Anyone who remembers the 1977 Wes Craven film The Hills Have Eyes, which was and remains a piece of Milwaukee-beer shit, remembers it because (A) they had a memorable fuck-or-puke night at the aging neighborhood drive-in; (B) Michael Berryman’s uniquely hairless mug, which glared from the video store horror sections…
Packed with female book club members, a screening of Mira Nair’s The Namesake left no doubt about the film’s target audience. If anyone’s going to flock to this warm and likable tale, it’s going to be women, yet it seems a pity to confine the movie behind the bars of…
Caryl Churchill’s A Number is a play that’s superficially about cloning and only slightly less superficially about the nature of identity — very slightly, for this piece is not subtle with its ruminations. The play has been hailed as “an astonishing event” by the London Evening Standard, was said by…
So this is paradise? Apparently so, if you take the title and intention of Jeanne Hilary’s documentary photographs, “Eden: A New Media Project,” as any indication. Both video and stills document small town America often with playful juxtapositions (like a huge print of five yellow flashlights in the foreground of…
Blood Diamond (Warner Bros.) Ed Zwick’s Blood Diamond, about the civil war over diamonds that devastated Sierra Leone in the late 1990s, plays like a guilt-ridden Jerry Bruckheimer movie. It’s little more than action-adventure pulp drenched in someone else’s blood — which it tries to wash off by proselytizing to…
Publisher: 2K Games
Platform: PS2, PSP
Price: $29.99
ESRB Rating: T (for Teen)
Score: 2.5 (out of 10)
Batman Beyond: Season Three (Warner Bros.) The Bridge on the River Kwai (Sony) Burning Annie (Warner Bros.) The Caine Mutiny (Sony) The Care Bears Movie: 25th Anniversary Limited Edition (MGM) Come Early Morning (Weinstein) Eragon (Fox) The Guns of Navarone (Sony) JAG: The Third Season (Paramount) Justice League Unlimited: Season…
American Cousins (BFS) Appetite for Deconstruction: A Punk Rockumentary (MVD) Barbie Fairytopia: Magic of the Rainbow (Universal) Bloody Reunion (Tartan) Blood Trails (Lions Gate) The Ed Wood Collection: A Salute to Incompetence (Passport) Favela Rising (Netflix) Fires on the Plain: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) The Gene Autry 100th Anniversary Collection…
The space-time continuum smacks the shit out of Sandra Bullock in Premonition, the latest in nonlinear nonsense, but the fun really gets going when she starts to smack back. As Linda Hanson, humdrum mom of Anywhere, U.S.A., Bullock sets things up by doing her thing, effortlessly establishing the girl next…
Let us applaud, on principle, Anthony Minghella’s return to small-scale storytelling. Breaking and Entering marks his first original screenplay since the oddball romcom Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991) and a retreat from the jumbo-sized period pieces of his Miramax-to-the-max phase. Overrated as they are, The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley,…
The “Director’s Note” in the program I received last Friday at Palm Beach Dramaworks revives the old line about Harold Pinter’s plays being “comedies of menace.” As near as I can tell, this means allowing glimpses of little, mundane moments to reveal the dread and horror that lives beneath life’s…
The stuff is bizarre enough that you might expect to see it pried from the clinging fingers of a vintage shopping virtuoso on an episode of BBC America’s What Not to Wear and tossed into the trash barrel by hosts Trinny and Susannah. It’s feisty duck feathers, kinky Moroccan lamb…
Casino Royale (Sony) James Bond gets a stirring shake-up in the best — yeah, Goldfinger fans, the best — film in the series’ 44-year history. Daniel Craig’s 007 has more going on above the neck and below the waist than even Sean Connery’s. He’s a genuinely compelling character — a…
Publisher: Microsoft Game
Studios
Platform: Xbox 360
Price: $59.99
ESRB Rating: M (for Mature)
Score: 8 (out of 10)
Long ago, there reigned a clan of Speedo-wearing militaristic psychopaths called the Spartans. They lived beneath a copper-colored sky, on a copper-colored land, amid copper-colored fields, in copper-colored homes made from copper-colored stone. Legend has it they would outline their copper-colored pecs and abs with ash to enhance their manly…
Wild Hogs — in which John Travolta, William H. Macy, Tim Allen, and Martin Lawrence play emasculated suburbanites taking a cross-country motorcycle trip to rediscover their masculinity — doesn’t even sound like a real movie when you describe it to people. They give you that yer-shittin’-me stare, as though it…
GableStage exists mostly to make people squirm. In the past three years, it’s presented us with goat fuckers, chicken fuckers, child murderers, and drug-addicted, child-molesting judges. Somehow, GableStage has made these subjects — which should be grim, numbing, and distancing — funny, poignant, and immediate. Now the company’s producing artistic…
Timing, as they say, is everything. When I contacted North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) recently, it was just to make arrangements to see “Merce Cunningham: Dancing on the Cutting Edge,” an exhibition featuring sets and costumes from productions by dance-world titan Cunningham. As it turned out, the great…
American politics has pretty much become a mockery of itself, but that doesn’t mean that art can’t celebrate the sad state of our nation, which — founded on truth, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — is collapsing into spin, gluttony, and the pursuit of world domination. “John Alexander: New…
Revenge of the Nerds: Panty Raid Edition (Fox) Revenge of the Nerds is a great movie. No, really. It’s got a bitching new-wave soundtrack and some truly inspired performances — memorable enough to wreck the careers of Robert Carradine (Lewis) and Curtis Armstrong (Booger). But mostly it’s the mix of…
Publisher: Nintendo
Platform: Wii
Price: $49.99
ESRB Rating: E (for Everyone)
Score: 4.5 (out of 10)
A Brush With Death (New Light) Buster Crabbe Collection (St. Clair Vision) Captain Horatio Hornblower (Warner Bros.) Care Bears: Friends Forever (Lions Gate) Commissar (Kino) Confetti (Fox) Death Row (Anchor Bay) The Electric Company’s Greatest Hits & Bits (Shout) Fast Food Nation (Fox) The Full Monty: Fully Exposed Edition (Fox)…
