The most important thing to know about the new movie Hoot, adapted from the children’s book by Carl Hiaasen, is that it’s co-produced by Jimmy Buffett, who also appears in a small role and provides new music for the soundtrack. Middle-aged drunks and boat owners might possibly rejoice at the…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

If you’re a parent trying to teach your sullen teenage kids that movies with subtitles aren’t all bad, try taking them to see Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor). Like Christophe Gans’ The Brotherhood of the Wolf or Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, this is a foreign-language film that proves that…

It should be too early in the year to expect a good movie, let alone a great one; anything released prior to the Oscars is bound to be forgotten by spring. Yet here it is, the first — dare we use the term that’s all but been stripped of meaning…

Tommy Lee Jones’ feature directorial debut is probably much as you’d expect: a blast of nostalgia that nonetheless accepts the realities of modernity, which isn’t surprising coming from an actor who’s getting up there in years but has found more fame as an old man than as a young’un. The…

If you have any awareness at all of the existence of Running Scared — no, not the Gregory Hines/Billy Crystal cop buddy comedy, but the new film written and directed by Wayne Kramer — chances are you have but one question: How in God’s name does anyone expect us to…

The best thing about Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden) is the way it draws on very contemporary fears without ever mentioning them. The War on Terror era has given us all new things to be afraid of; some fear being prey for terrorists, while others fear the government’s response, but both…

Let’s get right to the point: If you are the type of person who enjoys seeing attractive naked girls meet a hideously graphic demise, there’s a scene in Final Destination 3 that will wear out the pause and rewind buttons on your DVD remote a few months from now. Mega-stereotype…

January has earned its reputation as the month in which studios unload all their cheapie horror flicks, but February is the month when we invariably get yet another middle-of-the-road black-urban-professional romantic comedy. (It’s both Black History and Valentine’s month, hence the logic.) In that regard, Something New is anything but…

America — and, by extension, Hollywood — has an obsession with innocence and the loss thereof. Every generation has that Moment When Everything Changed, from Pearl Harbor to JFK’s assassination to 9/11. The impact takes a while to settle in, then people forget again, and future generations are similarly traumatized…

When a movie promises that a character played by Queen Latifah may well die during the course of the action, one might hope that the movie in question is Hostel, so that she could be beaten a few times and then dismembered, ideally by someone who sat through The Cookout,…

In September, UPN insisted that World Wrestling Entertainment remove the controversial Arab-American character Muhammad Hassan from its Smackdown broadcasts. One might have expected Hassan (in real life an Italian-American named Mark Copani) to resurface on USA Network’s Raw. Instead, Copani quit the business altogether to pursue movie stardom. Blame The…

Some of us go to the movies to escape into fantasy, others to cry at tragic drama. Then there are those who just enjoy a couple hours of shock treatment. Maybe it’s cathartic, or maybe it’s just sick, but it was unquestionably a good year for connoisseurs of the grotesque…

When Cedric the Entertainer makes a lousy movie, he’s delivering no less than we expect of him. But how long must we keep praising promising actors who consistently run on autopilot in mediocre crap, though we’ve seen that they’re capable of much more? Following are the top three sandbaggers of…