It happens so often these days. A comedy opens with clever jokes, endearing characters, and an enjoyably brisk pace, all of which put you at ease. This’ll be fun, you think, settling into your chair. Someone trustworthy is driving, so let’s enjoy the ride. And then, just when you thought…
It is often written of Harrison Ford that he’s the most profitable movie star in history, to the tune of some $3.8 billion in box-office receipts worldwide. Of course, once one subtracts from that total the first three Star Wars movies, the Indiana Jones trilogy, and two outings as CIA…
Let’s get right to the point: If you are the type of person who enjoys seeing attractive naked girls meet a hideously graphic demise, there’s a scene in Final Destination 3 that will wear out the pause and rewind buttons on your DVD remote a few months from now. Mega-stereotype…
That Curious George existed at all — much less as a franchise, an icon enduring some 65 years — was a result of “happy circumstance,” wrote Houghton Mifflin publisher Anita Silvey with some understatement in 1991, upon the 50th-anniversary publication of The Complete Adventures of Curious George. Silvey and critic…
The best thing about Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden) is the way it draws on very contemporary fears without ever mentioning them. The War on Terror era has given us all new things to be afraid of; some fear being prey for terrorists, while others fear the government’s response, but both…
This is not George Lazenby making his doomed run at James Bond, or even Mel Gibson presuming to play Hamlet. This is serious heresy, combined with a touch of felonious assault. It has evidently not occurred to Steve Martin that, just as there is only one Eiffel Tower, there is…
The studied British theatricality and sharp wit of Mrs. Henderson Presents are likely to make it a favorite among nostalgiaphiles, theater buffs, and the tea-and-crumpets set. Sailing along on the strength of another showy performance by Judi Dench, Stephen Frears’ period frolic is this year’s Being Julia, adorned with the…
Anthony Hopkins lends style points to any movie in which he appears. The thing may be a dog, but the actor who brought the gruesome psychopath Hannibal Lecter to life and got deep inside a repressed English butler always gives us something fascinating to behold. The depth and gravity of…
Here’s the first thing that’s audacious about What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole, the second installment in what has become a franchise of oversimplified science, outlandish speculation, and woo-woo spirituality: It’s not a sequel. It’s a revision. Shamelessly, Rabbit Hole uses extensive footage from the first film, including the…
A Good Woman, Mike Barker’s adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play Lady Windermere’s Fan, has been gathering dust for some time. It played the Toronto Film Festival in the fall of 2004 before opening in 2005 in every country in the world except this one. Such dawdling doesn’t bode well…
January has earned its reputation as the month in which studios unload all their cheapie horror flicks, but February is the month when we invariably get yet another middle-of-the-road black-urban-professional romantic comedy. (It’s both Black History and Valentine’s month, hence the logic.) In that regard, Something New is anything but…
There is evidently no limit to the sacrifices actors will make for their art. If you thought beautiful Charlize Theron went the distance by transforming herself into a bloated, scowling murderess for Monster, just wait ’til you and the kids get a load of Emma Thompson in the darkly amusing…
No one has ever mistaken Rocky Balboa for an officer and a gentleman, but that’s just about what we get in the numbingly predictable and none-too-stirring Annapolis, an underdog-makes-good boxing movie stuffed inside what amounts to a U.S. Navy recruiting pitch, with a dash of Good Will Hunting tossed in…
With the release of The White Countess, the much-honored Merchant Ivory canon is complete. The Bombay-born producer Ismail Merchant died in May 2005 at age 68, and whatever direction his longtime collaborator and life companion, director James Ivory, now chooses, the working partnership that gave us a dozen elegantly furnished…
America — and, by extension, Hollywood — has an obsession with innocence and the loss thereof. Every generation has that Moment When Everything Changed, from Pearl Harbor to JFK’s assassination to 9/11. The impact takes a while to settle in, then people forget again, and future generations are similarly traumatized…
The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen’s finest film since . . . oh, let’s see . . . Bullets Over Broadway, is it? Or perhaps Deconstructing Harry? Or maybe Sweet and Lowdown? One forgets where the good stuff left off, because there’s been so much bad stuff…
Albert Brooks, the once-funny comic turned filmmaker, plays a once-funny comic turned filmmaker named Albert Brooks in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which he also wrote and directed. It’s the second time Brooks has played himself, more or less; the first was in 1979, when he made Real…
We popcorn-chomping hitchhikers never know who will pick us up on the roadside. In Flirting With Disaster, it was a neurotic Manhattan adoptee on a nationwide search for his biological parents. The desert-parched heroines of Thelma & Louise brought us along as they raised hell en route to their doom…
Over the years, moviegoers who double as sports fans have had ample opportunity to pick and choose their favorite miracle — Shoeless Joe Jackson emerging from the tall corn, Rudy suiting up for Notre Dame, Rocky going the distance with Apollo Creed, the U.S. hockey team taking down the Russkies…
Over the centuries, the legend of Tristram and Iseult has fueled the derring-do of King Arthur, aroused Richard Wagner’s operatic thunder, driven poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Edwin Arlington Robinson to the heights of passion, and helped stock the back streets of Manhattan with companies of leaping Jets…
What’s an unemployed former superspy to do? Faced with a midlife career change, suave Pierce Brosnan seems to have chosen wry self-mockery, reinventing himself as a scruffy, fallen James Bond surrogate, sometimes still furnished with a license to kill and a certain gift for cool, but far more likely now…
When a movie promises that a character played by Queen Latifah may well die during the course of the action, one might hope that the movie in question is Hostel, so that she could be beaten a few times and then dismembered, ideally by someone who sat through The Cookout,…
