Nothing if not appropriate for summer blockbuster season, Werner Herzog’s latest feature, based on his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, offers a suitably fantastic tale of war, freedom, and fortitude, set in the jungles of Indochina and featuring an immigrant lad who turns out to be just as…
Did John Waters sell out? Or did our ever-more-metrosexual age merely render him irrelevant? Certainly long before Hairspray took up residence on the Great White Way in 2002, Waters had abdicated his throne as America’s elder statesman of underground smut in favor of a more lucrative career as a neutered…
I wanted to hate I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry. Truly I did. Two straight guys pretending to be gay (insert fiscal excuse here); been there, done that (insert all known variants on The Odd Couple here). Rampant homophobia hiding behind liberal pleas for tolerance — blech. And it’s…
The magic has returned to the Harry Potter franchise — albeit magic of the old, black variety. The darkest and most threatening, by far, of the five Potter films, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is also the only series entry outside of the third, Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry…
George Ratliff’s Joshua debuted at the Sundance Film Festival to raves from a particular breed of audience member: parents. Because no matter how hard Fox Searchlight’s trying to sell this movie as a horror picture — Rosemary’s Baby meets The Omen on the way to The Exorcist’s for a play…
Transformers twiddles its big, fat, stupid robotic thumbs for the better part of two hours before jabbing them into your eye socket and finger-fucking your brain in the last 20 minutes. Yes! It’s torture enough waiting for the iPhone and the second coming of Jesus without wondering when, exactly, this…
Dreams and the Internet, according to the psychotherapist superheroine of Satoshi Kon’s loopy Paprika, are “areas where the repressed conscious mind vents.” Is this not the ideal definition of movies as well? Kon’s head-tripping anime universe, which also includes Millennium Actress and Perfect Blue, is about as obsessive and personal…
“We’re Americans. We go into other countries when we need to. It’s tricky, but it works.” So declares Michael Moore in the midst of his new documentary, Sicko. Moore may be riffing on the war in Iraq, to name only our most recent intervention, but he’s actually referring to U.S…
Parked uneasily between sensitive indie and studio chick-flick, Lajos Koltai’s Evening makes star-studded hash of Susan Minot’s beautifully written, if emotionally constricted novel about a terminally ill woman trying to wrestle meaning out of the shards of her memories. Floating in and out of delirium in her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home,…
“Anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great.” So goes the personal mantra of the late celebrity chef Auguste Gusteau, whose disembodied spirit materializes, Jiminy Cricket-style, to guide the rodent hero of Brad Bird’s Ratatouille toward his goal of gastronomic excellence. He also seems to be guiding Bird,…
It takes Bruce Willis a while to get warmed up. He’s always just a bit below room temperature — a cool brother, dig, dating back to his Moonlighting days as a private dick belting out “Tighten Up” while going undercover as a man of the cloth in Wayfarer shades. He’s…
Do we need another movie about the liberal West watching in horror as something that befalls helpless bystanders all over Africa, Asia, and the Middle East happens to one of us? Yes, we do. Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was murdered by Islamic jihadists in Pakistan while researching…
Mike Enslin, the travel writer played by John Cusack in 1408, could use a better travel agent. Every hotel room in which he finds himself booked is said to be occupied by the ghost of some suicidal creep or a murderous goon who left behind a pile of bodies in…
Evan Almighty, the follow-up to Bruce Almighty, is the work of an angry God. At 89 minutes that last a lifetime, it’s a sanctimonious sitcom dolled up as the most expensive comedy ever made — $175 mil, so they say — and marks an unfortunate low point in the history…
Night Watch, you may recall, told of an ancient feud waged between the forces of Light and Dark. In the interest of maintaining a fragile détente, they organized themselves, as Russian super-combatants are wont to do, into complex bureaucracies, with the Night Watch heroes monitoring the vampiric shenanigans of the…
So lame it’s . . . cool? Nancy Drew, writer-director Andrew Fleming’s attempt to jump-start a new Warner Bros. franchise, is a movie flaunting a most obvious demographic strategy — a teen flick with a sensibility, or at least sense of humor, that’s most definitely parental. Invented in 1930 by…
Lowest Common Denominator-ism writ large and engraved in stone like the Ten Commandments according to Cecil B. DeMille, the Hollywood blockbuster is often an allegory for itself. Walt Disney, the notoriously litigious studio that successfully changed the nation’s copyright laws to protect its trademark Mickey Mouse but more recently declared,…
Mystery man of the long-ago Australian new wave, Ray Lawrence evidently has grown less finicky. Lawrence, now 59, made his feature debut with the phantasmagoric Bliss, the famous flop of the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. He then licked his wounds and directed TV commercials for 16 years before reappearing with…
The idea of “getting axed” is exploited for maximum double-entendre value in Severance, a grisly horror-comedy from the U.K. that has its tongue planted so firmly in its cheek that you half expect it to pop out the other side. Yes, heads (and, in one indelible bit, a severed foot)…
There is a moment in “Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers,” the 14th episode of the brilliant but canceled television series Freaks and Geeks, when gangly, bespectacled, picked-last-in-gym-class high school freshman Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr) arrives home from school, makes himself a grilled cheese sandwich, and sits down to watch an…
“I think the public doesn’t care about reviews,” says Eli Roth, writer-director of Hostel Part II, which — surprise! — isn’t being shown to the press before it opens Friday on more than 2,500 screens. Still, the 35-year-old perpetrator of high-grossing “torture porn” does appreciate critical kindness when he sees…
Eli Roth is obviously a poseur, but on the evidence of Hostel: Part II, he’s also kind of a pussy. Anyone can string a naked woman up by the ankles and slit her throat. Although I acknowledge it takes a little extra something to position a Eurotrash villainess beneath her…
