Watching Hollywood’s endless stream of John Grisham adaptations — The Firm, The Chamber, A Time to Kill, etc. — it would be easy to assume that Grisham is the worst sort of hack writer, with simplistic morals that usually overwhelm logic and come close to contravening the very law the…
God bless Johnny Depp. For the second time this year, the man has almost single-handedly redeemed an action movie that would otherwise be indistinguishable from the pack. Introduced right up front in Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico, he’s first seen dressed up like Prince in purple glasses…
Charlotte Sometimes introduces us to Michael (Michael Idemoto), a taciturn mechanic who also happens to be a landlord. Lori (Eugenia Yuan) is his tenant and one of his best friends, allegedly, but she’s also a fabulously beautiful woman who acts irritatingly flirty with him all the time, then has really…
For a few minutes, at least, things don’t look so bad. Watching Ben Affleck swagger around as the thuggish title character of Gigli (“Rhymes with really,” he tells us, twice) is amusing for a bit. Affleck is eminently qualified for the role, actually — that of a low-level hood pretending…
Military clerk Ray Elwood (Joaquin Phoenix) is something of a modern-day Sgt. Bilko. Anything you need, he can get. Any scam that’s possible, he’ll run. Never mind the bumbling Col. Berman (Ed Harris) who ostensibly runs the unit — Elwood has him wrapped around his finger. There’s just one major…
OK, so we don’t know for a fact that it’s PETA portrayed in the new zombie horror flick 28 Days Later. But, hey, PETA didn’t know for a fact that Rudy Giuliani’s prostate cancer was caused by drinking milk either, and it didn’t stop them from proclaiming such on a…
Having seemingly exhausted all permutations of the sports-comedy formula (Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump, et al.), Ron Shelton has now moved on to another obsession: the Los Angeles Police Department. Earlier this year, we got the uncharacteristically somber (for him, anyway) Dark Blue, a “what if” tale of the…
If you’re reading this paper, chances are you’re more literate than the average American. If you’re reading the film reviews, it’s also likely you’ve become familiar with words like bravura and eponymous, which seem to exist only in the vocabularies of professional movie assessors. But what if you were confronted…
Neil LaBute is back to his old self again, and the cinematic world is a better place for it. Honestly, what was he thinking when he made Possession? Did the charges of misogyny, still lingering from In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors get to him so…
Can we please, for the love of God, declare a moratorium on the use of Wild Cherry’s “Play that Funky Music” on the soundtrack of any and all movies? At the very least, if the plot of the movie in question features an uncool white guy who undergoes a quest…
The prospect of a new Chris Rock movie, especially for those who enjoy his standup, can be a scary thing. We want to like him. A movie anywhere near as funny as his HBO series and specials would be a wondrous thing to see. But every time we get our…
You know Internet dating’s become totally mainstream when Disney cranks out a bland comedy featuring a randomly selected pair of mismatched stars to take on the subject. Bearing the unwieldy and meaningless title Bringing Down the House, said comedy is predicated on the biggest pitfall of cyber-flirting, the idea that…
Right-wing pundits will come out of the woodwork to holler about this one. Bad enough, they’ll say, that The Life of David Gale attacks the death penalty; it also features a caricature governor of Texas with big ears and a familiar, Scripture-quoting smirk. There’s a character who notes that 73…
Here’s a tricky little movie to review, as it’s going to divide audiences fairly drastically. Conservatives, especially black ones like Larry Elder and Ken Hamblin, will likely laud Antwone Fisher as a heroic story of a triumphant black man who conquers all of his inner demons and outer obstacles (of…
Of all the movies you could be spending your December with — and there are many good choices, from Oscar-bait to better-than-expected sequels like The Santa Clause 2 — why would you want to end up at Drumline? It’s either an extremely canny bit of counter-programming or a tremendously heinous…
Robert De Niro has always loved an acting challenge, but lately those challenges have been less along the lines of “Can I convincingly play a boxer?” and more like “Can I alone be good enough to make this formulaic mess worth watching?” Yes, it was impressive that he played a…
The smart sci-fi fan knows that, technically speaking, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris is not a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film at all but rather a newly filmed interpretation of a Polish novel penned by Stanislaw Lem. Still, the new film stands in a mighty big shadow. If someone tried to make…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
