Some movies approach perfection. Alien: The Director’s Cut basically enhances a 99.9 percent perfect movie from 1979 with some digital polishing, small additions (including the revelatory “nest” scene) and minor nips and tucks. If for some weird reason you haven’t seen this brilliant creature feature, boycott the typically tell-all new…
Sometimes something so wonderful appears on the big screen that I want to leap up like a shameless non-professional and hug it. Such is the case early on in Sylvia, a superb drama based on the brief life of writer Sylvia Plath. While boating in Cambridge, England with her beau…
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…
That a new feel-good sports movie called Radio contrives to move us is just fine — that’s what feel-good sports movies are supposed to do. That its makers choose to move us in the style of a linebacker sacking a quarterback is not so good. After enduring this flagrant emotional…
If you lie down with dogs, you’ve got to expect to get up with fleas. And when you go to a movie about a coked-out former porn star who was implicated in the grisly murders of four lowlife drug-dealers — a case which remains “officially” unsolved to this day –…
Dave, a man who’s barely there, lulls his son to sleep with stories of a boy lost in the woods who escapes from wolves; it’s a thrilling bedtime story for the child, a tale that never loses its excitement with each repeated telling. Dave, played by Tim Robbins like some…
Veronica Guerin isn’t at all a bad movie, and some kind things will be said about it here. But cynical appraisal also has its place, so we’ll cover that aspect as well. Even before that, a significant disclaimer: Since this review is being written for several New Times publications, which…
Directed by. Screenplay by,. Starring.
It’s beginning to look as though the films of George Clooney are less the works of fiction than the products of documentary crews following around the actor leading his enviable life. In film after film, he’s seen dining with beautiful actresses in gorgeous surroundings perfectly lighted for an evening’s seduction:…
The opening credits insist Kill Bill: Volume 1 is “Quentin Tarantino’s 4th film,” when it’s actually his 3.5th; it’s too incomplete to be measured as a whole, half a movie waiting for a proper ending due to arrive in the next volume in February. Until then we’ll have to contemplate…
Having already produced a book (Disco Bloodbath) and directed a “shockumentary” (Party Monster) about the “Club Kids” scene that rose brightly and fell murderously in New York in the late ’80s/early ’90s, filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (The Eyes of Tammy Faye) would seem to have said their piece…
If your name ends in a vowel and your people came over in steerage a hundred years ago, you will almost certainly find yourself in the kitchen these days, wooden spoon in hand, plum tomatoes draining in the colander, thoughts drifting between sweet nostalgia and the malaise of indefinable loss…
Out of Time, in which we’re to believe 48-year-old Denzel Washington and 32-year-old Sanaa Lathan were high school sweethearts, demands its audience ignore all manner of implausibilities. Chief among them is the behavior of Washington’s Matt Whitlock, chief of police in a tiny coastal town just outside of Miami, who…
D irector Richard Linklater’s School of Rock imagines, sort of, what might have become of voluble rock snob Barry the morning after his grand finale in Stephen Frears’ adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity — after his Marvin Gaye impersonation had faded and been forgotten in the daylight hours, after…
The script for The Rundown has lingered for more than a decade and was originally a Patrick Swayze vehicle, well before those wheels fell off. Universal Studios revived it because the studio knows what it has in Dwayne Johnson: a gold mine made of bulging biceps, a man who was…
The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes’ best-selling travel memoir Under the Tuscan Sun is a virtual case study of Hollywood’s irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take. Mayes’ 1996 book is a nicely written, carefully observed meditation on buying a decrepit Italian villa…
Somewhere in the deepest mists of Eastern Europe lies an urban hell shrouded in shadowy azure, where darkly enchanted, black-leather-clad denizens leap about to thudding techno, blurting outrageously melodramatic proclamations in randomly accented English. It’s The Crow meets The Matrix, it’s goth-core tricked out with wire stunts, and, most important,…
Secondhand Lions is cornier than the cornfields spread out in front of the dilapidated rural Texas manse inhabited by Robert Duvall and Michael Caine, playing grumpy old brothers with mismatched accents. (Caine, in fact, has accent enough for three actors — one English, another maybe Texan, another perhaps Australian.) There…
Never mind the trailers, which advertise Cold Creek Manor as some kind of horror-thriller, complete with the image of a hand emerging from the shadows to quiet (yes!) Sharon Stone. Mike Figgis, most recently a maker of unwatchable art-house fare shot on digital video (Timecode, Hotel) that suggests a fetish…
Tidy little Montecarlo, Georgia, which is the setting for Jonathan Lynn’s The Fighting Temptations, is a perfect movie fantasy town. At the picturesque train station, the ticket agent will call you a taxi or serve you a plate of Southern fried chicken. The house band at the local nightclub is…
When Nicolas Cage plays still and sullen — a man possessed by self-loathing and melancholy in Adaptation, say, or the landlocked angel in City of Angels — he comes off as drowsy. He disappears into those roles like a head plopped in a fluffy pillow, and it doesn’t quite suit…
God bless Johnny Depp. For the second time this year, the man has almost single-handedly redeemed an action movie that would otherwise be indistinguishable from the pack. Introduced right up front in Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico, he’s first seen dressed up like Prince in purple glasses…
