Perhaps the most unlikely thing to capture on film is the creative process — the spinning of gears, the tripping of wires, the breaking of hearts, and the snapping of tempers that goes into the making of art. Movies about writers and painters and musicians seldom collapse the barrier between…
Jonathan Demme’s gutsy The Manchurian Candidate, which dares to rear its head just after the Democratic National Convention in Boston, is the anti-Bush-administration movie for those who refuse to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 or Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed because, well, they just ain’t Right. It’s less a remake of director…
Moviegoers who know the tides of recent Brazilian history likely will get more from Hector Babenco’s new prison movie, Carandiru, than the rest of us, because the filmmaker tells us so little about the society beyond the walls that helped shape the violent yet carefully ordered world within them. On…
If you’re, oh, 11 years old and you’ve had it up to here with Spider-Man’s current case of existential angst, it’s time to blow your weekly allowance on Thunderbirds. This special-effects-crammed action blockbuster aims a bit lower, age-wise, which is to say its hyperactive young hero wears a retainer on…
The opening moments of The Door in the Floor are not promising. A little girl stands on a chair in a hallway of photos, pointing at the images and speaking about them. Soon, she is joined by a middle-aged man, probably her father, who takes her on a tour through…
Without risking much critical credibility, it can be said that Catwoman succeeds on its own feline terms. Much like a cat, the movie is a superfluous gob of fluff with an attitude ranging from idiotic to nasty. It’s a sleek and self-absorbed animal, adoring itself so ardently that those of…
“Memory is a wonderful thing, if you don’t have to deal with the past,” declares the French Celine (Julie Delpy) to her erstwhile American one-night stand Jesse (Ethan Hawke) in Before Sunset, the meandering but reasonably charming follow-up to the duo’s 1995 Euromance, Before Sunrise. In the movies, as in…
Fair warning: If the behavior of camels in the Gobi Desert during the spring birthing season is not high on your things-to-learn-about list, and you don’t hunger to know everything about southern Mongolian herdsmen, then The Story of the Weeping Camel probably isn’t your kind of movie. Saying they were…
Behold what is, in theory, the thinking person’s ideal summer blockbuster. King Arthur features some of the planet’s most beautiful people, dressed way sexily, gallantly galloping and bashing each other with all manner of implements amid lush vistas and robustly appointed sets. Add an intriguing historical pedigree and apparently unprecedented…
It’s one of the oldest stories in cinema, and possibly the history of storytelling: A man is kidnapped by a baddie wielding a deadly weapon. His family waits at home to hear word while law enforcement types try to figure out what’s going on. A plan is developed to deal…
All you need to know about Spider-Man 2 is revealed in the opening credits, in which comic-book artist Alex Ross recaps the 2002 original in lovingly, lavishly painted panels. Spidey and Mary Jane Watson are once again entangled in that now-iconic upside-down kiss; nutty Norman Osborn, out of Green Goblin…
It’s charming. It’s hilarious. It is perhaps the most beautifully crafted, lovingly rendered portrait of extreme geekitude ever to grace the screen. It’s Napoleon Dynamite — the first feature film from 24-year-old Brigham Young University student Jared Hess — and, if there is any justice, it’s going to be huge…
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…
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…
The real Melvin Van Peebles shows up just once in Baadasssss!, a fictionalized account of his making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971, and it’s at the film’s end; he sits silent, grinning, clutching his ever-present cigar. But he’s all over this movie, in which his son Mario plays…
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…
Getting stranded at snowbound O’Hare for the night is one thing. You call home, maybe knock down a couple of martinis, then grab a blanket. A century ago, being quarantined at Ellis Island for eight months because you were, say, a part-time anarchist from Campobasso with a big mustache and…
You might think that with the technological advances in moviemaking since 1956, this new version of Around the World in 80 Days would at least look better than its predecessor did. You could not be faulted for believing you’d be wowed by the gadgets of inventor Phileas Fogg, the whirligigs…
It’s a sign that a nation may be losing its collective mind when it grants a nutty hack like Quentin Tarantino an exalted title like Officer of Arts and Letters, but there’s France for ya. Whether Gallic pop culture is rousingly progressive or embarrassingly adolescent is anyone’s call, but few…
Those seeking a spiritual counterpart to the yin of Lynne Ramsay’s masterfully moody Morvern Callar will find their yang in David Mackenzie’s exquisitely sorrowful Young Adam. Art-house aficionados may recall that in Ramsay’s recent film, a young male writer commits suicide, leaving his simple girlfriend to absorb his very being…
I’ve just seen a film that is either a brilliant parody of scholarly documentaries or else final proof that I am the stupidest person on Earth. Obviously, I prefer to believe the former — that What the #$*! Do We Know: A Quantum Fable is a genius of a mockumentary…
