In its final 10 minutes, Hamlet 2 is little more than chaos, noise, and nonsense, and those are 10 perfectly enjoyable minutes. It’s hard to knock any sequence that climaxes with a musical number titled “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus,” done up nice and Grease-y. Problem is, the 80 or so…
When I heard that Quentin Tarantino handed the Grand Jury Prize for best feature to Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, telling the audience that the movie “put my heart in a vise and proceeded to twist that vise until the last frame,” my jaw went…
Perhaps this review should begin with a disclaimer: Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen’s 39th film as writer/director, will do little to endear itself to the happily-ever-after crowd or those who consider acts of infidelity punishable by impeachment. Leave it to Allen to make a romantic comedy in which all the…
Early buzz out of Hollywood pegged Tropic Thunder, directed and cowritten by star Ben Stiller, as the end-all and be-all of movie-biz parodies — a savage beast with a rough touch featuring Tom Cruise in a career-resurrecting role as bald-headed, big-gutted, foul-mouthed studio boss Les Grossman, who does the fuck-you…
On the surface, Pineapple Express offers precisely what it advertises: a roll-’em-up, smoke-’em-up, blow-’em-up bromantic comedy from the freaks and geeks who have made Judd Apatow’s brand of stunted-man yuks a global franchise. Once more, Seth Rogen’s red-rimmed, half-shut eyes peek out from beneath his tousled Jewfro, which sits atop…
Making notes in 1949 for a review of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, George Orwell wrote that “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be… while holding untenable opinions.” Which is a nice way of saying that Waugh, a world-class satirist of everyone from the rich down, was…
Swing Vote is an election-themed comedy that’s about twice as smart as you expect it to be and still only half as smart as you wish it were. The clever premise, which would have seemed like pure science fiction no more than eight years ago, concerns a U.S. presidential election…
I haven’t seen much at the movies in the past two years that has given me as much unbridled comic pleasure as the sight of Will Ferrell as the win-at-any-cost NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby, calling on Jesus, Tom Cruise, and Oprah Winfrey to put out the psychosomatic flames engulfing his…
What a brooding pleasure it is to return to Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City — if “pleasure” is the right word for a movie that gazes so deeply and sometimes despairingly into the souls of restless men. In The Dark Knight, the continuation of Nolan’s superb 2005 reboot of the Batman…
I’ve always enjoyed ABBA — not in that post-hoc, so-bad-it’s-good hip way but innocently, the way I like Phil Spector. To this day, howling along in my car to that echoing, cascading, multiply overdubbed wall of sound makes me feel like a member of some dippy but joyous cathedral choir…
At the top, let’s be clear about one thing: Journey to the Center of the Earth is more a demo reel than a narrative feature. It’s a decent if overly familiar and yawningly obvious compendium of look-at-me moments intended to show off the latest and greatest in stereo 3-D filmmaking,…
Hollywood’s Endless Superhero Summer rolls on with the arrival of Hellboy II: The Golden Army from Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro, but before this review goes any further, I must confess — head hanging low in shame — that I haven’t read a comic book since I was 12…
The Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis as a dead man, was writer/director M. Night Shyamalan’s breakthrough, but its follow-up, Unbreakable, starring Bruce Willis as the walking dead reborn as a superhero, was the filmmaker’s masterpiece. It remains the most quietly influential of all recent superhero movies, the unacknowledged template for…
To my 10-year-old daughter, the term “American Girl” means “that store my meanie of a mom — unlike all the other, higher-quality moms — won’t let me go near.” While we’re on the defensive, why should I? She hates dolls, and I — creeped out by row upon row of…
You want a history lesson? Take a class. You want clanging swords, sneering villains, storybook romance, and bloody vengeance? Here’s a brawny old-school epic to make the CGI tumult of 300, Alexander, and Troy look like sissy-boy slap parties. Mongol, alias Genghis Khan: The Early Years, may compress, elide, and…
Of the summer’s many revenge-of-the-nerd fulfillment fantasies — from The Incredible Hulk all the way down the megaplex food chain to The Foot Fist Way — Wanted stands the best chance of dislodging Fight Club from fanboys’ Facebook pages. It has the same dizzying flipbook style, the same kicky ultraviolence,…
As old Broadway shows are revived, new Broadway shows get spun from old movies so that new movies may be fashioned from ancient TV series. It’s an iron law of the culture industry that turns out to be a pleasant surprise in the case of Get Smart, the late-’60s sitcom…
Nothing snaps a child’s head around quite like a dying parent, even when the parent is a cantankerous old sod like Arthur Morrison (Jim Broadbent), whose nominally adult son Blake (Colin Firth) still clings to childhood grievances. Directed by Anand Tucker with the same quiet tact he brought to Hilary…
Screenwriter Steven Conrad writes movies about success and self-fulfillment in America — how we define it, the price we pay for it, and what it looks like depending on where you’re standing. In Conrad’s The Weather Man, the central figure was a vain TV news personality who had everything that…
Loath though I am to carp about any director who’s devoted chunks of his career to bringing the non-white world’s suffering to Western attention, Roger Spottiswoode’s The Children of Huang Shi — a drama based on the life of an Englishman who saved an orphanage full of boys from Japanese…
Behold Adam Sandler, in a passable Israeli accent and outsized codpiece, as Zohan the Mossad superheavy: catching barbecued fish in his butt crack on a Tel Aviv beach, repelling bullets with his nostril, sculpting hand grenades into toy poodles for delighted Palestinian children while making mincemeat of an Arab terrorist…
It’s been 20 years since Errol Morris made The Thin Blue Line — a found “noir” that served to free an innocent man convicted of murder. Gathering evidence and dramatizing testimony, Morris’ movie circled around a single, unrepresentable event — the death of a cop on a lonely stretch of…
