Fellowship of The Ringer

It’s impossible to talk about The Ringer, a comedy about someone pretending to be retarded in order to rig the Special Olympics, without mentioning that episode of South Park in which Cartman does the same thing. The Ringer was already in production when that episode was made, and has taken…

Homo on the Range

It’s not hard to predict how Ang Lee’s controversial Brokeback Mountain will play in John Wayne country. This romantic tragedy about a pair of lean, wind-burned cowpokes who secretly live to poke each other flies in the face of everything that most people in Casper or Riverton or Laramie think…

Monkey Business

For whatever reason, the modernized, comic redo of King Kong released exactly 29 years ago has become less the “pop classic” that Pauline Kael insisted it was at the time than a dimly remembered punch line. It barely registers with modern-day moviegoers, who remember it as a campy, eco-aware update…

Oh, Joy

One cannot, in good conscience, describe the countless strands of plot and strains of characters skittering through The Family Stone without knowing that description merits at least a snicker. . . . Okay, all right, bellowing guffaws. The movie’s too overstuffed by half with pointless people and plot lines that…

Blood for Oil

Warner Bros. put $50 million into Syriana and allowed writer-director Stephen Gaghan as much time and travel as necessary to research and write his story. They’d be well advised to pony up a few extra bucks to provide filmgoers with a flow chart that connects the myriad, scattered dots that…

Lion in Winter

If you’re a fan of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, all you need to know is this: Disney has done right by The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It’s impossible to imagine it done much better, in fact. If you’re not a fan, perhaps you’re among…

Fluxuation

Close to a decade ago, at a comic book convention in Los Angeles, animator Peter Chung was asked by a fan if he’d ever consider allowing a live-action movie to be made based on his avant-garde MTV series Aeon Flux. Chung said he had no interest in such a thing,…

Jesus Saves

Hands down (and hands down her pants, from the sound of it), the funniest bit from the summer’s raunch smorgasbord The Aristocrats was hearing Sarah Silverman tell the infamously profane family-act joke at the center of Paul Provenza’s documentary. Where Robin Williams, Drew Carey, George Carlin, and a hundred other…

Last Laugh

A common criticism of Hollywood from the right side of the political spectrum is that it hasn’t made any movies that deal with the War on Terror, the way it did with World War II, for example. The truth is that it’s probably less an example of political bias than…

Snow Bored

It begins with a very literal cliffhanger. Five snowboarders — the best in their field, we’re told — are dropped off via helicopter atop an Alaskan mountain called 7601, imaginatively named for its height above sea level. Swooping aerial shots around the peak convince us that it’s steep, high and…

Weighting . . .

For those of us who dug Rob McKittrick’s recent comedy Waiting . . . , Just Friends offers up some good news: Ryan Reynolds and Anna Faris are together again as a dysfunctional couple. He’s a slick music executive named Chris Brander, still traumatized at having gotten the “Let’s just…

Spent

Ever since its Broadway debut in 1996, Rent has generated a loyal, almost cultlike following. Showered with praise, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical touched a nerve among the young, artistic, gay, urban, and alternatively dressed people who identified as outsiders and wondered how they would make their way in the world…

Common Cold

A few weeks ago, Harold Ramis was sitting in a hotel conference room discussing the subtext of The Ice Harvest, his new film based on the novel by Scott Phillips and adapted by Robert Benton and Richard Russo. Ramis explained he took the project, which Benton (Nobody’s Fool, The Human…

All Yours

Most movies intend to entertain or inform us, or maybe take our minds momentarily off personal problems — that bullet-riddled body in the trunk, say, or Aunt Edna’s arrest for shoplifting doughnuts. Presumably, no picture really means to make an airtight case against children. But after sitting through the witless,…

A Family Adrift

Writer and director Noah Baumbach has made three light films — one so slight (1997’s party-hopping Highball), it didn’t see release ’til five years after its completion, and even then it snuck onto video-store shelves credited to a pseudonymous writer and director. There was nothing on his filmography — not…

Fire Flies

The part with the dragon is really cool. Might as well cut to the chase, right? It’s not as though you need anybody to tell you the basic premise of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; if you somehow missed the last three, this won’t likely be the one…

Cash Cropper

It seems like so much nitpicking, but why is the Johnny Cash biopic called Walk the Line when a far better name would have been Ring of Fire? Surely James Mangold, co-writer and director, would insist he chose the former because of its lyrics dealing with the temptations that crop…

Spell It Out

Richard Gere? That’s the first thought that came to mind upon learning that Mr. Salt-and-Pepper-Sexy-Buddhist-Wasp had been cast as Saul Naumann in Bee Season, the film version of Myla Goldberg’s best-selling novel. In the book, Saul is an oppressive and learned Jewish patriarch, a cantor and student of mysticism whose…

Private Dicks

As a screenwriter, Shane Black has built a reputation on action movies featuring mismatched partners. Crazy Mel Gibson and aging Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon; sassy Samuel L. Jackson and amnesiac hit-woman/housewife Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight; burnout detective Bruce Willis and football player Damon Wayans in The…

Love at First Fight

Keira Knightley, who is all of 20 but has the grace and gravitas of someone a good decade older, probably considers herself the luckiest lass in all the world at present. Just as Pride & Prejudice begins filling the cineplex with dewy, hopeless romantics who can’t get enough of Jane…

Off the Tracks

Moviegoers with a taste for nasty villains will get all they can handle from the heavy in Swedish director Mikael Håfström’s Derailed. Philippe LaRoche — played with obvious relish by a craggy-faced Vincent Cassel — is not the kind of effete Frenchman you find reading poetry in the corner bistro…

Aboard Game

Pay attention, Disney: This is how you do a family film right. Neither pandering nor dull, Zathura plays exactly like a no-limits replica of the kind of space adventure that imaginative kids left to their own devices might enact. Assuming there’s no Xbox to distract them, naturally. Loosely based on…