The sex is real in John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus; only the setting — an animated New York cityscape, benignly watched over by a fluorescent Statue of Liberty — is fake. To an extent, that describes the movie: a sexually daring, dramatically timid roundelay that employs unsimulated twosomes, threesomes, and even…
American Dreamz (Universal) Till this, Paul Weitz had a stellar filmography, a career in ascension: American Pie (good), About a Boy (great), In Good Company (absolutely perfect). But this, er, satire about a dumb American president (Dennis Quaid, channeling whassisname) trying to get smart, a cynical wannabe singer trying to…
In its 21 years, the crusty Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival evolved from an intimate little affair for South Florida cinephiles to the World’s Longest Film Festival, recognized as such by the Guinness Book of World Records. This year, however, director Gregory Von Hausch has vowed to put FLIFF on…
Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West. Don’t you just love a good hate flick? This one takes a whack at Islam (after offering the caveat that it’s not targeting all Muslims), asserting that the terrorist threat is real and that Islamic militant extremists need to be stopped before they…
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Season Two (Universal) Anytown USA (Film Movement/Repnet) Behind Enemy Lines II: Axis of Evil (Fox) The Big Black Comedy Show (Fox) Big Love: The Complete First Season (HBO) The Break-Up (Universal) Clean, Shaven: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Feast: Unrated (Weinstein) Frankenhooker (Anthem) Charmed: The Complete Sixth Season…
Flannel Pajamas. This one should have worked. It’s a good movie. It doesn’t hedge its bets, it doesn’t insult anybody’s intelligence, and it doesn’t lie. It’s well-written, skillfully acted, and lovingly directed. All the same, Flannel Pajamas made me want to crawl inside my own navel and die. And that’s…
In The Last King of Scotland, an adequate thriller redeemed by Forest Whitaker’s sensational turn as Idi Amin, freshly qualified Scottish physician Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) arrives in Uganda in 1970, ravenous for adventure. Under the rigorous and vaguely romantic tutelage of a lithe blond with a flabby marriage and…
There is no way of sidestepping the issue, so why not jump right into it: Infamous, this year’s retelling of how Truman Capote wound up in Kansas writing his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, never comes close to approaching the quiet, devastating brilliance of Capote, last year’s retelling of how…
Barry Levinson hasn’t made a movie of note in almost a decade — since 1997’s Wag the Dog, to be precise, and even that was less a work of substantial relevance than a bit of lucky timing based on someone else’s better novel. Granted, it had its moments — at…
God is in the details no matter what you believe, but Jesus Camp is content to introduce its appalled exposé of Christian youth indoctrination with shots of a fast-food- and flag-lined highway and the words “Missouri, USA.” Welcome to hell, kids. Missouri — yikes! — is among the holy lands…
A Prairie Home Companion (New Line) This all-star sing-along — with Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Tommy Lee Jones, Virginia Madsen, Woody Harrelson, etc. — that wears its smile bright and wide looked for all the world like a summertime sleeper hit. Not so much, even though no movie this year…
The Andy Milonakis Show: The Complete Second Season (Paramount) The A-Team: Season Five, the Final Season (Universal) Bloodied but Unbowed: Bloodshot Records’ Life in the Trenches (Bloodshot) Carlos Mencia: No Strings Attached (Paramount) Click (Sony) Don’t Go in the Woods Alone: 25th Anniversary Edition (Code Red) Everybody Hates Chris: The…
No studio director was a greater hero to the Hong Kong new wave than Martin Scorsese. John Woo dedicated The Killer to him; Wong Kar-wai modeled his first feature, As Tears Go By, after Mean Streets; Taxi Driver’s rain-slicked slo-mo urban stylistics worked their way into countless lesser HK films…
Front-loaded with family discord, terminal cancer, prodigal jailbait, a cute kiddie looking for love, and other accessories of the ready-to-wear soap opera, Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is as heartfelt, sincere, and soggy with nostalgia as some of his other periodic homages to the virtues of peasant…
(HBO) Like many other Daily Show success stories, Lewis Black is a comedian made for these times; his facial contortions and verbal tics are expressions of the Bush-era phrase “outrage overload.” But unlike other big names in political stand-up right now (David Cross, Bill Maher), Lewis isn’t smug and smirking…
Avenger (Warner Bros.) Calvaire: The Ordeal (Palm) Cedric the Entertainer: Taking You Higher (HBO) Changing Times (Koch Lorber) Confidence (Lionsgate) Deadfall (Lionsgate) Edmond (First Independent) The Greatest American Hero: The Complete Series (Anchor Bay) Harvey Toons: The Complete Collection (Sony Wonder) Humphrey Bogart: The Signature Collection, Volumes 1 & 2…
One would never confuse the work of writer/director Todd Phillips with that of the late Robert Hamer, whose filmography includes the essential Kind Hearts and Coronets. Hamer’s movies had a gentlemanly quality, no matter the cruelty that skulked beneath their prim exteriors; one always felt that the characters in his…
weet, crazy, and tinged with sadness, Michel Gondry’s new feature, The Science of Sleep, is a wondrous concoction. The tricksy romantic narrative — in which Gael García Bernal plays a hapless, Chaplinesque madman — may be reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which Gondry directed from Charlie Kaufman’s…
Watching The Guardian, you will learn that the U.S. Coast Guard’s rescue swimmers rank among the bravest and least heralded of military personnel, selflessly hurling themselves into raging currents or hurricane swells to save a single human life. But I doubt that even these knights in neoprene armor could rescue…
The Big Animal (Milestone) It’s a simple yet lesser known law of comedy: Camels are always funny. There are the jaws that drool and chew side to side, the front legs that move like a human’s, the humps — but mostly it’s the eyes: There’s something of Buddha in a…
Beowulf & Grendel (Anchor Bay) The Book of Daniel: The Complete Series (Universal) Bratz: Passion Fashion Diamondz (Fox) Con Man (Docurama) Curious George (Universal) Danger Mouse: The Final Seasons (A&E) Daniel Boone: Season 1 and Season 2 (Goldhil) Dark Shadows: DVD Collection 26 (MPI) Dracula: 75th Anniversary Edition (Universal) Drop…
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…
