It was only a matter of time before Hollywood capitalized on the sympathy and admiration that have enveloped the nation’s firefighters since 9/11, and here we are. Jay Russell’s action-packed, flame-broiled Ladder 49 is an all-out valentine to the firehouse fraternity that might never have gotten to the screen were…
Shark Tale is an animated film, though after you see it, you might wonder whether the term is intended as oxymoronic. Put simply, it has no life in it at all. Not even the kids roped into an afternoon preview screening seemed terribly interested. Perhaps they’ve grown tired of computer-made…
The very best thing about A Dirty Shame, a giddy sex farce from John Waters, is the credits. What’s not to love about a list of characters that includes “Sylvia Stickles,” “Marge the Neuter,” “Fat Fuck Frank,” “Cow Patty,” and “Tire Lick Boy”? The soundtrack, too, bears comic fruit, with…
Ash is feeling a little bit under the weather, so I’ll be taking charge.” So says Shaun (Simon Pegg) to his valiant crew of appliance salespeople, but if you don’t get the real meaning, you’re probably not part of the target audience for Shaun of the Dead. Ash, for the…
Silver City is being marketed as a biting, bitter send-up of George W. Bush. Hence the copious use of trailer footage in which Chris Cooper, as Colorado gubernatorial candidate Dickie Pilager, stumbles over simple sentences, dodges reporters’ questions with mindless macho explications (“My message to the criminals is this: You…
Essayist. Playwright. Radio personality. Librettist. Actor. Novelist. Now, with Bright Young Things, inimitable British wit Stephen Fry debuts as feature screenwriter and director. Best-known here in the colonies either as Jeeves (opposite Hugh Laurie) in Jeeves and Wooster or as Peter in Peter’s Friends or possibly as Oscar Wilde in…
Although most people in the moviegoing universe by now know the differences between an “Alien” and a “Predator,” putting the two critters together in one movie really ought to necessitate more specific species names for each, since both are technically aliens and predators (they’re from outer space, and they hunt…
Rare is the film that caters to fans of rabbits, motorcycles, Gordon Lightfoot, and fellatio, but now, thanks entirely to Vincent Gallo, we’ve got that demographic nailed. With The Brown Bunny, the cinematic enfant terrible who gave us the awful pleasures of Buffalo ’66 returns, but don’t expect a retread…
In Victorian England, 40,000 novels were published every year. Of the few that have endured, perhaps none is more worthy of a film adaptation than Vanity Fair, if for no other reason than this: It’s a chore to read. Clocking in at 850 pages, with frequent excursions into unrelated subjects…
Some of the people who helped bring you dank, morose amusements such as The Crow, Dark City, and The Matrix have a new movie to offer. Like The Matrix, it features a dork who flies through the air. As in Dark City, we witness the protagonist’s world radically changing shape…
Oh, Janis. Oh, gorgeous, outrageous, soul-ripping, rockin’, bluesy momma Janis Joplin. She’s a volcano. She’s a tsunami. She’s a fearless, reckless, raging American beauty. Watch her tear open her chest to reveal her hot, pulsing wounds. Watch her rage with burning, glorious light. Watch her smile that sweet Janis smile…
You know how fear is scary? Well, director E. Elias Merhige is into that, especially in his new serial-killer thriller, Suspect Zero. Absent, however, is the dark-comic malevolence the director smartly cultivated in his successful and disquieting Shadow of the Vampire a few years ago, bullied and bulldozed out of…
Edmund Elias Merhige is an artist among hacks. Suspect Zero, the new thriller from the Brooklyn-born, L.A.-based filmmaker, employs a lot of elements of the serial-killer genre popularized throughout the 1990s, set in familiar noirish desert locales. Yet it’s compulsively watchable, featuring a meticulously shaded performance from Ben Kingsley (whom…
Say hello to a pop-cinema masterpiece. This Japanese import opens with a massive thud not unlike Godzilla’s footfall, and its cinematic legacy stretches back almost as far. It’s got crafty Samurai action, hilarious bits of business, insightful observations into the human condition, and geysers of kitschy, computer-generated blood. Oh yes,…
It’s a real credit to Intimate Strangers director Patrice Leconte that even though his film features a couple of ridiculous contrivances to get the plot going, the overall film still feels true. Leconte has a gift for depicting the quirks of odd relationships; his last film, Man on the Train,…
A good friend likes to say that there’s only one kind of great pop song — the song that someone had to create, as though the writer and performer had no choice. The song can be corny or cynical, upbeat or downhearted; it doesn’t matter. All that counts is that…
You may have already heard the stories about A Home at the End of the World. In what many viewers have deemed a big loss, Colin Farrell’s penis no longer appears in the film. The official line is that test audiences found it too distracting, though that seems unlikely, given…
As a reviewer, one can be tempted to want in on the ground floor of a phenomenon, to say you were there first when some low-budget feature with a nifty premise made its festival debut, only to be picked up by a big studio and become a national phenomenon. Whether…
It would be nice to declare “Fans of Mike Hodges, rejoice!” or some such thing at the arrival of the veteran director’s latest film — but alas, not this time. I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead shares elements with some of Hodges’ previous work, including a familial revenge theme (from his…
Jonathan Demme’s gutsy The Manchurian Candidate, which dares to rear its head just as the Democratic National Convention convenes in Boston, is the anti-Bush administration movie for those who refuse to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 or Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed because, well, they just ain’t Right. It’s less a remake…
Perhaps the most unlikely thing to capture on film is the creative process — the spinning of gears, the tripping of wires, the breaking of hearts, and the snapping of tempers that goes into the making of art. Movies about writers and painters and musicians seldom collapse the barrier between…
There is nothing mysterious or subdued about Stacy Peralta’s enthusiasms. A product of Southern California’s vivid beach scene, he’s been a surfer since boyhood and was a professional skateboarder in the ’70s before he started making documentaries about the defining moments of those sports. The phenomenally successful Dogtown and Z-Boys…
