America’s Heart & Soul, the debut feature from commercial director Louis Schwartzberg, is being depicted in some quarters as the antidote to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, mostly because it’s a documentary, being released around the same time, about the USA. For more simplistic minds who equate anti-Bush sentiment with hatred…
Everyone loves tigers, save perhaps for those actually being mauled to death by them. Men like ’em because they’re wild beasts; women like ’em cuz they’re big kitty-cats. So whatever your point of interest, Two Brothers, starring a pair of tigers named Kumal and Sangha, is the perfect date movie…
It’s often a challenge to fairly assess a film that, by its very conception, is simply targeted to an entirely different demographic from one’s own. I am not by nature romantic, or female; for those who are, it may have to suffice that the mostly double-X-chromosomed crowd watching The Notebook…
So let’s get this straight: You’re a much-loved comedian who just did a low-budget, multi-award-winning film with an acclaimed up-and-coming director. In recent years, thanks in part to your work with the younger, edgier filmmaking set, you’re starting to be taken seriously as an actor. You even managed to score…
If the summer movie season is our annual time for escapism, last summer’s audiences escaped most often with the likes of Hulk, Terminator 3 and The Matrix Reloaded. Those titles, respectively, ended in a homeless and penniless hero, the end of life on Earth as we know it, and our…
As much of the civilized world now knows, the latest Harry Potter director is Alfonso Cuarón, best known for the explicit teen sexual awakening movie Y Tu Mamá También. As such, it may come as little surprise that his Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban begins with the teenage…
If even one of the major networks had a successful sitcom in the vein of Friends but with an all-black cast, movies like Breakin’ All the Rules would have no reason for existence. Part of an ever-expanding subgenre that includes The Brothers, Two Can Play That Game and Deliver Us…
What Boogie Nights did for porn stars, What Alice Found does for truck-stop hookers. That is to say, the film takes a sleazy profession, sexes it up for the cameras, and depicts those involved in the field as a weird sort of family with truer ties than some of the…
It’s interesting to see how conventional political assumptions get turned on their heads when it comes to the case of Tibet, a nation militarily dominated by China, which claims it as Chinese territory despite the fact that China treats the Tibetan people as a lesser class. Liberal Democrats and Greens,…
It’s a measure of continual cultural desensitization that The Girl Next Door plays like a remake of 1983’s Risky Business, yet very little of it feels risky in the slightest. Twenty years on, the notion of a high school student getting involved in the sex-for-pay business seems almost cute, rather…
In the beginning, there was The Evil Dead, and Stephen King looked down upon it and saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let there be Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, that the message of writer-director Sam Raimi be spread across the land!” So it was written, so…
Before Star Wars and Indiana Jones, audiences thrilled to an epic big-screen trilogy of a different sort: the tale of one righteous lawman and his big piece of wood. Based on the real-life exploits of Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser, the first Walking Tall movie (1973) made lead actor Joe Don…
Oh dear. Angelina Jolie’s made another bad film. Is it too soon to give up on her yet? There’s no denying that Angelina’s sexy as hell. The tattoos, the knife collection, the exhibitionist streak, the bisexual vibe she gives off . . . totally hot, no question. Given her work…
The problem with Spartan isn’t so much that it’s mediocre, but that it could be a whole lot better. Unlike writer-director David Mamet’s last movie, Heist, a film with such a generic plot and predictable Gene Hackman performance that it never had a chance, Spartan has a reasonably compelling story…
With 50 First Dates, it seems as though Adam Sandler is trying to compile a Greatest Hits film, cobbling together the stuff that worked in his previous films in the hopes that it’ll play even better all in one go. There’s the falsetto comedy song bit from every episode of…
“Michael Caine is a revelation!” declares the Jeffrey Lyons quote currently appearing on ads for The Statement. Lyons is right, but not in the way you might expect. Indeed, Caine’s performance here is revelatory — who knew he could be this boring? Insufferable, yes — Oscar aside, his mangled “American”…
Back in January of 2003, New Line Cinema released Final Destination 2, a horror movie in which the antagonist was the unseen hand of death itself. All of the main characters knew their time was up, but they didn’t know how, or when, so they existed in a constant state…
Remember the Farrelly brothers? Makers of Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary? Known for crossing the line of good taste and making fun of the differently abled, but with a sufficiently sweet streak that they could be forgiven for such? Kinda popular until Trey Parker and Matt Stone…
Like the Disneyland ride upon which it’s based, The Haunted Mansion opens with a spooky voice intoning, “Welcome, foolish mortals!” Scary objects, like candelabra and tarot cards, float in front of the screen, and we’re then treated to a nicely wordless sequence from the 19th century, a Romeo and Juliet-type…
It took four years, but finally Dark Castle — Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver’s horror division that puts out a movie a year around Halloween — has made something that’s genuinely scary. It may be no coincidence that this time around, Silver has scored a higher-profile cast than usual, and…
Given the way the United Nations has been taking a beating in the American media over the past year or so, it may not be a bad thing that the new movie Beyond Borders is at heart a two-hour infomercial for Kofi Annan’s organization. As a call to action, the…
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