Politics is always confusing, and in dangerous times, it’s probably better to be knowledgeably cynical than gaily ignorant. All by itself, Jason Pollock’s The Youngest Candidate ought to be enough to douse the fire of youthful idealism, at least when it comes to electoral politics. In fact, the film is…
You probably don’t know photographer Eddie Adams, though you know his work. His most famous picture is the one of South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan blowing out the brains of captive Vietcong Nguyen Van Lem on the third day of the Tet Offensive. That picture won Adams a Pulitzer…
Filmmakers and novelists love to talk about American insularity and blundering naiveté. You know, that distinctive and ultimately insidious impulse to do good while making a profit — a course that, witness the hapless characters in Coyote, invariably seems to create havoc. Steve and J. (Brian Petersen and Brett Spackman,…
For anybody who has tried to ride the often-blown-out waves of the Sunshine State, the glassy and perfectly rolling Australian surf in Newcastle is simply stunning. But while there’s talk about surf contest and national champions, Newcastle is a teen drama, a road-trip film that you know will go wrong…
The Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival opened officially on October 17 — over 200 films in 29 days at three separate venues (Cinema Paradiso, AMC Coral Ridge, and the Miniaci Performing Arts Center). New Times reviews some notable entries, including the Southeast premiere of the opening night film, Coyote, and…
Oliver Stone’s W. may be less frenzied than his typical sensory bombardment. But in revisiting the early ’00s by way of the late ’60s, this psycho-historical portrait of George W. Bush has all the queasy appeal of a strychnine-laced acid flashback. Hideous re-creations of the shock-and-awful recent past merge with…
Nothing curdles comedy more quickly than forced whimsy, which is what this would-be romantic comedy has in abundance. The story focuses on a handful of New Yorkers, none of them especially appealing, least of all the hapless immigrant who’s the default protagonist. Irwin Pelkalvski (played, according to the credits, by…
Monday, October 6 Pre Fest Membership Party • at Blue Martini 6 p.m. — Martinis and Movies Madness Membership Party Free with membership purchase or renewal Wednesday, October 15 • at Cinema Paradiso 5:30 p.m. — The Long, Hot Summer Prekickoff reception Thursday, October 16 • at Cinema Paradiso 5 p.m. —…
The Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival opens officially on Friday, and it will close on November 11. In the intervening month, the festival will proceed much as it has for the past 22 years. Movies will play, celebrities will party, and a small coterie of extremely dedicated festival organizers will…
Murder, Spies, & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story is an exhaustively (and exhaustingly) thorough investigation of the claims of Clint Curtis, the man who was allegedly approached by Florida Rep. Tom Feeney to design a software program to throw the 2004 presidential elections to George Bush. The film has…
Any distance you might feel between yourself and the result of cheap politicking depicted in Boogieman is obliterated within the first half-hour of Neshoba. Americans over 50 will likely remember the sudden disappearance of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, on June 21, 1964. Their bodies were found…
The title transaction in this British comedy — a crime that’s carried out with about as much gusto as the reluctant murder swap in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train — involves a young London tube operator (Mackenzie Crook) and an all-around good-for-nothing (Colm Meany) who meet under chance circumstances. The…
A new kind of war movie for a new kind of war, Body of Lies is about the War on Terror as it is being waged on the ground, in the air, but most of all in cyberspace. Directed with terrific verve by Ridley Scott (coming after the listless American…
The most recent example of bleak chic, Fernando Meirelles’ mostly harrowing adaptation of José Saramago’s international bestseller Blindness, mixes the high-velocity pace and stylishness of the Brazilian director’s breakout City of God with the Portuguese author’s thinly metaphysical horror thriller. Unflinching at best and treacly at worst, the film unveils…
There’s a whole lotta fucking going on in Choke, Clark Gregg’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s first-person novel about a sex addict named Victor Mancini with severe Mommy issues — fucking in a cramped airplane bathroom, on a barnyard’s itchy haystack, in a grimy toilet stall, in a hospital chapel even…
On some level, you’ve got to hand it to Spike Lee. There are probably less than a handful of directors working in Hollywood today who could put together the financing for a three-hour war movie lacking any marquee names and performed largely in Italian and German with English subtitles. Spielberg…
Earlier this year, when I found myself assigned to jury duty on a drug-related trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, our jury foreman turned out to be a blond, blue-eyed reality-TV producer from the bedroom community of Altadena. During the jury-selection process, when the judge asked if we had any…
Masters of the carefully crafted cheap shot, Joel and Ethan Coen have built a career on flippancy. Given their refusal to take anything seriously — least of all the enthusiasm of their fans — the brothers surely got a chuckle from an upcoming academic tome, The Philosophy of the Coen…
What do you think this is?” cries a lady who lunches in Diane English’s remake of George Cukor’s The Women. “Some kind of ’30s movie?” Even without the 14-year struggle to get the Murphy Brown writer’s pet project past studio doubters, it would be a tall order to remake George…
And so, another summer movie season comes to an end not with a bang but with a whimper — what else to call four new releases (Babylon A.D., Bangkok Dangerous, College, and Disaster Movie) in the past ten days that weren’t prescreened for critics by their respective distributors? These are…
In a nation of frightened dullards, there is always a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome.” So wrote Hunter S. Thompson of the Hell’s Angels after riding with California’s motor-psycho Mongol hordes in the mid-1960s, a feat of embedded journalism that left…
Despite his reputation as that rarest of creatures — a Hollywood intellectual — new evidence suggests that Steve Martin reads… prepare yourself… thrillers and spy novels. Or at least that’s the only conclusion one can draw from the “Story by” credit the comedian receives on Traitor, an uneven yet engrossing…
