William H. Macy’s plain-vanilla features and hangdog screen demeanor have served him well. Who could resist him as the clueless car dealer who hatched the disastrous kidnapping plot in Fargo, or as the distraught husband of a frisky porn star in Boogie Nights? A splendid character actor with a gift…
This year’s British assault on the Yank funnybone is a spirited, hard-trying farce called Calendar Girls, plucked straight out of a 1999 headline and dolled up with all the heartwarming charm we’ve come to expect from recent films made by our former rulers. Essentially a chick flick for middle-aged women…
Not unlike Kurt Vonnegut, J.R.R. Tolkien remains a massively popular author whose seemingly “morbid” work often reflects surviving the horrors of war, firsthand. Tolkien was also a devout Catholic — a demographic gleefully bashed by the entertainment industry in countless movies, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. The question is, who profits…
Remember the Farrelly brothers? Makers of Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary? Known for crossing the line of good taste and making fun of the differently abled, but with a sufficiently sweet streak that they could be forgiven for such? Kinda popular until Trey Parker and Matt Stone…
“Here, go ahead and light this joint, man, let me tell you my idea . . .” Flick, flick . . . puff, inhale, hold it, eyes bug out, holding it, exhale, coughing fit . . . “Okay, we got a screenwriter with a pretty good feature film under his…
Sorrow sprouts wings and flies in Jim Sheridan’s radiant new film In America, which pits the pain and grief of unimaginable loss against the resilience of the human heart. In this semi-autobiographical tale from the writer-director of My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father, a working-class Irish…
In his career as a Hollywood action figure, Tom Cruise has been dressed in some pretty hip outfits — a macho fighter pilot’s sleek leather jacket, a NASCAR driver’s logo-speckled fire suit, assorted silken Armani sports jackets, even black cape and fangs. So it’s a bit unsettling to see the…
Honey is one of those movies you will see (or not, whatever), swear you’ve seen before in several other guises and incarnations, then immediately forget you ever saw to begin with. Its story, about a would-be dancer trying to plot her escape from mean streets (or mean movie sets and…
Well into the third decade of the AIDS epidemic, films like Longtime Companion, An Early Frost and Philadelphia, as strange as it may be to imagine, have become period pieces. People aren’t expiring quite so quickly anymore, thanks to new anti-viral drug “cocktails.” Lives that in years past would have…
Like the Disneyland ride upon which it’s based, The Haunted Mansion opens with a spooky voice intoning, “Welcome, foolish mortals!” Scary objects, like candelabra and tarot cards, float in front of the screen, and we’re then treated to a nicely wordless sequence from the 19th century, a Romeo and Juliet-type…
Michael Crichton seems pretty clever. The doctor-screenwriter-novelist digs odd history (Eaters of the Dead, a.k.a. The 13th Warrior), clashing cultures (Rising Sun) and cutting-edge biotechnology (Jurassic Park, and virtually his whole canon). His 1999 novel and its inevitable new movie adaptation, Timeline, both attempt to deliver all this and more,…
In director Ron Howard’s The Missing, Tommy Lee Jones’ Samuel Jones takes his place among the oldest archetypes in the Western genre — the white man who has lived among the Indians ’til he has at last become one. This plot device, used in Hombre and Nevada Smith and myriad…
It took four years, but finally Dark Castle — Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver’s horror division that puts out a movie a year around Halloween — has made something that’s genuinely scary. It may be no coincidence that this time around, Silver has scored a higher-profile cast than usual, and…
If you’re hankering for a movie about an awkward yet lovable “outsider” type who wanders into a pastel mockup of Middle America and cajoles the straights to get saucy, you’re in luck. It’s called Edward Scissorhands, and it’s been available on video for years. Renting it will absolve you of…
Russell Crowe to his agent: “More Oscar-bait. Now.” Agent, considering his cut of Crowe’s $20 million payday: “Yes, sir.” A possible scenario, anyway. Thus, Crowe is back in another iconic, self-serious performance, and his beefy mug will stare down upon us from this season’s heroic movie posters until Tom Cruise…
In the annals of fraud and fakery, a discredited ex-magazine reporter named Stephen Glass will likely wind up a mere footnote. The people who forge van Goghs and the con artists who bilk naive grandmothers out of their life savings (not to mention certain fast-dancing corporate executives) even more richly…
The first question that comes to mind upon hearing that the Looney Tunes are back and, indeed, in action, is the following: Back from where? Who Framed Roger Rabbit married the Tunes to live action in 1988, and Space Jam (a 90-minute Michael Jordan commercial) featured the Tunes as recently…
Not terribly long ago in an uninhabitable galaxy called Burbank, a generally astute movie studio founded by four Polish siblings alienated a young hotshot filmmaker. The studio was Warner Bros. and the project was a cold, disturbing, highly stylized vision of a mechanized future called THX-1138. Not wholly original, but…
‘Tis the season and all that jive; beneath the tree this first week of November you will find two films set during the final week of December, when sugarplums and candy canes go on sale at the concessions stand for all the good little girls and boys’ parents to buy…
Pieces of April, made by playwright turned novelist turned screenwriter turned director Peter Hedges, could be confused for a compendium reel of someone’s home movies. Shot on digital video using existing light, it looks like something assembled by a film student for a final and lost soon after, left behind…
With its soundtrack stockpiled with songs of romance and Christmas and a screenplay by the man who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, it’s appropriate that Love Actually feels less like a brand-new movie than a greatest-hits compendium. It offers nothing new and instead…
Remember that silly little-girl version of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally . . . , snuffling “I’m difficult!” through a charming tantrum? Well, make it a point to greet Ryan’s new incarnation in the psychosexual thriller In the Cut. Post-Crystal, post-Hanks and even post-husband Dennis Quaid (toward whom…
