For as long as it forges ahead without explanations, The Unborn works as a series of snap-cut gotchas introducing each new contestant in its pageant of cold-sweat set pieces. Often, this involves starlet Odette Yustman approaching some obscured, inevitably terrifying figure from behind, very… very… slowly. Yustman plays Casey, a…
Walt Kowalski growls a lot — a dyspeptic rumble that wells up from deep inside his belly when he catches sight of his midriff-baring teenage granddaughter text-messaging her way through her grandmother’s funeral, or when his good-for-nothing son and daughter-in-law suggest that he sell his house on a gang-infested corner…
Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg — a lot of name for a lot of guy. Born into German aristocracy in 1907, he was a soldier by the age of 19 — and, by most accounts, a warrior with the soul of a poet (he was especially smitten with…
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is certainly curious — a modest F. Scott Fitzgerald story about a man born in the twilight of life and gradually regressing toward dawn that has been adapted into a two-ton, Oscar-season white elephant. Directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Eric Roth,…
Back in the early 1980s, a prominent professor I knew was accused of sexually harassing a colleague. This man was a compulsive flirt who couldn’t get within feet of a woman without coming on to her, so it wasn’t altogether a surprise. But long before an internal inquiry cleared him…
Two years ago nearly to the day, Will Smith and Italian director Gabriele Muccino released The Pursuit of Happyness, one of the most underrated of recent Hollywood movies. It starred Smith as a single father navigating a hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of San Francisco. Watching Smith and Muccino’s latest…
I hear America singing, and I see… Richard Nixon. Not the man but the muse: Has any president since Lincoln inspired more movies, TV miniseries, and operas? As Nixon’s beetle brows, ski nose, and mirthless grin were made for caricature, so his rampant pathology was a gift for novelists and…
First, a key spoiler: Cadillac Records is not the story of Chess Records, the blues label started in Chicago in 1950 by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess that featured among its stable of artists Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Etta James, plus many others who birthed…
Nobody in the film industry wants to be pigeonholed. Personal assistants long to be studio heads, gaffers want to direct, and name actors fantasize about hanging it up and doing something that, y’know, matters. In such an environment, director Randall Miller’s career is fairly typical. Using his 1990, feel-good film-school…
You don’t have to have been raised on colonial Brit lit, classic melodramas, Westerns, war movies, or Gone With the Wind to figure out the likely outcome of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia within its first 15 minutes, but any or all of the above will help. Tightly wound and corseted posh…
Gus Van Sant has never been what you’d call a risk-averse filmmaker, but he directs his Harvey Milk biopic so carefully, there might be a Ming vase balanced on his head. Van Sant’s steps are deliberate, his posture is straight, his attitude is responsible, and his eyes are fixed firmly…
With his blazing-white coat and pig-pink ears, to say nothing of the zigzag of lightning cut into his flank, the eponymous canine lead of Disney’s lively new animated movie Bolt looks a little bit real and a whole lot not. That’s not a failure of craft: Goofy and sweet like…
Kristin Scott Thomas has gotten so locked into playing tragic victims or frigid grandes dames that few remember that the actress got her big break as a wistfully amused friend in Mike Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral or that she played Plum Berkeley on Absolutely Fabulous. Thomas has mischief…
Those of us who adored Casino Royale, the 2006 reboot of the haggard, self-parodic James Bond franchise, had some trouble trying to decide where to place it among the series’ finest. Was it better than Goldfinger? Probably not, but close. The Spy Who Loved Me? Maybe so. From Russia With…
If you traveled the length of John Malkovich’s medulla oblongata, hung a sharp left at the desk where Beckett’s Krapp recorded his last tape, and walked through the adjoining door of the interstellar hotel room at the end of 2001, you might end up somewhere in the vicinity of Charlie…
These reviews are part of New Times’ continuing coverage of the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. Fling — Formerly called Lie To Me, this is one of those loathsome movies full of improbably beautiful young people in improbably beautiful apartments having improbable amounts of sex with other improbably beautiful young…
If the dream of every comic is to have his humor live on long after he’s left the stage, then the late Bernie Mac has exited this world on a high note. Soul Men, a comedy completed shortly before Mac’s untimely death in August, is no classic, but the comedian,…
Ostensibly, Zack and Miri Make a Porno should be money-shot Kevin Smith: Pals make a porn to pay the bills and, in the process of gettin’ it on for the video cam, cum to realize their years-in-the-making friendship is really a love affair. Awwwww, how sweet. In other words, it’s…
The protaganist of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a modestly gaudy people’s heroine industriously repairing the social world one frayed interaction at a time. After extended cameos in two previous Leigh films (as a resourceful pop tart in All or Nothing and a date-raped rich girl in Vera Drake), fine-boned Sally…
On a double bill with L.A. Confidential, Chinatown, or just about any film made after 1970 about institutional corruption in Los Angeles, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, a period drama based on a 1928 Los Angeles missing-child case, would come off as faintly geezerish noir lite. As LAPD scandals go, the case…
These reviews are part of New Times’ continuing coverage of the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival.The New Twenty — First-time feature filmmaker Chris Mason Johnson couldn’t have possibly anticipated the current goings-on in the financial world, so don’t hold it against him that two of his main characters in this…
Pride and Glory doesn’t make any effort to disguise precisely what it is: a barely held-together string of vignettes lifted from every cop movie ever made, save, perhaps, Turner & Hooch. It serves up clichés bound together by a flimsy, bored-out-of-its-own-skull story about bad cops, black sheep, good sons, and…
