Faced with yet another sports movie in which lovably troubled kids triumph over adversity, it’s easier to scoff and grumble than to feel even partially uplifted. So let’s do it — let’s scoff and grumble. At least for a moment. In Brian Robbins’ Hardball, a degenerate gambler who owes bent-nosed,…
A year after Cameron Crowe climbed back aboard the tour bus for one last spin through rock’s golden days of giddy hedonism and phony heroism comes a film set a decade later, in the mid-1980s, when the parties got harder, the music louder and the musicians prettier. The world of…
The indie Let It Snow was originally titled Snow Days. Both titles are terrible — they suggest either a schmaltzy ’40s-era holiday musical or else a kiddy comedy from Nickelodeon. The movie is, rather, a derivative but likable romantic comedy, sort of a bus-and-truck When Harry Met Sally . …
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Cuddly outsider #63178D, please step forward. Well, my goodness, look at you! You are so alternative, so fringe, so punk! So artsy and alienated! So utterly aimless and oozing with angst! Tell us, girl, what ought we to call you? Edwina Scissorhands?That’s one easily justified reaction a viewer may take…
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Anybody with siblings knows that, while birth order isn’t the determining factor in how we develop, it certainly provides a convenient excuse for any number of undesirable character traits. The eldest child can be insufferably responsible and bossy, lording it over his or her younger siblings, or wild and crazy,…
Woody Allen’s latest romp through Old New York combines (among other things) a skirt-chasing insurance investigator with the charm of a rodent, a wisecracking Vassar grad who takes no guff and a nightclub hypnotist in a sequined turban who doubles as a major jewel thief. The year is 1940. The…
Beware the filmmaker who looks through the camera’s lens and sees only himself on the other side, blowing kisses. He’s the fool who confuses “personal vision” with “jacking off,” and he’ll try every time to convince you there’s something meaningful and imaginative in the shallow and hackneyed. He is so…
There is something fairly amusing about this title, Apocalypse Now Redux. Think about it: Prophetic Disclosure Presently Shows Up Again Newfangled. Of course, in the 10 years since the release of the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, we’ve been taught to revere the legend of Francis Ford Coppola…
Times certainly have changed. Twenty years ago, a musical about an East German transsexual rock singer would have premièred in one of New York’s off-off Broadway theaters or cabarets, run for a couple of weeks and remained the pleasant memory of a select few. But when John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig…
During this cinematic Summer of Dumb, it would be all too easy to celebrate half-assed cleverness as a virtue, especially when proffered by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who elevated the gross-out to an art form (or, more likely, fart form) in Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary. Osmosis Jones, one…
It was about two years ago that there was real hope for the horror movie coming once again due for a decent revival. The Blair Witch Project made people remember how to fear the unknown, and remakes of The Haunting and House on Haunted Hill promised a return to the…
The most telling scene in Rush Hour 2 comes during the closing-credits montage of outtakes that have become the most enjoyable part of Jackie Chan’s Hollywood outings. Chris Tucker — the poor man’s Eddie Murphy, who now pockets more than the real thing per picture — and Chan have just…
After winning five separate audience awards and other honors at various gay and lesbian film festivals over the past year, Thomas Bezucha’s Big Eden has finally opened in general release. You don’t have to be an expert on the history of gay cinema to see why — or even to…
There are scenes in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes redo that are so hysterical they drown out minutes’ worth of dialogue that follows, which is hardly a knock. Indeed, the film is often so comical, so ridiculous in that self-aware, wink-wink sort of way, that it plays like a…
If there’s any justice in moviedom, this summer’s feel-good hit will be an unassuming Dutch comedy called Everybody’s Famous! Defying long odds, writer-director Dominique Deruddere has taken a couple of shopworn subjects — the public obsession with celebrity and the ineptitude of amateur criminals — and parlayed them into an…
When last we spotted indie icons Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau onscreen together, they were knocking back fruit-flavored martinis and chasing L.A. skirt in the inventive Gen-X hit Swingers. The goofy charm of that phenomenon now gives way, sad to report, to a labored fringes-of-the-mob comedy called Made, in which…
Festering somewhere between an after-school special and kiddie porn lies this frank but heinously melodramatic open wound from veteran Canadian director Léa Pool (Emporte-moi). Adapted by screenwriter Judith Thompson from the novel The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan, Lost and Delirious is about girl joy and girl sorrow, girl…
If you’re enthralled by watching acclaimed actors meandering purposelessly around Montreal, this may be the summer sensation you’ve been hankering for. Heck, the good folks at Paramount obviously believe in this one (enough to have kept it safe from our clutches until too late for timely publication), and the requisite…
A third Jurassic Park movie was, of course, inevitable, given that the second shattered box office records (it also shattered the conventional notion that any movie starring Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore and a bunch of dinosaurs had to be at least somewhat interesting). But when you have one of the…
There’s plenty of French star power in The Closet (Le Placard). This comedy must have been a fairly big deal in the Land of the Heavy Sauce; it stars Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu and Thierry Lhermitte, and was written and directed by Francis Veber. In U.S. terms, this is roughly…
