Refreshingly, the biggest wonder about the new Arnold Schwarzenegger ride is not that human cloning has become a reality, or that the America of the future (“sooner than you think,” as an opening caption ominously suggests) very closely resembles present-day Vancouver, Canada. It’s not even that technological advances appear to…
The soon-to-be-talked-about sensations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream include three or four flashing, near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil; an extreme close-up of heroin cooking in a teaspoon, and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst…
November may mean Thanksgiving to most of you, but in the film biz it means a rush of “serious” films trying to gouge an impression into the short memories of Oscar voters. This shouldn’t be a bad thing, but since the relationship between “Oscar” and “actual interesting filmmaking” is nearly…
Early in Spanish director Carlos Saura’s stunning new film, the 82-year-old protagonist, the great 19th-century painter Francisco de Goya, awakens from a disturbing dream and rises to see an apparition of his lost love, the Duchess of Alba. Following her down a surrealistically white hallway, he suddenly finds himself outdoors…
The wonder of Solas, the latest in a growing list of remarkable Spanish films that have recently made their way to the U.S. (Butterfly and Goya in Bordeaux are also well worth seeing), is a courtly old gentleman referred to simply as “Neighbor.” Played to absolute perfection by Carlos Álvarez-Novoa,…
The Legend of Bagger Vance
Charlie’s Angels
Urbania
The Opportunists
Although it must have been a no-brainer to make a sequel to The Blair Witch Project, it was hard to imagine an intelligent follow-up to a film that culminated in the apparent death of all the principals. Romeo and Juliet 2, anyone? Hamlet Returns? But given the inevitability of Book…
Somewhere near the halfway mark of The Broken Hearts Club, the latest gay romantic comedy (they really seem to be piling up these days), comes a not-unexpected scene in which a rock-solidly avuncular/maternal older man (John Mahoney) tells a tremulously insecure younger one (Ben Weber) the “message” that’s at this…
Any moviemaker who ventures into the sewers of New York City corruption will find Sidney Lumet’s wet footprints. In classics like The Pawnbroker, Serpico and Q&A, this streetwise film master has explored, among other things, individual morality in the face of big-city vice, and individual transcendence of ethnic conflict. Other…
To put it mildly, it is uncomfortable and embarrassing to have one’s cynical ass whipped by a huge, hulking Hallmark card, and this is exactly the sensation one takes away from Mimi Leder’s Pay It Forward. Not that the near-total emotional submission isn’t preceded by a knock-down, drag-out battle for…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, which is about a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat brick row houses, laundry flaps sadly in the breeze…
The first thing to know about The Legend of Drunken Master is that there is no Legend of Drunken Master, not really. Miramax/Dimension’s new Jackie Chan release is a repackaging of the star’s 1994 Drunken Master II.This is not inherently a bad thing. Nearly all Jackie Chan buffs — count…
Onscreen, the giant lips appear and begin to sing a catalogue of monster-movie references. In front of the screen, illuminated by hand-held lights from the audience, stands an incredibly thin, pale young woman — she looks like a more spectral Winona Ryder. She begins to sing along with the lips…
Richard Gere, as Dallas gynecologist Sullivan Travis, has never been more likable onscreen, perhaps because he’s never been more human, more vulnerable, more there. After so many years of so many duds, after so many years of playing ladies’ man to little girls (and the recent Autumn in New York…
Too often baseball players are reduced to statistics, hollow numbers that resonate with the fetishist who drifts off to sleep counting home runs and career batting averages. Baseball demands such precision: It’s a team sport, yes, but ultimately it’s man against man, record against record, history against history. Look no…
There’s no getting around it: The Contender is the most offensive movie of the year. It pretends to be high-minded even while it slings mud and semen at the audience in its attempt to make its bludgeoning point, which is: If a woman wants to ascend to one of the…
With global overpopulation neatly intertwining with the advent of the home video camera, we have been afforded, as a species, several near-miracles. For instance, when supersonic jets explode, or when mobs impolitely loot and riot in urban centers, the common consumer can now document the event and sell it to…
Meet the Parents has just enough class to make for prestige pop: Robert De Niro as star, Randy Newman as composer, Blythe Danner as wallpaper, Ben Stiller as schmuck. It has just enough “comedy” to qualify as crowd-pleaser: sight gags (Stiller chasing a cat across a roof before setting fire…
There’s plenty of campaign rhetoric about working families, but who ever talks about one of the biggest problems of the working man today — massive corporate downsizing? In the era of record profits and welfare “reform,” all that matters is having any kind of job, regardless of whether it’s the…
