Love him or not love him, Lasse Hallström has done it again: the human frailty, the sorrowful past, the hopeful future, the triumph of love and family over crushing despair. Since he broke out in 1985 with his Swedish feature Mitt Liv Som Hund (My Life as a Dog), the…
Had The Royal Tenenbaums been made by a first-time filmmaker unburdened by acclaim or expectation, it could be heralded — and then just as easily dismissed — as a light, literary exercise in filmmaking that’s as pleasant as it is frustrating. Its tale of a dysfunctional family of geniuses torn…
Generally, in the realm of motion pictures, producers are evil, actors are pathetic, screenwriters are delusional, agents are bottom-feeders, and true directors scarcely exist. Contrary to the glitzy stories the mainstream media continually jam down your throat, making movies is quite often an ugly, unpleasant business, based on the ultimate…
It’s almost easier to pick the year’s worst than its finest. Leading the pack is I Am Sam, in which Sean Penn does his retard dance for Oscar only to watch it horribly misfire, followed closely by Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Nic Cage, who might be retarded), Jay and Silent Bob…
The most daunting thing for an actor is to portray a god, and when that god comes equipped with a tangle of myths and the quickest left jab in history, the actor’s job can soon veer into guesswork. To Will Smith’s credit, he has managed to get at least partway…
Since the horrors of dominator culture — destruction, devastation, dumbassness — do not appear to be receding of their own accord, there’s great poignancy to the new cinematic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The film succeeds as massive, astonishing entertainment; enthralling…
Having given us The Shawshank Redemption in 1994 and The Green Mile five years later, director Frank Darabont finally busts out of prison with his third feature, The Majestic (which, incidentally, has the worst ad art since Green Mile). Working from a script by Michael Sloane — no Stephen King…
Beneath the hazy, mystifying layers of Vanilla Sky lies a remarkable Tom Cruise performance — one that, to a large extent, takes place beneath a makeup artist’s piled-on scars and a costumer’s blank “prosthetic” mask. As David Aames, hipster publisher of Maxim-like magazines, Cruise plays a lothario so vain he…
It took five men to concoct the hackneyed plot and conceive the brainless jokes that constitute Not Another Teen Movie, meaning that right now, five men in Los Angeles are still trying to wash that stink off their soft, idle hands. Five men — five men… the very thought boggles…
The lights go down, and the puzzlement begins. Ensemble cast of superstars? Check. Loose remake of amusing curiosity? Check. Built-in, pre-fab sense of cool? Check. A little something for wistful fans of Dino and Sammy? Check. So… wait a minute. Is this The Cannonball Run Redux? With his ambitious but…
If you came across Edward Burns’s Sidewalks of New York on cable TV and didn’t recognize any of the actors, chances are you’d assume it was part of MTV’s massive reality-TV franchise: Handheld cameras follow the protagonists around in their daily routines (during the course of which they try to…
The pitch for this one must have seemed sensational: “It’s called Spy Game, right, and it’s about this old spy who recounts, via flashbacks, how he mentored this young spy, only now the young spy is captured and about to be killed, so the old spy spends his last day…
Though Behind Enemy Lines, set in Bosnia, was originally due for release next year, already it feels antiquated; that conflict is already a distant memory, a ghost lost in the shadow of the war on terrorism. The film tested so well that 20th Century Fox pushed up its release date,…
The new Martin Lawrence comedy, Black Knight, is yet another twist, albeit an uncredited one, on Mark Twain’s protean A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, one of the original fish-out-of-water comedy-fantasies. Was there an outcry for yet another redo? After all, Twain’s 1889 novel, about a New England mechanic…
It takes a nimble mind to mix light and dark, to wed humor with treachery, and in Novocaine, newcomer David Atkins is not always up to the task. Neither is Steve Martin, who wants to be taken seriously while reserving the right to produce the occasional sick yuk. If you…
Lovely magic, this. An enchanting family classic. If you believe in magic, you’ll love Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. And if you don’t, you will, and you will. True, the hype has been a bit much. And, yes, a mad, desperate world choked with reproduction and reprobation could hardly…
Joel and Ethan Coen’s periodic genuflections to classic Hollywood are inevitably accompanied by a knowing wink from one brother and a wry smile from the other. These devoted movie buffs’ versions of vintage gangster pictures (Miller’s Crossing) or the populist comedies of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges (The Hudsucker Proxy)…
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival has a consistent track record when it comes to three genres: documentaries, gay-themed pictures, and movies with strong female performances. This year, in the festival’s 16th season, my rules of thumb mostly hold up. I…
The 16th Annual Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival swings into full gear this weekend, beginning with the official opening-night film Friday at the Parker Playhouse and continuing with an average of more than a dozen screenings a day. Without further ado here’s a selection of what you can expect from…
At the risk of sounding like an old-timer reminiscing about the good old days, I remember when the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival was a relatively small, intimate affair called the Greater Fort Lauderdale Film Festival — and you actually stood a chance of taking in a good portion of…
Here you’ll find madness, mayhem, and murder in no short supply. The Hughes brothers, Albert and Allen, have always had a knack for horror, as evidenced by their edgy gangster flicks, Menace II Society and Dead Presidents, which they’ve stated were influenced by the styles of Brian De Palma and…
Ask David Lynch, and he will tell you apple-pie America just isn’t what it seems. People behave strangely, sometimes violently, and sometimes they even transform into different people without being polite enough to warn you first. Eerie and freaky, shot through with sporadic bursts of humor and sex, Mulholland Drive…
