Ross Hunter, dead seven years, hasn't been this alive at the movies since the 1950s and '60s, when he produced some of the weepiest melodramas and cheeriest romantic comedies ever to barely stick to the screen. His ghost has been wandering up and down the aisles ever since Don Simpson...
"Phoenix, MEXICO!"² Lupillo Rivera's shout is swallowed up by a deafening roar from the tightly packed audience in front of him. The singer grins at what he sees. Men in cowboy hats and women wearing tight jeans and halter tops fill Club 602, a large nightspot in west Phoenix and...
In 1997's The Apostle, Robert Duvall took on a subject near and dear to his heart: Southern Pentecostal preachers. No one would make the film for him, so he went ahead and directed it himself, garnering much acclaim from media both secular and religious for his warts-and-all portrayal of a...
Among Anger Management's copious flaws is the fact that its premise doesn't wash. Adam Sandler's Dave Buznik, a designer of catalogues for overweight-cat clothing, isn't really angry at all; he's just a self-loathing, introverted mess whose insecurities date back to a crowded street party in Brooklyn circa 1978, when he...
It's been nearly three years since Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Perhaps it's in the spirit of spreading things around that Spain has not nominated Almodóvar's latest, Talk to Her, as its entry this year. Certainly it's hard to imagine any...
The Hunted pits Tommy Lee Jones versus Benicio Del Toro in a battle of hand-to-hand, wit-to-wit fighting skills. Frankly, my money would be on Tommy Lee any old day: He may be old, but he's a tough geezer who looks like he could mop the floor with Benicio. (Also, frankly:...
I'm feeling like that guy in Mystic Pizza, the cozy Julia Roberts movie from 1988. Remember him? He played "The Everyday Gourmet," a TV restaurant critic who traveled to Mystic, Connecticut, just for a bite of Mystic Pizza pie. He was endearingly pompous when he arrived, making high theater of...
You know Internet dating's become totally mainstream when Disney cranks out a bland comedy featuring a randomly selected pair of mismatched stars to take on the subject. Bearing the unwieldy and meaningless title Bringing Down the House, said comedy is predicated on the biggest pitfall of cyber-flirting, the idea that...
It's usually right about this time of year that film critics, especially those of advancing years, begin to feel a slow chill of dread creep up their spines. Suppressing that urge, they generally find it quickly replaced by a sudden rush of sneering condescension and smug mock-martyrdom. "Oh no!" they...
Rob Evans faces his basketball team in the locker room at Wells Fargo Arena. It's mid-November, 10 days until opening night, and Arizona State University has just finished a dress rehearsal for the 2002-2003 season, an intersquad contest in which the prospective starters got thumped by the second team. The...
March 21, 2003though he never knew the precise date, it was the very day Nile Southern had been waiting for longer than he cared to remember. On that day, Southern went into the Chelsea Mini-Storage facility on Manhattan's West Side, grabbed the largest dolly he could findit looked like a...
Dark Blue, according to its credits, is based upon a story by Los Angeles-born author James Ellroy, who pens grisly and guilt-ridden pulp-noir haiku that spread across hundreds of pages. Its screenplay was penned by copper caper fetishist David Ayer, a native Angelino with an affinity for Hollywood-dark stories that...
These are the dog days of January, the poor, put-upon month used by studios as a dumping ground for product considered too lethally toxic for release during those real moviegoing months December, say, when audiences are buzzed on two weeks of vacation and award-contenders do their Oscar striptease and reveal...
For the first time in my life, I'm wishing that I adored baseball. Specifically, baseball as played by two teams: the San Diego Padres and the Seattle Mariners. Because then I could be as excited as the rest of the world seems to be over the new, improved northwest Valley,...
Francis Ford Coppola dreamed of doing an accurate Pinocchio film, but legal battles took that away from him. Walt Disney's version is a classic, but omits a huge amount of material from the original book and Disneyfies what remains. And others have tried, over the years, though it's best to...
It all begins with the word. "I believe I may have a first sentence," murmurs Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman yes, really) to her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), commencing labor on her fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The year is 1921, but skillfully intercut segments illustrate that the book's heady emotional content...
Four of the top 10 films I saw this past year don't actually open in the U.S. until 2003, but they played at various film festivals during the year. By listing them here I not only alert readers to films they should watch out for in '03, but I also...
Of all the movies you could be spending your December with -- and there are many good choices, from Oscar-bait to better-than-expected sequels like Santa Clause 2 -- why would you want to end up at Drumline? "Hey, dear, wanna go see the new Scorsese flick, or maybe one of...
In all, a far better year than any in recent memory, so much so that it feels impolite and irresponsible to choose a mere 10 best among the annum's offerings. This list remained in flux 'til the last possible moment; five seconds ago it featured, among others, Signs, Full Frontal,...
The Year of Living Dangerously Cinema 2002 counterbalanced a treacherous world. In order to distill the essence of a year in cinema, one must first appraise the year itself. In a word, 2002 was about strife. Why? Mainly because some of our leaders are stupid and/or insane. (We've all been...
Let's start this movie year off right. Let's talk about women. In film, that is. Oftentimes, women in film act a lot like men in film. (Behold, an almost complete history of men in film, condensed into six words: talking smack and/or cracking skulls.) Of late, however, it has come...
