It’s readily apparent that Danny DeVito’s Death to Smoochy deals with a thoroughly debauched children’s television host (Robin Williams) who plots, amid much dark zaniness, to destroy his squeaky-clean successor (Edward Norton). It’s also quite easy to proclaim it the greatest movie ever made… about a singing vegan in a…
Kissing Jessica Stein ends several times — which likely explains how a film with so short a running time, 94 minutes, feels as though it lasts much longer — and each conclusion satisfies; each feels real, natural, and, best of all, inevitable. That is, except for the actual finale, which…
Cell phones and silk saris, dot-coms and arranged marriages — Monsoon Wedding, the latest film from Indian-born director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala) captures the heady mix of old and new, rich and poor, traditional and modern that defines contemporary India. A sort of Father of the Bride set…
To say that Showtime is the year’s best glossy studio entertainment film thus far may be the ultimate in faint praise. The first quarter is always pretty bad, following the majors’ traditional end-of-the-year marketing/release orgies, but 2002 has been several degrees worse than usual. From the dual Pearce-ings of The…
Ice Age posits a heretofore unfathomable question: Is it possible for computer-generated characters to go through the motions? Everything about this endeavor — from 20th Century Fox, playing cartoon catch-up after 2000’s Titan A.E., which smelled like something stolen from Saturday-morning television — feels pilfered and stitched-together. There’s not an…
Science fiction can wow us with gadgetry, but only the truly ambitious stuff lights up our imaginations with disturbing and unshakable aberrations, be they incredible shrinking men, 50-foot women, or Sting’s winged panties from Dune. In this vast genre, it figures that the ultimate human construct — time — proves…
Over the past half-century, countless filmmakers great and obscure have stood in serious debt to The Bicycle Thief. But for my money, no one has borrowed so cleverly or shifted the weight of Vittorio De Sica’s 1947 masterpiece so gracefully as young Wang Xiaoshuai, whose Beijing Bicycle embodies the spirit…
If We Were Soldiers smells at all familiar, perhaps you’re confusing it with the stink emanating from a nearby theater screening Black Hawk Down. After all, on their shiny, blood-drenched surfaces, they’re damned near the same movie: Both are based on books that recount true-life battles that claimed the lives…
For an industry notorious for its test screenings, focus groups, and obsession with what will play best in the heartland, the movie business occasionally and spectacularly drops the ball with respect to its mainstream entertainment. Last year, someone decided that what the public most wanted to see was America’s Sweethearts,…
To call a movie the most accessible Dogme 95 film ever made is not merely damning with faint praise. It also threatens to alienate the two segments of the population that might consider going to see such a film in the first place: fans of the back-to-basics, no-frills-of-any-kind Danish filmmaking…
If the fall of the Taliban has you feeling shamefully joyous, here’s a stark little oasis of misery to remind you that America sometimes sucks and its denizens aren’t all heroes. Featuring painstaking attention to the copious warts of this big, proud country, Monster’s Ball moseys down South to issue…
Hart’s War, like most mediocre films, is little more than a movie about the movies. Set in a POW camp during the final months of World War II, it owes much of its existence to far superior films, chief among them La Grande Illusion, Stalag 17 and The Great Escape;…
Give Super Troopers a little credit. It’s slightly better than its abysmal trailer, which manages to intersperse the least-funny scenes from the film with a moronic rave from an anonymous poster at the Ain’t It Cool News Website. And it may appeal to some: The screening audience was laughing hard…
Miguel Piñero was poet, playwright, and actor — and thief, liar, and junkie. If everyone has within him a mix of the beautiful and the ugly, few of us have either to the extremes that Piñero did. He was in Sing Sing by his early 20s, the iconic leader of…
If they teach the work of Todd Solondz someday, the lectures are bound to be rather short. To grasp the material without actually attending, just bone up on a little bargain-basement Freud, a whiff of primal therapy, and a sprinkle of Jerry Springer. The quizzes will be a breeze, and…
You’ve got to hand it to any romantic comedy that makes The Mexican and the Sweet November remake seem like classics, which appears to be the chief objective of Birthday Girl. This slipshod sophomore effort from Jez Butterworth (Mojo) has been sitting on the shelf since its original release date…
It’s astonishing just how open Screen Gems has been about showing Slackers to the reviewing press well in advance of deadlines. Dim, youth-oriented sex comedies like this often slip into theaters under cover of darkness. Not that critical appraisal really matters to such films; if it did, Freddie Prinze Jr…
There is nothing terribly wrong with Kevin Reynolds’s The Count of Monte Cristo, which the Internet Movie Database lists as the 18th remake of Alexandre Dumas’s tale of innocence betrayed and avenged. It is neither a drag nor a gas; it neither betrays its source material nor adheres too slavishly…
Just in time to take our tired minds off the twin terrors of Osama and Enron comes The Mothman Prophecies, an enjoyable if utterly stupid upscale entry in the old Amityville Horror genre — that is, a horror film allegedly based on spooky and inexplicable real-life events. The fashionable sheen…
Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, based on reporter Mark Bowden’s factual account of a 1993 U.S. Army operation gone dreadfully awry in Somalia, doesn’t just kick your ass. It pummels your entire body and leaves you trembling. Once the premise and setting are established, this brutal combat adventure doesn’t catch…
Attended by a rather sexy air of intrigue, the hit French film Brotherhood of the Wolf (Le Pacte des Loups) arrives upon our shores, and, refreshingly, it’s left up to us to figure out just what the hell it is. Monster movie? Costume drama? Martial-arts extravaganza? To say the least,…
Appropriately, A Beautiful Mind does not offer a literal translation of the life of John Forbes Nash Jr., the mathematician whose work on game theory won him a Nobel Prize in 1994. The film leaves out significant events, people, and places; it amalgamates central figures, disguises prominent locations, and hides…
