"T.I.A.," mutters Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), slouched across a bar in Sierra Leone. It is 1999. As the West obsesses over Clinton's blowjob, the West African nation is mired in a savage civil war. Our hero, a world-weary soldier of fortune, has struck up a conversation with Maddy Bowen (Jennifer...
No, the Virgin Mary doesn't get high on aerosol fumes, and Joseph doesn't ride in on a skateboard, but in most other respects, The Nativity Story is less of a departure for Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown director Catherine Hardwicke than one would have imagined. From our first glimpse of...
For Your Consideration pulls off the neat trick of skewering the movie industry while remaking it in its own image. The latest ensemble comedy by Christopher Guest and company may take place in Los Angeles, but its imaginative provenance lies somewhere between the La-La Lands of Entourage and Mulholland Dr...
"I guess it doesn't matter where I begin," reasons the adult narrator of Running With Scissors, the inevitable Oscar contender adapted from Augusten Burroughs' wacky memoir of coming out as a gay teen in his adoptive guru's carnivalesque commune. "No one is gonna believe me anyway." No one? In fact,...
Do artists actually see more than ordinary people? That's what my high school art teacher thought. So, apparently, does Nicole Kidman — or at least that's the way she plays Diane Arbus (1923-71) in the celebrated photographer's exceedingly curious "imaginary portrait," Fur. Kidman acted around a prosthetic proboscis to win...
Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater from Eric Schlosser's 2001 best-selling exposé of the McDonald's conspiracy, is an anti-commercial. It's designed to kill desire and deprogram the viewer's appetite. Linklater — who, along with Steven Soderbergh and Gus Van Sant, has staked out a particular outpost on the indie-studio...
Milestone in Motion Picture History: On Halloween weekend, 2006, Saw III grossed $34.3 million to become the Iraq war era's bloodiest chart-topping torture movie whose victims don't include Jesus of Nazareth. God or Jack Valenti only knows how this work of pure entertainment got away with an R rating "for...
Desert Stages Theatre's A Man of No ImportanceThere were so many reasons Desert Stages Theatre’s production of A Man of No Importance shouldn’t have worked. There was the cramped quarters of the company’s Actor’s Cafe space, into which this odd musical was squeezed. There was the mostly amateur cast, an unusual, time-bending script, and the curse that seems to blight most all […]
I Am a Sex Addict (IFC) Caveh Zahedi has made a movie of our times -- a strange mix of self-absorption, shamelessness in the pursuit of fame, and sex. Most shocking of all is that it works. Part fiction and documentary, confessional and comedy, the film traces the history of...
According to its publicity, bringing Robert Penn Warren's 1946 novel All the King's Men to the screen again has always been "a cherished dream" of executive producer James Carville — suggesting a lurking sense of payback frustration with the insubstantial legacy of the real populist Southerner Carville himself helped to...
Monster's Ball producer Lee Daniels makes his directorial debut with Shadowboxer, and it couldn't be clearer that he's trying to follow his previous formula for success. Oscar-caliber actors? Check. Interracial sex? Plenty. A violent demise or two, all in the service of character development? Oh yes. But Daniels maybe could...
The good news is that no theater company has announced a production of Cats this season. The bad news is that every single other tired old musical ever written will make its way to local stages over the next several months. Surprise! And welcome to the 2006-2007 theater season, which...
Borne Again In the other guy's shoes: I enjoyed the cartoon story by Jim Mahfood and Stephen Lemons ("The Passion of El Cristo," September 14), maybe because I spent 20 years on the west side of town in an area that was 95 percent Mexican. I met a gentle migrant...
Grand Prix (Warner Bros.) John Frankenheimer, as underrated as he was brilliant, made a racing picture in 1966 that's yet to be topped 40 years later. James Garner suffered through the director's churlish demands (which Frankenheimer reveals and owns up to, in archival footage on one of the documentaries here)...
Any second now, the nice folks over at the ariZoni Awards will start handing out bowling trophies to anyone who's come within three feet of a theater stage this season. Therefore, welcome to the Second Annual Robbie Awards, which celebrate actual accomplishments — and acknowledge some really low points —...
UC-Berkeley gymnast Dan Millman (Scott Mechlowicz) is one of the best at what he does, and he has it all: perfect abs, a big bulge in his crotch (the camera focuses on it early on), beautiful girlfriends, and the ability to balance full beer glasses on his feet. There's just...
Marlon Brando sleeps with the fishes. But before the legendary actor died, he worked one last job. Curiously, it was for a videogame. In The Godfather: The Game, Brando attempts to relive his Oscar-winning role as Don Vito Corleone. From the raspy voice to the drooping jowls, it's Vito, all...
We all want to believe that in even the most dangerous or frightening of situations, we would have the courage to stand up for our convictions -- that we would not name names, that we would not betray our friends or our ideals. Thank God, most of us will never...
At this late date, it's hard to tell one digitally rendered talking animal from another. Madagascar blends into Ice Age looks like A Shark's Tale sounds like Shrek might as well be A Bug's Life turns into Antz feels like Chicken Little could be Over the Hedge, which is really...
If you're a regular moviegoer with a gift for remembering unusual names, chances are you've started paying attention to Chiwetel Ejiofor, the black English actor with a chameleon's talent for disappearing into a role. You may not have caught his breakthrough performance in Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, but you...
The Darwinian theory that schlocksploitation must tighten its twist of the nuts with each new release will be tested strenuously for years -- or at least several weeks -- by Hard Candy. A pointedly s(l)ick cross between Oleanna and I Spit on Your Grave, thrown like raw meat to Lions...
It should be too early in the year to expect a good movie, let alone a great one; anything released prior to the Oscars is bound to be forgotten by spring. Yet here it is, the first -- dare we use the term that's all but been stripped of meaning...
