Night of the White Pants stars Tom Wilkinson as a depressed, bored millionaire in the middle of an ugly divorce. He’s got a heart condition, he’s alienated from his two grown children, and his business interests are going down the shitter. Then, for reasons far too complex to adequately explain…
Things That Hang From Trees. Although this moody Southern gothic from first-time feature director Ido Mizrahy never quite comes together, it has its moments. Most of them involve an 8-year-old boy, Tommy Jr., played with great reserves of sorrow and mystery by Cooper Musgrove. Little Tommy has asthma, and there…
Joni’s Promise. Don’t let subtitles turn you off: you don’t have to be a film buff to enjoy Joni’s Promise. The Indonesian flick hardly feels foreign, despite the language difference. With a rockin’ soundtrack (and many songs in English), the movie delivers a fast-paced romantic comedy (though it’s billed as…
The Queen is more fun than any movie about the violent death of a 36-year-old woman has a right to be. It’s also as exotic an English-language picture as the season is likely to bring. Directed by Stephen Frears from Peter Morgan’s script, The Queen is set in the peculiar…
There’s a scene about halfway through Catch a Fire during which freedom fighters — men and women, each boasting such nicknames as “Pete My Baby” and “Hot Stuff” — are being trained at an African National Congress safe house in Mozambique. Their ranks consist of South Africans who’ve been politicized…
Shark Park: The Heaviest Wave in California. There are no sharks in Shark Park, a surfing documentary in which the only killers are the killer waves in the title’s park, which isn’t even really a park. Imagine being in the Pacific Ocean about 50 miles off the coast of California…
When it was first produced in 1988, Lee Blessing’s Two Rooms received glowing reviews for its clear-headed treatment of terrorism. It was an honest play. Face-to-face with a reality more brutal than what America’s armchair pundits will ever confront, Blessing’s characters exhibited a desperate confusion. It may have seemed like…
Some things just get a rise out of you. “Erotic Art,” a group show of more than 30 artists, isn’t necessarily one of those things. True, what arouses some may not excite others, but although this is an exhibit of a bunch of naked bodies, not all of them are…
Viewed from an airplane high over the islands of San Esperito, the land seems to stretch out endlessly. The sun slowly rises over the ocean, bathing the clouds in ochre and throwing stark shadows on the lush jungle below. If only there were something worth doing down there. Welcome to…
Reservoir Dogs: 15th Anniversary (Lions Gate) Quentin Tarantino’s first film shows its age these days, mostly because we’ve seen all its tricks done far better by now. From the nonlinear storytelling to the pop-culture gabfests to the shameless cribbing from obscure films, everything that once seemed so shockingly fresh has…
Publisher: Konami
Platform: PS2
Price: $39.99
ESRB Rating: E+10 (for Everyone 10+)
Score: 8 (out of 10)
(Paramount) On the commentary track, director J.J. Abrams and star Tom Cruise sound like they’ve fallen in love; you might say they complete each other’s sentences, except that’s just Cruise interrupting the Alias creator, who rescued a franchise by streamlining it, lightening it, brightening it, and likely killing it off…
Ten ‘Til Noon is a twisty crime thriller that is constantly watching the clock. With a circular structure and some unexpected punches, the movie replays the same ten minutes six times over, each time from a new point of view or location, introducing new characters throughout. Each one of the…
An American Haunting (Lions Gate) Astaire and Rogers: The Complete Film Collection (Warner Bros.) Freak-Out (Anchor Bay) Greg the Bunny: Best of the Film Parodies (Shout!) Justice League Unlimited: Season One (Warner Bros.) La Commune (Paris, 1871) (First Run) Looking for Kitty (Velocity/ThinkFilm) The L-Word: The Complete Third Season (Showtime)…
Baywatch: Season 1 (First Look) The Benny Hill Collection (Music Video Dist.) CSI: Miami — The Complete Fourth Season (Paramount) Down to the Bone (Hart Sharp) Future-Kill: Limited Collector’s Edition (Subversive) Ghost in the Shell SAC: Complete Collection (Manga) The Ghost Whisperer: The Complete First Season (Paramount) Hardcastle and McCormick:…
Volver. The title of this latest and highly enjoyable comic melodrama from beloved Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar translates as Coming Back — as in “back from the dead,” referring to the amusingly matter-of-fact resurrection of Irene (Carmen Maura), an old grandmother who refuses to let mortality get in the way…
A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. They say youse can never go home again, but Queens-bred big-timer Dito Montiel revisits his old Astoria stomping grounds in this Sundance-sanctioned testosterone indie, loosely based on the 30-something writer/director and occasional fashion model’s neo-Beat semiautobiography of the same name. A slumming Robert Downey…
Drop-dead hip or cluelessly clueless? Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, a candy-colored portrait of France’s infamous teen queen, is a graceful, charming, and sometimes witty confection — at least for its first hour. The famously shy Coppola may be an inscrutable personality, but her bold exposé of backstage royalty opens with…
The sex is real in John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus; only the setting — an animated New York cityscape, benignly watched over by a fluorescent Statue of Liberty — is fake. To an extent, that describes the movie: a sexually daring, dramatically timid roundelay that employs unsimulated twosomes, threesomes, and even…
I bleed admiration for the brave men of the Public Theatre. Last week, performing a shabby little play called All the Great Books (Abridged), they worked a minor miracle in front of the most unabashedly indifferent audience ever assembled in a theater. You should have seen them — a surly…
For so many years, people have been calling me all different kinds of names to describe me as an artist: outsider, black artist, ghetto artist, the Picasso of the Ghetto,” Purvis Young said at a public appearance in August. “I just want to be called an artist. That’s all I’ve…
It’s a tiny exhibit, but “Mary Cassatt: Pastels and Drawings” evokes a reaction. “Loved the collection! Wished there were more,” one patron wrote in the guestbook provided for comments. “Her best works are not represented,” griped another, prompting a querulous response: “That is not the point! These are works that…
