More like Hollywood fluff than Gallic farce or sophistication, the French romantic comedy Jet Lag stars Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno as mismatched lovers who meet when circumstances — bad weather, computer glitches, a strike by air traffic controllers — ground them both at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris…
Much like “hilarious Islamic comedy” or “sublime Affleck picture,” the term “terrific second sequel” isn’t bandied about too much. Name one. Took you a minute, didn’t it? Don’t be ashamed — there are probably support groups for fans of Smokey and the Bandit III. Generally, creative juices are drained by…
What is it with women, anyway? They want to be safe walking the streets at night; they want to be able to trust strangers; they want the world to be beautiful, free, and wild. Are they nuts? Before you click SEND with the hate mail (or, worse, with the “You…
OK, so we don’t know for a fact that it’s PETA portrayed in the new zombie horror flick 28 Days Later. But, hey, PETA didn’t know for a fact that Rudy Giuliani’s prostate cancer was caused by drinking milk either, and it didn’t stop them from proclaiming such on a…
Once in a while, a film comes along that is as sound, smart, sweet, and significant as can be, and Whale Rider is such a film. Fault the project on various counts if you like (I’ll try), but ultimately the tale is beyond reproach, a bane to cynics and a…
He’s 12 feet tall. He’s ripped. He’s as quick as a tiger and fierce as a dragon. Lit by his fury to a dull green glow, the guy is sheer boundless power. Any NFL team you can think of would love to start him at middle linebacker. But, as art…
The hero of Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen is an isolated teenager mired in a gray Scottish slum with only a vague dream of family life to sustain him. Like previous Loach heroes — the impoverished boy who finds hope training a falcon in Kes, say, or the downtrodden working stiff…
French putz Xavier (Romain Duris) is depressed. The poor guy lives in Paris, has Amélie’s Audrey Tautou as a girlfriend, eats gourmet vegan dinners prepared for him by his free-spirited mother, and is being set up for a graduate degree in economics by a friend of his father’s. “I don’t…
Having seemingly exhausted all permutations of the sports-comedy formula (Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump, et al.), Ron Shelton has now moved on to another obsession: the Los Angeles Police Department. Earlier this year, we got the uncharacteristically somber (for him, anyway) Dark Blue, a “what if” tale of the…
Whenever the stars of the adolescent street-racing fantasy 2 Fast 2 Furious were feeling balky or temperamental on the set, as movie stars are wont to do, the cure was probably easy — an oil change and a tune-up. John Singleton’s adrenaline-spiked sequel to the surprise summer hit of 2001,…
If grownups were meant to watch Walt Disney cartoons, God would have kept us all in the third grade for two or three decades. Still, somebody has to drive the SUV every time the Disneyfolk decide to lure the little ones down to the multiplex, and as long as the…
Another week, another remake — summer, that season of air-conditioned originality, must be upon us. Only, unlike The In-Laws, which creaked into theaters last week, this latest updating of a decades-old action-comedy has two things going for it: Its forbear is a veddy British caper film little-seen in the United…
If you’re reading this paper, chances are you’re more literate than the average American. If you’re reading the film reviews, it’s also likely you’ve become familiar with words like bravura and eponymous, which seem to exist only in the vocabularies of professional movie assessors. But what if you were confronted…
Talk about tough acts to follow: The original, 1999 Matrix, a critical and commercial smash, came almost as a revelation out of nowhere — if the combination of Joel Silver, Warner Bros., and roughly 60 million bucks qualifies as “nowhere.” After more than four years, The Matrix Reloaded — the…
The budding teenage poet in Karen Moncrieff’s Blue Car writes melancholy verse about autumn leaves falling off trees and fathers abandoning their daughters. Predictably, the girl’s floundering mother is too harried and too strapped for cash to pay much attention to her, and her troubled little sister is endlessly needy…
In March 2002, days before President Bush was scheduled to visit Peru, a car bomb exploded near the U.S. embassy in Lima, killing nine and injuring dozens. Government officials, here and in Peru, blamed the attack on Shining Path — a Marxist terrorist organization with roots dating to the 1960s,…
Neil LaBute is back to his old self again, and the cinematic world is a better place for it. Honestly, what was he thinking when he made Possession? Did the charges of misogyny, still lingering from In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors get to him so…
If you have never heard of Lizzie McGuire, you are not a female child between the ages of 6 and 14; nor are you a parent with a female child between those ages. For the uninitiated, then, Lizzie is the eponymous heroine of the 3-year old, wildly popular Disney Channel…
Filmmaker Terry Gilliam is no stranger to fiasco. After all, this is the human dynamo who saw 1989’s inventive if sometimes incoherent The Adventures of Baron Munchausen through a series of artistic and financial crises that would have landed most people in an asylum. But Gilliam’s encounter with the tale-spinning…
It is rare to find a film that defies one’s expectations as sweetly and satisfyingly as this coming-of-age comedy-drama from first-time feature writer-director Peter Sollett. The surprise isn’t in the plot of Raising Victor Vargas — that would be too easy — but rather in the extraordinarily subtle and convincing…
You can’t be sure what to make of Identity for its first hour: Director James Mangold’s first foray into the horror genre plays so much like a joke, it’s almost impossible to tell whether he’s making you laugh on purpose or because, well, he is director James Mangold, maker of…
In Confidence, Edward Burns plays Jake Vig, a con artist whose body temperature runs a few degrees below normal. Even when things seem to go bad, when a would-be partner betrays him with a phone call or a seedy-greedy Dustin Hoffman lays maybe-gay and grubby paws all over him, Burns…
