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…
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…
Bad Santa, in which Billy Bob Thornton plays a drunken department-store Santa who repeatedly swears at children, pisses himself publicly, chain-smokes like an industrial plant, and cracks safes on Christmas Eve, is the least sentimental holiday release ever made. No one is redeemed, no one comes to believe in the…
Her bedroom walls are plastered with pinups of Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable, and Audrey Hepburn. She dresses in evening gowns, sweater sets, and silk scarves tied at her chin. Her hair is set with rollers. Her heart is set on song. Her name is Billie Golden (Isabel Rose), and she’s…
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 till he has at last become one. This plot device, used in Hombre and Nevada Smith and myriad…
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 naïve grandmothers out of their life savings (not to mention certain fast-dancing corporate executives) even more richly…
The spooky beauty of Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s strange take on the Columbine massacre, arises not from the shock of sudden violence but from the filmmaker’s steady gaze at the numbing routines of life inside a suburban high school. With what first looks like cool detachment, Van Sant (My Own…
There was a gaggle of young women sitting near me during the screening of Tupac: Resurrection. They frequently voiced their enjoyment of the movie, in particular at three specific points. They growled appreciatively at an image of Tupac naked in a bathtub, his crotch festooned with gold chains. They cackled…
Editor’s Note: The Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival winds down to an end Sunday. Here are reviews of some of the movies that will be shown this week: Ah, the quiet life of a small-town cop. Nothing to do but play a little street hockey, lunch at the hotdog stand,…
A not terribly long time 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…
Wouldn’t you know it? I finally saw a selection from the “18th Annual Fort Lauderdale Film Festival” that really knocked me out, only to discover that it was too late to review before it played at the festival. Such are the vagaries of festival screenings. No matter. Since it appears…
Editor’s note: The official opening of 133-film FLIFF isn’t until next Friday, but the entries are already spinning. Here are reviews of some that will be shown in the next week: Just when you thought the music world had gone the way of Britney Spears forever, a band like Betty…
You may notice this year that, for the first time in the history of New Times Broward-Palm Beach, reviews of selections from the 18th-annual “Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival” bear more than one byline. OK, I confess: After nearly a decade and a half of covering the festival solo –…
Given the way the United Nations has been taking a beating in the American media over the past year or so, it may not be a bad thing that the new movie Beyond Borders is at heart a two-hour infomercial for Kofi Annan’s organization. As a call to action, the…
I really like the cold — it makes me feel really alive.” There are few more attractive (or more atypical) things a woman can say, and when wunderkind Sarah Polley says this in My Life Without Me, thinking viewers will note that however “real” the story seems, we are also…
Watching Hollywood’s endless stream of John Grisham adaptations — The Firm, The Chamber, A Time to Kill, etc. — it would be easy to assume that Grisham is the worst sort of hack writer, with simplistic morals that usually overwhelm logic and come close to contravening the very law the…
Did you hear the one about the talking dog? Well, of course you did. If you’ve ever been to the movies or watched television, then you know that our otherwise silent four-legged friends almost invariably come to verbal life when the cameras roll. We’ve had horses (Mr. Ed), mules (Francis),…
t’s beginning to look as though the films of George Clooney are less the works of fiction than the products of documentary crews following around the actor leading his enviable life. In film after film, he’s seen dining with beautiful actresses in gorgeous surroundings perfectly lit for an evening’s seduction:…
he opening credits insist that Kill Bill: Volume 1 is “Quentin Tarantino’s 4th film,” when it’s actually his 3.5th; it’s too incomplete to be measured as a whole, half a movie waiting for a proper ending due to arrive in the next volume in February. Till then, we’ll have to…
Director Richard Linklater’s School of Rock imagines, sort of, what might have become of voluble rock snob Barry the morning after his grand finale in Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity — after his Marvin Gaye impersonation had faded and been forgotten in the daylight hours, after he quit his gig at…
You gotta love John Sayles. No, really — you gotta, or else a mob of indie-minded cineastes will club you into submission. Sometimes it’s easy to comply, as with City of Hope and Sunshine State, both astute portraits of uniquely American class, race, and real estate struggles boiling down to…
The script for The Rundown has lingered for more than a decade and was originally a Patrick Swayze vehicle, well before those wheels fell off. Universal Studios revived it because the studio knows what it has in Dwayne Johnson: a gold mine made of bulging biceps, a man who was…
