If you’re looking for a horror film to revitalize the genre, keep looking. If you’re looking for a horror movie with believable characters… yes, you’re gonna have to keep looking. But if sudden loud noises, relentless strobe lights, digital hallucinations, and mutilated corpses make you jump and you feel that…
Let’s all agree on one thing from the outset: The poster for Blue Crush is fantastic. It has a great color scheme; actresses Michelle Rodriguez (Resident Evil), Kate Bosworth (Remember the Titans), and Sanoe Lake (a professional model and surfer making her film debut) look as good as they’ve ever…
In case you didn’t happen to read the tagline on the ubiquitous poster, Xander Cage, also known as XXX because he’s tattooed his first initial three times on the back of his neck, is “a new breed of secret agent.” The old breed, we learn pretty quickly, is Bond, James…
It’s daunting to hear that John Sayles’s new film, Sunshine State, is almost two and a half hours long and consists mostly of calm conversations. But don’t be deterred or you’ll miss out on a study of character, class, and changing times that puts Robert Altman’s stodgy Gosford Park to…
Like a Jawbreaker that changes color every few seconds that you suck it, MIIB: Men in Black II delivers a quick buzz, lots of stuff to look at, and a totally non-nutritious joy that can be attained only with the aid of artificial flavorings and yellow #5. In a nutshell,…
If it’s possible for a film to be simultaneously ambitious and banal, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is both. There’s little here we haven’t seen repeatedly in some form or another — growing up Catholic is popular fodder for filmmakers, as is growing up in the American South, usually…
Three years have passed since The Phantom Menace thrilled some and infuriated others, yet the schism in the Church of Lucas remains. Die-hard supporters still refuse to admit that Episode I has some truly awful acting, dialogue, and borderline offensive caricatures; and dyed-in-the-wool detractors remain bemused, even offended, that some…
Say this about World Wrestling Federation Entertainment head honcho Vince McMahon: He knows what his fans want. Few movies have ever been as specifically tailored to an existing audience as The Scorpion King, in which McMahon’s prize champion, the Rock, portrays the Rock wearing a loincloth and going by the…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
What is it that people get from Shakespeare’s plays? Is it the flowery dialogue? The author’s ability to capture a time and place that is foreign to us yet familiar via the emotions of the protagonists? It probably isn’t the stories; Shakespeare often used preexisting ones. More likely the timeless…
hy is it that every time they make a movie about a nerd, the character in question is always white? Someone must have cried discrimination, for Jump Tomorrow gives us a black nerd and puts him front and center. In the time-honored movie tradition, of course, he’s actually a good-looking…
A third Jurassic Park movie was of course inevitable, given that the second shattered box office records. (It also shattered the conventional notion that any movie starring Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, and a bunch of dinosaurs had to be at least somewhat interesting.) But when you have one of the…
“I want you to suck my big dick. I want you to lick my balls.” Thus begins Larry Clark’s Bully, a return to Kids territory, following a forgettable detour into adulthood titled Another Day in Paradise that apparently didn’t kick up enough of a fuss for the guy. So he…
A ragtag group of travelers, one of whom is a violent man prone to aggressive outbursts, rides in a ramshackle transport on a journey through dark terrain. Mostly they sleep peacefully, until an error in their navigation equipment becomes apparent and their vehicle breaks down in the middle of nowhere…
You may not know the name Anthony Anderson yet, but you will. Having had significant roles in four major films last year (Big Momma’s House; Me, Myself & Irene; Romeo Must Die; and Urban Legends: Final Cut), he’s trying to top himself this year with appearances in five. Already he’s…
It’s a scenario with which we’re all familiar by now: young single guys in search of hot babes, firing one-liners at each other, making pop-cultural references ad nauseam, and ultimately finding out that women are somewhat less shallow than they’ve been led to believe. At least it’s a scenario you…
The Wedding Planner begins with footage of a seven-year-old girl performing a wedding ceremony with her Barbies. It’s a fitting opening, because the movie that ensues could almost be the result of a screenwriter literally transcribing the play scenario enacted by a small child and her dolls. If you were…
This is some damn fine coffee you got here in Twin Peaks. And some damn good cherry pie. But I have to tell you something, sheriff: Last night I had a dream in which a dancing midget talked backward, thus leading me to believe that our killer is a man…
