The opening credits of Charlie’s Angels hint at a movie that never appears in the film’s expurgated 94 minutes; the tease is too soon rendered a disappointment. A Mission: Impossiblestyle prelude suggests a live-action cartoon as directed by Robert Altman; a camera stalks the aisles of a jumbo jet capturing…
Depending on how you look at it, the 15th Annual Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival is more than halfway over or just about to begin: “Officially” the festival opens November 3, although there have been screenings all over South Florida for more than two weeks now. Such incoherence may be…
It’s Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival time again: Time for more than a hundred movies from dozens of countries. Time for screenings at locations from southern Palm Beach County to Miami-Dade’s South Beach. Time for foreign and domestic features, documentaries, and short subjects, along with the affiliated parties and other…
Let’s be honest: As much as people may complain about Spike Lee’s public pontifications on race or his controversial stances or his being a rabble-rouser, that’s the way we like him. What first comes to mind when you hear his name mentioned? Certainly not Girl 6 or The Original Kings…
Much has changed for urban gays in the 20 years since William Friedkin’s Cruising. That controversial serial-killer thriller — set in the leather bars and after-hours sex clubs of New York’s West Village — was derided by gay-rights activists as a piece of cheapjack sensationalism, seemingly designed to exacerbate the…
Richard Gere, as Dallas gynecologist Sullivan Travis, has never been more likable onscreen, perhaps because he’s never been more human, more vulnerable, more there. After so many years of so many duds, after so many years of playing ladies’ man to little girls (and the recent Autumn in New York…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, the story of a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat, brick row houses, drying laundry flaps sadly in the…
Meet the Parentshas just enough class to make for Prestige Pop: Robert De Niro as star, Randy Newman as composer, Blythe Danner as wallpaper, Ben Stiller as schmuck. It has just enough “comedy” to qualify as a crowd pleaser: sight gags (Stiller chasing a cat across a roof before setting…
With global overpopulation neatly intertwining with the advent of the home video camera, we have been afforded, as a species, several near-miracles. For instance, when supersonic jets explode or when mobs impolitely loot and riot in urban centers, the common consumer can now document the event and sell it to…
It takes a special kind of mindset to celebrate castration, and audiences confusing feminine empowerment with the crude hacking off of seemingly oppressive huevos are certain to get a bang out of Girlfight, the gritty debut feature from writer-director Karyn Kusama. Metaphoric or otherwise, there’s already a movie about deballing…
It’s a sorry fact that what everybody in Hollywood — writer, actor, best boy, and caterer alike — really wants to do is direct. This has led, over the years, to some embarrassing debuts and some unexpected triumphs. For many the notion that Sally Field — after Gidget and Sister…
This song explains why I’m leaving home and becoming a stewardess,” says Anita Miller (Zooey Deschanel) to her well-meaning, overbearing mother, as the soundtrack begins to swell with the low hums of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Just a few seconds earlier, Elaine Miller (Frances McDormand) had insisted she wouldn’t…
I had this idea that these ritual pubic-hair shavings which take place in the play could be made into murders, so I called up Charles, and we had a meeting of the minds and worked out the story of the film.” This is the sort of answer you get when…
There are so many intense themes running rampant in Joe Charbanic’s debut feature, The Watcher, that it’s tricky to keep up. For instance there’s the ominous notion that a young lady who lives alone with her cat is pretty much doomed. Then there’s the gripping premise that borrowing from nihilistic…
By day they drive their rippling torsos beneath the blinding desert sun, pausing intermittently to gaze sexily into the distance. By night they head for the open-air discos of Djibouti to get squiffy with the locals. When time allows they wash their socks, shave, and wander around in cylindrical white…
Humans and their stories, my oh my. Somehow the familiar themes just keep coming around ad infinitum. Of course most of them have already been captured and processed by Shakespeare. From the bitter young man to the crazy old king, from the flirty young thing to the malicious old crone,…
This is the beginning of The Way of the Gun you will not see, because it was written but never filmed: Two men, Parker and Longbaugh, urinate in an open grave in front of mourners, beat up a priest, steal organs meant for transplant, and shoot a dog. The introduction,…
Turns out that, when goodfellas don’t die (when they don’t get shot or blown up in a car or beaten to death with a baseball bat), they move to South Beach. They drive tour buses for the elderly, take orders at Burger King, give dime-a-dance lessons to old women in…
Too often baseball players are reduced to statistics, hollow numbers that resonate with the fetishist who drifts off to sleep counting home runs and career batting averages. Baseball demands such precision: It’s a team sport, yes, but ultimately it’s man against man, record against record, history against history. Look no…
When John Waters is at his best, as he is in his latest, Cecil B. Demented, he can drive you in in a way few filmmakers have ever managed to do. But recognizing that fact can sometimes be difficult in today’s market-driven context. In fact, for the first half hour…
“Be cool, get chicks.” While that’s paraphrased and boiled down, it’s nonetheless the essential creed of Dex (Donal Logue), the corpulent connoisseur of carnality who lumbers through this debut feature from Jenniphr Goodman as if he’s Paul Bunyan and every woman in sight is a tree. Overweight and underemployed, Dex…
As any Klump family member can tell you, this has been a hot summer for black comedians. New movies starring Martin Lawrence, the Wayans brothers, and Eddie Murphy have already pulled down more than $300 million at the box office, and by the time Chris Rock’s remake of Heaven Can…
