May opens with a scream, and a pair of scissors rammed into an eye socket. It continues with an opening montage of rapidly descending doll parts, which, as any Courtney Love fan can tell you, are inherently frightening yet simultaneously symbolic of fragility, or something. In between severed plastic limbs,…
The French government should officially proclaim actor Jean Rochefort a national treasure. A fixture of Gallic cinema for five decades, he is best known to American audiences for his comedic turns in such sex farces as Pardon Mon Affaire and The Closet, and of course his near-miss as Don Quixote,…
Another week, another remake — summer, that season of air-conditioned originality, must be upon us. Only unlike The In-Laws, which creaked into theaters last week, this latest updating of a decades-old action-comedy has two things going for it: Its forebear is a veddy British caper film little-seen in the United…
Matt Dillon learned his lesson early: Suck up to the Hollywood fat cats, and you’ll keep working. From his adolescent launch in the troubled-teen flick Over the Edge to dalliances with Francis Ford Coppola, Garry Marshall, Gene Hackman and Michael Douglas, the actor has been everybody’s boy. Now, as star,…
If grown-ups were meant to watch Walt Disney cartoons, God would have kept us all in the third grade for two or three decades. Still, somebody has to drive the SUV every time the Disneyfolk decide to lure the little ones down to the multiplex, and as long as the…
Alot of moviegoers see hyperactive Jim Carrey as the second coming of Jerry Lewis, but no one’s ever mistaken him for God. Clearly, he’d like to change that — at least for now, at least at the box office. Hey, you’d feel the same way if your last movie was…
The Chicago-based filmmaker Steve James rose to prominence in 1994 with Hoop Dreams, a gritty, uncomfortably intimate portrait of two inner-city kids who try to escape poverty and deprivation through basketball. Shot over four years, it was at once a stirring indictment of the social services bureaucracy, a tribute to…
Occasionally I can be convinced it’s the singer, not the song. I’ve no love for Britney Spears’ “Baby… One More Time,” but can’t get enough of Brit band Travis’ laconic redo of said iconic single, which squeezes out the then-teen temptress’ toxic sugar ’til it’s just a bittersweet lament. On…
Talk about tough acts to follow: The original 1999 Matrix, a critical and commercial smash, came almost as a revelation out of nowhere — if the combination of Joel Silver, Warner Bros., and roughly 60 million bucks qualifies as “nowhere.” After more than four years, The Matrix Reloaded — the…
Ross Hunter, dead seven years, hasn’t been this alive at the movies since the 1950s and ’60s, when he produced some of the weepiest melodramas and cheeriest romantic comedies ever to barely stick to the screen. His ghost has been wandering up and down the aisles ever since Don Simpson…
It’s usually right about this time of year that film critics, especially those of advancing years, begin to feel a slow chill of dread creep up their spines. Suppressing that urge, they generally find it quickly replaced by a sudden rush of sneering condescension and smug mock-martyrdom. “Oh no!” they…
Neil LaBute is back to his old self again, and the cinematic world is a better place for it. Honestly, what was he thinking when he made Possession? Did the charges of misogyny, still lingering from In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, get to him so…
Long ago Eddie Murphy had grown tired of Eddie Murphy parts: the fast-talking high-jiver, the preening put-on. Even before he began parodying himself in Bowfinger and Showtime and I Spy, the latter two perhaps accidentally, he accepted high-paying roles in low-rent movies that neutered and humiliated the character he had…
In last year’s Showtime movie turned theatrical release The Believer, audiences were introduced to a hate-filled young skinhead who seemed surprisingly knowledgeable about the arcana of the Jewish people he loathed so much. Turned out he was Jewish, and ultimately had to come to grips with his Torah upbringing and…
Just to admit this up front, my ideal concept of musical comedy involves Bryan Adams and Dave Matthews garroting each other onstage with their own damnable guitar strings. Nonetheless, even viewers with a more centrist appreciation of the genre may feel disappointed by this friendly new folk music curiosity called…
At some fast-approaching point in pop culture evolution, we’re due to hit Total Outsider Saturation, wherein everybody is an outsider and therefore there is no longer an outside. In the fleeting meantime, we have scintillating reminders of the struggle like X2: X-Men United, the latest bid from comic book land…
Filmmaker Terry Gilliam is no stranger to fiasco. After all, this is the human dynamo who saw 1989’s inventive (if sometimes incoherent) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen through a series of artistic and financial crises that would have landed most people in an asylum. But Gilliam’s encounter with the tale-spinning…
It is rare to find a film that defies one’s expectations as sweetly and satisfyingly as this coming-of-age comedy-drama from first-time feature writer-director Peter Sollett. The surprise isn’t in the plot — that would be too easy — but, rather, in the extraordinarily subtle and convincing ways the characters grow…
“I’m guessing this is pretty much the point of this movie, the reason it was made,” says Bob Hoag, sounding disappointed. The lead singer of Go Reflex and all-around impresario behind the thriving Mesa rock music scene is sitting in a theater at Superstition Springs Center. On screen, meanwhile, two…
In nature, living things prey upon each other all the time. Humanity, on the other hand, has a choice. It’s flouting this choice that turns on director Gaspar Noé. In his latest project, Irréversible, he basically swipes Christopher Nolan’s backward-narrative structure from Memento to tell a lurid tale of rape…
In Confidence, Edward Burns plays Jake Vig, a con artist whose body temperature runs a few degrees below normal. Even when things seem to go bad, when a would-be partner betrays him with a phone call or a seedy-greedy Dustin Hoffman lays maybe-gay and grubby paws all over him, Burns…
Imagine a large, dead Saint Bernard with its bones removed. Then visualize a hefty bellows inserted into it from behind, with a gorilla hopping up and down on it, causing the huge dog’s baglike corpse to twitch spasmodically, wheeze and croak. Voilà, this is today’s Nick Nolte. What’s amazing is…
