“Hit me,” says Mark Zupan — begs, actually, like a kid clamoring for a new toy. “I’ll hit you back.” He means it too, and his ripped pecs, buzzed scalp, tattooed back and arms, and bushy gangster goatee promise just as much menace. The dude’s bad and doesn’t need to…
And so, once more, the googolplex emits the stink of the network rerun, this week offering yet another worthless big-screen take on small-screen detritus. As Hollywood wonders — cries, actually, over spilt spoiled milk — why audiences are staying away from theaters, offering theories ranging from the absence of such…
Since George Romero’s long-awaited Land of the Dead turned out to be a letdown, we’ll have to find our zombie-movie solace elsewhere. Thankfully, Romero’s been making movies for so long that not only has he inspired others to follow in his footsteps but those others have begotten others still. Sam…
Gregg Araki likes to shock. That’s no secret to anyone who has followed the director’s career, but a cartoonish layer of unreality has usually kept the polymorphous sexual pairings and graphic violence somewhat at a distance. There’s a little bit of that in Mysterious Skin, but mostly it stays grounded…
Must Love Dogs, it should be clearly stated, is not the greatest romantic comedy ever made about a quirky couple who meet at a dog park. That honor goes to Dog Park, the oddball 1998 flick starring Luke Wilson and Natasha Henstridge, written and directed by former Kids in the…
If the Navy is looking for splashy recruiting tools, it could do worse than Stealth, a zillion-dollar action movie stuffed with futuristic jet fighters, glamorous carrier pilots, and an overload of explosive, mostly digital derring-do. Here is Top Gun revised and updated, complete with a new array of enemies –…
Remember the scene in X2 where Wolverine grabs a Dr. Pepper and enlists the aid of Iceman to make it cold? Take the tone of that scene and stretch it out to feature length and you get Sky High, a less angsty, more kid-friendly movie about teenagers attending a school…
The British indie filmmaker Sally Potter, a former dancer, lyricist, and performance artist, clearly has a taste for adventure. In 1992 that led her to Orlando, a screen adaptation of the experimental Virginia Woolf novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who hangs around for 400 years, eventually morphing into a hip…
MTV Films made a wise purchase in picking up Hustle & Flow at Sundance: The soundtrack is killer. Rapping over music composed by Three 6 Mafia and Al Kapone, star Terrence Howard has the skills. The rest of the songs heard onscreen, most of which fall into the uniquely Southern…
It should come as no surprise that the hero and heroine of the new Michael Bay action extravaganza are clones. Exact copies of other people. You don’t get to be a Hollywood hitmeister like Bay — 200 Zillion Tickets Sold! — without indulging in formulas, and the characters Star Wars…
Going to the theater this summer has been like stepping into a time machine where your fondest childhood memories are retooled by cynics and sadists. Bewitched, Herbie: Fully Loaded, last week’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and now Bad News Bears are meant to be gobbled like comfort food by…
When rocker-turned-director Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses was released in 2003, after years of bouncing around between stud ios afraid to put their name on a movie about a cartoonishly murderous family, it was anticipated as a hardcore gorefest. Instead, it was a plotless mess, with decent violence but…
Vince Vaughn probably has to check the bags under his eyes at the airport, and he’s about as in-shape as a toddler’s fistful of Play-Doh. This is no doubt why audiences dig him; he is us, dude, and we am him. Onscreen, he looks like any other buddy who’d loan…
Roald Dahl’s inner child was evidently a contrary lad — precocious, dark-minded, contemptuous of adult supervision, and fueled by a sense of justice that often proceeded via cruel whim. In Dahl’s twisty children’s stories, villains throw kids out of windows, beautiful women turn out to be hideous witches in disguise,…
If you’re short on reasons to be grateful these days, look no further than March of the Penguins, the astonishing if imperfect nature documentary from first-time director Luc Jacquet. Hard times may have befallen you, but at least you are not a penguin, an animal destined to repeat a devastating…
So little time, so much trouble. In the 24-hour period that’s dissected in Heights, the first feature from Harvard/Cambridge/USC Film School-educated Chris Terrio, an aspiring Manhattan photographer named Isabel (Elizabeth Banks) gets cold feet about her upcoming marriage to dull but pleasant lawyer Jonathan (James Marsden); a needy Broadway diva…
Italian Jewish painter Amedeo Modigliani was 35 years old when he died in 1920 due to complications of tuberculosis, drug abuse, chronic alcoholism, and neglect. Actor Andy Garcia is 50, and his movie Modigliani implies that the artist’s death was directly induced by injuries from a violent altercation and that…
Quite simply and quite literally, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds is Close Encounters of the Third Kind turned inside-out: They’re still out there, only this time the aliens are out for our blood, which they spray all over the countryside like so much red paint…
Martin Lawrence has never exactly been among the world’s more gifted comedians, yet his movies seem to keep raking in the cash, so there must be legions of loyal Lawrenceheads out there somewhere. But even they, who have made financial successes of Black Knight, Big Momma’s House, and National Security,…
Forget Mad Hot Ballroom. The real dance documentary hit of the summer is more likely to be Rize. After all, which do you think the kids are going to find more appealing: formal steps that require suits, partners, and schoolteachers or shaking the booty and slamming into fellow dancers while…
Not many people saw Lost and Delirious, the 2001 boarding-school drama about two girls in obsessive love, and that was probably for the best. Yes, Piper Perabo (Coyote Ugly) made a stunning androgynous rebel, but she couldn’t rescue the film from its unctuous self-importance. My Summer of Love, a bewitching…
Anyone who would insist that movie reviewing is not a real job (‘Sup, Mom) hasn’t been forced to sit through screenings of Bewitched and Herbie: Fully Loaded in the span of five days — and by forced, I mean either you see both movies, write 800 words about each, or…
