pretty hellish; all that cutesy talk about this good old street or that once-hoppin’ nightclub. Therefore, when it’s announced that there’s a movie called Welcome to Collinwood about a bunch of Hollywood actors playing…
As pharmacologist Elmo McElroy in Formula 51, Samuel L. Jackson initially sports a seriously silly fake Afro along with hippy-dippy threads that make him look like some sort of flower power cult leader. When next we see him, it’s 30 years later, and he’s got cornrows and is inexplicably wearing…
“If the public’s not interested, they don’t have to buy!” sneers aging spoiled brat Amber (Madonna) to her uber-wealthy, idiotic friends in Swept Away — and for a few minutes, it’s tempting to use the line against both her and this seemingly noxious vanity project. Advance buzz for this remake…
In the last few years — more or less since the failure of his embarrassing Joan of Arc epic The Messenger — former wunderkind director Luc Besson has become a fantastically prolific writer/producer. (The IMDB claims he has nine projects lined up for next year.) His latest, The Transporter –…
Good Lord, there hasn’t been this much blond hair on screen since the Von Trapp children sang and danced their way across the Alps in The Sound of Music. The fact that these latest golden locks belong to the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Wright Penn and Renée Zellweger suggests…
Brad Silberling’s instincts are right about half the time, which means that, depending upon your point of view, his films are either half-empty or half-full. His last picture, 1998’s City of Angels, an American remake of Wim Wender’s poetic Wings of Desire, tried to marry European art house cinema with…
Ordinarily, it would seem pretty odious to put so fine a point on this, but what the hey: Gather up your gay friends, because here’s a movie they’re going to dig, dig, dig. Probably, anyway. That general demographic seems to be the target audience of the radical, whimsical French import…
I might as well just come out and say it: Spirited Away is the best movie I’ve seen all year. Though it would be a masterpiece in any language, Hayao Miyazaki’s animated spectacular (and Japan’s highest-grossing film ever) is being released by Disney simultaneously in two versions — one in…
Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is released from a mental institution the day of her older sister’s wedding. One afternoon with her dysfunctional family and she’s ready for rehab again. No such luck, however, so instead, Lee turns — or returns — to her favorite pastime: self-mutilation. Based on a short…
So there’s no confusion, the star of Sweet Home Alabama is Reese Witherspoon, who graces the film’s poster in full-body pout and appears on the press kit in close-up mug-shot smirk; any closer, and we’d shoot up her nostrils and exit through her pores. Of course, there’s a great deal…
Although his name sounds like an inventory notebook for candy bars, Heath Ledger is presently overcoming this confusion — as well as the plight of the pretty boy — to become one of contemporary cinema’s more vital actors. In The Four Feathers — as in The Patriot, A Knight’s Tale…
Among the more preposterous rumors spread by Harry Knowles, whose Ain’t It Cool News movie-biz gossip Web site garners undue attention from studios too craven to do their own thinking, was one from this year’s beginning: Terrence Malick, Knowles “reported,” was working on an adaptation of The Catcher in the…
In The Banger Sisters, Goldie Hawn plays Suzette, an aging groupie too stuck in a gloriously seedy past to move into the future. It’s 2002, yet she acts as though it’s 1969 and nothing’s changed — not the Sunset Strip’s Whisky A Go-Go, where she still tends bar behind sunglasses…
