So lame it’s . . . cool? Nancy Drew, writer-director Andrew Fleming’s attempt to jump-start a new Warner Bros. franchise, is a movie flaunting a most obvious demographic strategy — a teen flick with a sensibility, or at least sense of humor, that’s most definitely parental. Invented in 1930 by…
Lowest Common Denominator-ism writ large and engraved in stone like the Ten Commandments according to Cecil B. DeMille, the Hollywood blockbuster is often an allegory for itself. Walt Disney, the notoriously litigious studio that successfully changed the nation’s copyright laws to protect its trademark Mickey Mouse but more recently declared,…
Mystery man of the long-ago Australian new wave, Ray Lawrence evidently has grown less finicky. Lawrence, now 59, made his feature debut with the phantasmagoric Bliss, the famous flop of the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. He then licked his wounds and directed TV commercials for 16 years before reappearing with…
The idea of “getting axed” is exploited for maximum double-entendre value in Severance, a grisly horror-comedy from the U.K. that has its tongue planted so firmly in its cheek that you half expect it to pop out the other side. Yes, heads (and, in one indelible bit, a severed foot)…
There is a moment in “Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers,” the 14th episode of the brilliant but canceled television series Freaks and Geeks, when gangly, bespectacled, picked-last-in-gym-class high school freshman Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr) arrives home from school, makes himself a grilled cheese sandwich, and sits down to watch an…
“I think the public doesn’t care about reviews,” says Eli Roth, writer-director of Hostel Part II, which — surprise! — isn’t being shown to the press before it opens Friday on more than 2,500 screens. Still, the 35-year-old perpetrator of high-grossing “torture porn” does appreciate critical kindness when he sees…
Eli Roth is obviously a poseur, but on the evidence of Hostel: Part II, he’s also kind of a pussy. Anyone can string a naked woman up by the ankles and slit her throat. Although I acknowledge it takes a little extra something to position a Eurotrash villainess beneath her…
A few friends of mine who’ve adored Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up at early screenings have nonetheless voiced a similar complaint: There’s no way pin-up-pretty Katherine Heigl would end up with soaked-in-bongwater Seth Rogen, not even while drunk on a gallon of Everclear and stoned on a field of your finest…
Mr. Brooks — in which Kevin Costner plays a respectable Seattle businessman who kills for thrills, thanks to the goading of an imaginary friend who looks a lot like William Hurt — is stunningly tepid, neither the clever and poignant metaphor for addiction it strives to be nor the darkly…
The Coen brothers’ pulpy, pretentious neo-Western, No Country For Old Men, was screened early at the Cannes Film Festival and, by the end, had maintained its standing as the most widely approved Yankee feature to bow here since Pulp Fiction (though it didn’t win any awards). Once again, the appeal…
Last weekend, as Jerry Bruckheimer’s pirates were once again storming the international box office, the Cannes Film Festival (May 16-27) bestowed its two top prizes on a gut-wrenching Romanian movie about backroom abortion and a plaintive Japanese drama about a sad old man who wants to dig his own grave…
Disney’s immense, booty-busting, pro-piracy epic has come to an End. I doubt very much that Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is, in fact, the last we’ll be seeing of Captain Jack Sparrow and, you know, all those other people. How could it be? Treasure remains to be squeezed…
The most volatile, least easily psychoanalyzed of ’70s auteurs in Peter Biskind’s classic New Hollywood tell-all Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, William Friedkin may have mellowed since unleashing The Exorcist, sliding into box-office hell, and marrying a major studio boss. Indeed, the recovering bad-boy movie brat — now 71, believe it…
Once, written and directed by John Carney, is a deceptively simple movie. It’s a narrative strung together by pop songs, but without the sheen (or arrogance) of most cinematic musicals. By day, a Dublin busker (Glen Hansard) sings Van Morrison on a street corner for spare change, which, on occasion,…
“I don’t mind if you take a shot of me eating,” says William Friedkin, between bites of an avocado sandwich, to the photographer busily taking his snapshot. “People know I do that.” Friedkin and I are downing a quick dinner in the green room of west Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural…
After Shrek the Third, I asked the two smart preteen girls I had in tow what they liked about the movie. Projectile vomiting and multiple farts, they said promptly, best Shrek ever. Ordinarily, I’m not big on puke and flatulence, but, in this instance, I sympathized — there’s not much…
Jafar Panahi is a paradoxical populist. He makes crowd-pleasing art movies, often set in the midst of life — the urban crowd is one of his subjects — and is a virtuoso director of (non) actors. On the other hand, this most widely seen of Iranian filmmakers is also the…
The would-be cineastes recently seen fleeing the Museum of Modern Art’s screening of The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema in New York can’t say they weren’t warned. What exactly were these fussy museum-goers expecting from Slovenian philosopher and theorist Slavoj Zizek’s three-part shuffle through the hallowed halls of cinema? An Ebert…
Four years after “Mission Accomplished,” 28 Weeks Later reminds us that the mission, whatever the hell it was to begin with, is now officially, apocalyptically fucked. The story thus far: Seven months have gone by since the Rage virus passed from chimp fang to British bloodstream in an animal-rights intervention…
Three noisy women and a worn-out premise rattle around trying to make contact in Georgia Rule, an incoherent dramedy of rampant parental insufficiency from director Garry Marshall. Marshall’s broad comedy has always made him a soft target for critics, but along with his duds (Beaches, Runaway Bride, and Raising Helen),…
“When women tell their truth,” says Jane Fonda, “everything changes.” She is sitting on a sofa in a room on the 15th floor of the Four Seasons in Los Angeles. She is noticeably tired, having arrived from Atlanta after midnight without any clothes or shoes but the ones she’s wearing,…
In the superbly tacit chamber piece Away From Her, intolerable pressure is brought to bear on the 44-year marriage between a college professor and his homemaker spouse after she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Grant Andersson (played by veteran Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent) and his wife Fiona (an artfully wrinkled…
