Snort a few lines of Fame, screen Save the Last Dance a couple of times, and channel what you’ve learned through the bad-ass pose of a second-rate Eminem and you get Step Up, a dance romance with the originality of a paint-by-numbers set. First-time director Anne “Mama” Fletcher, the choreographer…
Countless are the creative souls who struggled with mental illness, as are the novels and films dedicated to them. Again and again, we’ve encountered artists both inspired and undermined by their madness, whose torment and tumult produce works of beauty and depth. So can a documentary about a singer-songwriter and…
There is no modern-day antecedent to the movies Will Ferrell makes with writer-director Adam McKay, with whom Ferrell collaborated during their tenure at Saturday Night Live only a few years ago. To compare their offerings, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and the new Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky…
What’s the difference between a good liar and a good storyteller? The answer, or the lack of an answer, is a mystery at the heart of The Night Listener, a muted psychological thriller adapted from the Armistead Maupin novel. A writer’s elaborate what-if scenario extrapolated from an anecdote, it’s presented…
Monster’s Ball producer Lee Daniels makes his directorial debut with Shadowboxer, and it couldn’t be clearer that he’s trying to follow his previous formula for success. Oscar-caliber actors? Check. Interracial sex? Plenty. A violent demise or two, all in the service of character development? Oh yes. But Daniels maybe could…
It seldom fails. Every year, we’ll get a movie that doesn’t necessarily have a remarkable plot or director, but does feature an aging master (or mistress) thespian from the U.K., whom one might assume is an automatic shoo-in for an award nomination, ensuring eternal recognition for the movie at hand…
It’s no secret that documentaries have finally gained some currency in the American media. With the help of Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, and a very cold bunch of penguins, docs have increased their audiences by railing against injustices, exposing political and corporate malfeasance, and inviting us into hidden worlds. Naked…
The old Lucas/Spielberg stunt of turning B-movie peekaboos into E-ticket thrill rides remains the industry standard — to the virtual exclusion of other multiplex fare, particularly when school’s out. But as not every kid who remade Raiders in Super 8 either gave up the dream or morphed into Michael Bay,…
Michael Mann’s Miami Vice is like a car that’s been stripped of everything but its two bucket seats and rebuilt from the ground up. The protagonists are a pair of detectives named Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), and a cover of Phil Collins’ “In the Air…
The Ant Bully is based upon a very short children’s book by John Nickle, who wrote and illustrated the 1999 work all by his lonesome after years of providing illustrations for The Wall Street Journal and Sports Illustrated, not to mention other works of kiddy lit. The book, as most…
Originally, Ward Serrill set out to make a documentary — and a short one at that — about Bill Resler, an avuncular tax professor at the University of Washington who thought he knew enough about basketball to coach the girls’ team at Roosevelt High School in Seattle. Never mind that…
For 35 years, Woody Allen was a long shot to stray into the Bronx or Staten Island, much less the alien reaches of London, England. The creator of Manhattan has always been joined to his chosen borough like pastrami on rye — so when he ventured abroad last year to…
Two weeks ago, a colleague insisted that Superman Returns isn’t a remake of the 1978 original, as I wrote, but a reinterpretation — its melancholy flip side. Where the Christopher Reeve model was pop art and a cool breeze, the Brandon Routh version is heavy and solemn, weighed down by…
It would be a mighty sweet thing to see M. Night Shyamalan as the great redemptive storyteller he clearly thinks he is — or as he portrays himself in those American Express commercials. Genuine yarn-spinning, even as a doomed ambition, is virtually extinct in American movies; what had been the…
In the latest extravaganza from executive producers Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, millions of dollars and long hours in the digital animation studios have produced . . . a photorealistic, computer-animated, generic American suburb! Location costs must be getting pretty damn expensive nowadays. As Monster House begins, we follow a…
Slipped into the summer movie season like acid in your Happy Meal, Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly is a blockbuster of counterprogramming. No matter that the dude from The Matrix is its star — or would be, if he weren’t half-hidden under a thick swath of digital paint. Linklater’s return…
Owen Wilson has moved up in the world: He’s gone from crashing weddings to crashing entire marriages. In the listless farce You, Me and Dupree, his titular ne’er-do-well shows up on the doorstep of his childhood friend Carl (Matt Dillon), having lost his job and been evicted from his apartment…
Perhaps no one can pinpoint the exact moment vaudeville died, but there’s a moment early in Strangers With Candy where you’d swear you had just witnessed the death of visual comedy. En route to her first day of high school, a tarty middle-aged jailbird — this is not a Disney…
The fact that 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was such a hit had much to do with viewers’ pre-launch expectations, which were approximately none. Who could have been blamed for thinking a Gore Verbinski-directed, Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movie based on a theme-park ride would proffer…
After all that, just . . . this? After all the anticipation, all the hype, all the product available on toy-store shelves and kiddy sections at bookstores, after all the promise that this would be the most super of Superman movies, all we get is just this . . …
For an industry in decline, print journalism has done a fashion publicist’s job of staying in vogue, particularly among the more stylish of career-seeking college grads. Never mind telling these BlackBerry-toting eager beavers that even an unpaid gig in the field is as rare as a winning lottery ticket: The…
It can’t be easy making films about war. It’s so inherently dramatic that, as a setting for art, it’s overdetermined; it drips with meaning even before the first scenes are set. And so much has been said already: War is hell. War is noble. War is surreal. War is absurd,…
