The advantage of making a Christmas movie is that, no matter how mediocre your final product is, it’s all but guaranteed to show up on at least one TV station, at least once a year, in perpetuity; even such woeful losers as the Nicolas Cage-Dana Carvey comedy Trapped in Paradise…
So, you wish to know whether Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is as good as the first Harry Potter movie. Is it as charming, visually gratifying, faithful to filthy rich author J.K. Rowling’s inescapable books? Well, that’d be yep times four, as it’s definitely an enchanting spectacular for…
The question “All right?” is asked of every character, on many occasions, throughout Mike Leigh’s latest film All or Nothing. That no one ever seems to stop and ask or answer the question in any serious, meaningful way is the heart of the issue in this portrait of three neighboring…
As the 17th-annual Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival nears its end — oh, wait a minute! Just because the “closing-night film” screens on Saturday, November 9, that doesn’t mean the festival is really over. That would be too easy — and too sensible. No, “the world’s longest film festival,” as…
Now that the Boca Mini Fest and the Asian Film Festival are out of the way, the main body of the 17th-annual Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival officially gets under way. Never mind that “The Main Event,” as the program refers to it, started on Wednesday, October 30, and opening…
I’ll start with a disclaimer: The Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival has grown so gargantuan — more than a hundred movies and related events — that it would take an insanely ambitious writer (or one plied with massive doses of amphetamines) to cover it in its entirety. Even festival organizers…
Much like a psychic, a cinema critic must look through a movie and see the other side. In the case of the new thriller The Ring — remake of the 1998 Japanese hit, Ringu — the formative forces swim into focus without effort. There’s a DreamWorks boardroom, some executives exclaiming…
As pharmacologist Elmo McElroy in Formula 51, Samuel L. Jackson initially sports a seriously silly fake afro along with hippy-dippy threads that make him look like some sort of flower-power cult leader. When next we see him, it’s 30 years later, and he’s got cornrows and is inexplicably wearing a…
Ordinarily, it would seem pretty odious to put so fine a point on this, but what the hey: Gather up your gay friends, because here’s a movie they’re going to dig, dig, dig. Well, probably, anyway. That general demographic seems to be the target audience of the radical, whimsical French…
In the past few years — more or less since the failure of his embarrassing Joan of Arc epic The Messenger — former wunderkind director Luc Besson has become a fantastically prolific writer/producer. His latest, The Transporter — a swift if sometimes ridiculous action film, with venerable Hong Kong director/action…
The not-so-great American pastime of serial killing has splattered pop culture in recent years, but from the biopics of America’s Most Unwanted to the nervy theatricality of Anthony Perkins or Kevin Spacey, only one legend stands definitive: that of Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter. Within the performance of that other eerie…
Brad Silberling’s instincts are right about half the time, which means that, depending upon your point of view, his films are either half empty or half full. His last picture, 1998’s City of Angels, an American remake of Wim Wenders’s poetic Wings of Desire, unsuccessfully tried to marry European art-house…
So there’s no confusion, the star of Sweet Home Alabama is Reese Witherspoon, who graces the film’s poster in full-body pout and appears on the press kit in closeup, mug-shot smirk; any closer and we’d shoot up her nostrils and exit through her pores. Of course, there’s a great deal…
Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is released from a mental institution the day of her older sister’s wedding. One afternoon with her dysfunctional family and she’s ready for rehab again. No such luck, however, so instead Lee returns to her favorite pastime: self-mutilation. Based on a short story by Mary Gaitskill…
Among the more preposterous rumors spread by Harry Knowles, whose Ain’t It Cool News movie-biz-gossip Website garners undue attention from studios too craven to do their own thinking, was one from year’s beginning: Terrence Malick, Knowles “reported,” was working on an adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye for Fox…
Although his name sounds like an inventory notebook for candy bars, Heath Ledger is overcoming this confusion — as well as the plight of the pretty boy — to become one of contemporary cinema’s more vital actors. In The Four Feathers — as in The Patriot, A Knight’s Tale and…
September is supposed to be the time when the teen-demographic action films give way to the “classier” stuff, but now all we have Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever arriving in theaters just in time to beat out Jackie Chan’s The Tuxedo and two Luc Besson-produced action films, Wasabi and The Transporter…
For those with any kind of pop cultural memory, it’s more than a little surprising to see Ice Cube in a movie like Barbershop. Not because it’s a light comedy — Friday was too, and that was certainly in character. What’s odd about Barbershop is its seeming embrace of positions…
Director Neil LaBute (Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty) seems the unlikeliest candidate to direct the film version of British author A.S. Byatt’s Booker Award-winning bestseller Possession. LaBute’s earlier films were resolutely tied to American culture, and Byatt’s book couldn’t be more British if it drank tea at 4 and…
If you’re looking for a horror film to revitalize the genre, keep looking. If you’re looking for a horror movie with believable characters… yes, you’re gonna have to keep looking. But if sudden loud noises, relentless strobe lights, digital hallucinations, and mutilated corpses make you jump and you feel that…
When Robin Williams was America’s favorite funnyman in films like Mrs. Doubtfire, it always felt a little strange admitting that the guy seemed kinda creepy. When he “got serious” in irritating tearjerkers like Hook and What Dreams May Come, it was certainly in vogue to proclaim him annoying, but few…
To misappropriate a choice comment from TV journalist turned music-biz impresario Tony Wilson, I’ll just say “Ian Curtis.” If you know what I mean, great; if you don’t, it doesn’t matter, but you should probably read more. That is, one need not be a fan of the late Curtis, epileptic…
