According to various unreliable sources on the Internet, Just Married co-stars Ashton Kutcher (forever to be known as the star of Dude, Where’s My Car?) and Brittany Murphy (who wears way too much scary makeup even when she isn’t playing mental patients who’ll never tell) are now actually planning to…
It’s easy to presume that About Schmidt isn’t much of a movie, since its protagonist, Warren Schmidt, isn’t much of anything. He’s portrayed by Jack Nicholson, but the actor is actually someone who looks like he used to be Jack Nicholson. This Warren, this rinky-dink actuary banished to the wasteland…
There have been other films dealing with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland — some very good — but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best. Of course, it starts out with a huge advantage: The 69-year-old Polanski is probably the only…
People in show biz do very weird things to prove their credibility. Starlets pose for skin mags, actors start rock bands, rockers become sitcoms, rappers become tombstones and, now, in a heartwarming feature called Evelyn, James Bond wants us to believe he’s an Everyman. The lovely thing is, it works…
Francis Ford Coppola dreamed of doing an accurate Pinocchio film, but legal battles took that away from him. Walt Disney’s version is a classic, but omits a huge amount of material from the original book and Disneyfies what remains. And others have tried, over the years, though it’s best to…
Everything about Catch Me If You Can, the loosely based-on-fact tale of a teenager who swindled millions while posing as, among other things, a Pan Am pilot, a doctor and a lawyer, is breezy and easy to swallow. Its maker, Steven Spielberg, hasn’t had so much fun in two decades,…
Al Capone himself probably couldn’t kill Chicago. The bawdy Kander and Ebb musical has been charming theater audiences since 1975 with its gleefully jaundiced view of life, and Rob Marshall’s inventive movie version likely will win a lot of new friends for the stage-struck murderess Roxie Hart, her sharpie lawyer…
Here’s a tricky little movie to review, as it’s going to divide audiences fairly drastically. Conservatives, especially black ones like Larry Elder and Ken Hamblin, will likely laud Antwone Fisher as a heroic story of a triumphant black man who conquers his inner demons and outer obstacles (of which skin…
Based on the true story of three young Aboriginal girls who walked 1,500 miles across the Australian outback to be reunited with their mothers, Rabbit-Proof Fence might well be subtitled True Grit in recognition of the courage and single-minded determination that drove the trio to undertake such a perilous journey…
Fantasy is at its best when it ennobles our reality, and in this year’s cinema no fantasy towers above The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The second installment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s dark and delightful yarn is here adapted just as handily as last year’s The Fellowship of the…
Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged in the mid-19th-century caldrons of unbridled greed, ethnic violence and civil war. It means to give us the city as wild frontier — without the usual cowboy hats. This…
Adaptation is the most overrated movie of the year (of all time?) by people who should know better. Film critics have either been suckered in by its gimmick (Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman can’t adapt a book for the big screen and winds up writing himself into his screenplay,…
It had to happen eventually: the adorably scattered Sandra Bullock and the self-deprecatingly charming Hugh Grant paired in a romantic comedy. As predictable as Miss Congeniality and almost as broad, Two Weeks Notice is an undemanding, by-the-numbers romance that is made bearable only by the presence of its two ingratiating…
Of all the movies you could be spending your December with — and there are many good choices, from Oscar-bait to better-than-expected sequels like Santa Clause 2 — why would you want to end up at Drumline? “Hey, dear, wanna go see the new Scorsese flick, or maybe one of…
Maid in Manhattan, in which Jennifer Lopez goes from pauper to princess, comes not from a screenplay but from a handful of self-help books and fairy tales and fashion magazines cut and pasted together in a glossy montage committed to celluloid. Characters, made from the highest-grade cardboard and resplendent in…
If you already know that female and male humans employ somewhat different strategies for relieving themselves of liquid waste, you’re in for no surprises in Rob Schneider’s latest look-at-me-I’m-so-cute comedy, The Hot Chick. Every few minutes a dumb pee-pee gag rears its little head, usually as Schneider bumbles around half-clad…
After garnering a bushel of positive critical notices less than two months ago for his work in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler now squanders his newfound respectability with another one of his cookie-cutter “lovable loser” vehicles, Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights. Only two elements set this apart from…
The terror is real — that of Miramax executives, anyway, as their Dimension division refused to screen its new creature feature Wes Craven Presents: They for critics, lest we go all crazy and tell you about it. But just to show a sporting attitude, let’s offer up some potentially useful…
The smart sci-fi fan knows that, technically speaking, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris is not a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film at all, but rather a newly filmed interpretation of a Polish novel penned by Stanislaw Lem. Nonetheless, the new film stands in a mighty big shadow. If someone attempted to make…
It’s doubtful Robert Louis Stevenson imagined his Treasure Island populated by cyborgs and scored to Goo Goo Dolls outtakes; and one has to wonder what the author would have made of his characters being turned into talking and walking dogs and cats who, gulp, copulate and reproduce mangy hybrids. Far…
The tragedy is that even those who should have known better didn’t know at all; how could they? The names they sought weren’t listed, their contributions weren’t cited, their influences weren’t credited, so even those who spent hours and days and forevers wearing out the grooves in search of holy-mother-of-God…
