A spin-off of a sequel, Beauty Shop plays like most Hollywood comedies these days — as tepid sitcom, benign product, and cynical afterthought. If last year’s Barbershop 2: Back in Business was little more than a dilapidated retread of the charmingly lightweight 2002 hit Barbershop, consider this incarnation condemned for…
It’s always difficult to pan a movie that features good actors, important issues, and noble intentions. But In My Country, a romantic drama about two journalists covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in post-Apartheid South Africa, leaves little choice. Clunky and obvious, it makes the mistake of asking drama…
Better than I thought it’d be” was the refrain repeated by those exiting the preview screening of Guess Who, which doesn’t mean much — freebie audiences expect nothing and usually receive it. But in this case, it neatly summed up the experience of catching Ashton Kutcher in a part once…
Before we walked out the door to see Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous, a colleague sneered, “Why do you even bother with that shit?” It’s a question one’s tempted to ask of its star, Sandra Bullock, as well. (Surely, our answers would be the same: The paycheck, pal.) Hers…
Does the world really need a new film from Woody Allen every single year? Yes, he is one of America’s great auteurs. Yes, he’s responsible for some very fine movies, many of them comedies (Annie Hall), several of them tragedies (Crimes and Misdemeanors, Another Woman), and some hovering in that…
The Ring, Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, offered sufficient closure that it didn’t exactly demand a sequel. The horror lay in wondering why a mysterious videotape kills viewers seven days after they watch it; to a lesser extent, there was the mystery of the creepy girl, face…
Everyone with a TV remembers President Bush in the flight suit, landing on that aircraft carrier, standing in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner, and triumphantly declaring that major combat operations in Iraq were over. Two years on, many feel like asking what exactly he meant by that. Gunner Palace…
Almost as wide as he is tall, with a round but unremarkable face, Schultze doesn’t look like a rebel. Truth to tell, he looks like Curly of Three Stooges fame or, less kindly, a mass murderer (well, he does bear a passing but disturbing resemblance to John Wayne Gacy). Schultze…
The Upside of Anger belongs to Joan Allen, who plays Terry Wolfmeyer, a wife abandoned by her husband and left to pick up the pieces and collect them in a giant bottle of vodka. Terry’s is the cold, composed visage of a woman struggling to keep it together; through her…
Toward the end of Born into Brothels, a superb and piercing documentary by directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, a 12-year-old child examines a photograph. It’s beautiful, he says, because it shows us how its subjects live. Yes, they’re very poor, and the shot is hard to look at, because…
Being part of a popular, fantasy-based TV series is no guarantee of success on the big screen. When was the last time you heard the phrase “starring George Takei” or, for that matter, “featuring Gillian Anderson”? No slight to the talents of either, but the considerable cult following for anything…
Give Dan Harris, the writer/director of Imaginary Heroes, plenty of credit for boldness and ambition. Not many kids fresh out of Columbia University would have the wherewithal to tackle a complex family-crisis drama with four or five kinds of trouble running through it and half a dozen crucial minor characters…
The novel Be Cool, written by Elmore Leonard in 1999 while the ink was still wet on the publisher’s advance, existed only because the beloved writer of seedy thrillers and Westerns knew it was guaranteed gold — the sequel to the 1991 hit novel Get Shorty that, in 1995, became…
Based on the success of their TV work, beloved among those who swim in the deep end of bongwater, Lennon and Garant have done considerable rewrite work on scripts considered not funny enough; among others, they’re said to have added to Starsky & Hutch the scene in which Ben Stiller…
First, the good news. Uncharacteristically for a February release targeting African-American viewers, Diary of a Mad Black Woman is not a yuppie romantic comedy featuring Gabrielle Union and Morris Chestnut. Anthony Anderson and Eddie Griffin are nowhere to be seen, and despite the fact that the most memorable character is…
Beautiful Boxer, the true story of a Thai transgender kickboxer, is a well-intentioned film with a heart of gold. Unfortunately, it also has a brain of lead, a stomach of iron, and legs of jelly. A student at the beat-you-over-the-head school of moviemaking, its sensibilities are crude, its sentiments super-sweet,…
At first (and second and maybe even third) glance, it’s all so familiar: Keanu Reeves shrouded in a black trench coat that flaps behind him like a superhero’s wings, moving between a real world used as a battleground, breeding ground, and playground for higher beings amused and appalled by the…
It’s hard to know what to expect from Wayne Wang. The Hong Kong-raised director has made one gorgeous mood movie (Chinese Box ) and two intelligent literary adaptations (Smoke and Anywhere But Here); he was also responsible, in his early days, for the overwrought sobfest Joy Luck Club. Then, in…
One should expect little from the man who has directed an Olsen twins movie (It Takes Two, the one with Steve Guttenberg, no less), Matthew Perry’s first Friends-to-film entry (Fools Rush In, its title an apparent nod to audiences who went to see it), and Sweet Home Alabama, one of…
Bride & Prejudice is the third major film released stateside in the past few years to fuse the epic romantic musical stylings of Indian “Bollywood” movies with more Westernized “Hollywood” elements. It’s also the most successful of them, but when the only significant competition has been The Guru and Bollywood/Hollywood,…
For those viewers hailing from the lucrative under-six demographic, Pooh’s Heffalump Movie will prove to be a suitably sweet addition to the Winnie the Pooh cinematic canon. The youngest of them certainly won’t recognize the story’s central message — accept others, especially purple elephant-looking creatures with dreadlocks, for who they…
The small Appalachian community of Whitwell, Tennessee, boasts two traffic lights and a population of 1,600, nearly all of them white and Christian. Lying just 100 miles from Pulaski, where the Ku Klux Klan was founded, this now-defunct coal-mining town would seem an unlikely place to find a memorial to…
