Although virtually no one in this country foresaw the American disaster in Vietnam, the late British writer Graham Greene glimpsed it with astonishing clarity a decade before the first U.S. “adviser” set foot on Vietnamese soil. The Quiet American, a disturbing and provocative film by Australian director Phillip Noyce based…
If nothing else, because there’s nothing else to this movie, Shanghai Knights allows Jackie Chan, he of halting dialogue and poetic movement, to pay direct homage to his idols. He hangs from the arms of Big Ben, dangling off the stories-tall clock like Harold Lloyd in 1923’s Safety First; he…
First off, make no mistake: Biker Boyz is not, and has no intentions of being, The Fast and the Furious on two wheels, which will be considered a serious shame by the 12-year-old demographic that was hoping to chug a little more Diesel fuel till the official sequel’s release this…
Let’s start with two raves and a beef. Final Destination 2 is a tight, rockin’ popcorn flick packed with nasty kicks. It’s also a rare beast, a second horror-franchise installment that matches and in some ways supersedes the original (unlike such sputterings as Jaws 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street…
Hitler as artist… Hitler as artist… Damn. So much for the ol’ “summarize plot, tease overpaid actors, pontificate wildly” formula. Reviewing Max — about the wonder years of Der Führer (Noah Taylor) and his fictional Jewish benefactor, Max Rothman (John Cusack) — looks to be something of a task. Set…
Compiled in the cold light of day, the sum of Chuck Barris’ contributions to American culture are the Top 40 ditty “Palisades Park,” which he wrote in 1962, and his discovery, a few years later, that many people are willing to make complete fools of themselves in front of a…
It all begins with the word. “I believe I may have a first sentence,” murmurs Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman, yes really) to her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), commencing labor on the author’s fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The year is 1921, but skillfully intercut segments illustrate that the book’s heady emotional…
Intacto, the first feature film by 34-year-old Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, is a complex meditation on luck, fate, and the torments of memory. It has some opaque moments, and once in a while, it gives off a whiff of film-school pretension. But the young Spaniard looks like a force…
Other films have dealt with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland — some very well — but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best. Of course, it starts out with a huge advantage: The 69-year-old Polanski is probably the only working filmmaker…
Those who seek a polar opposite to Michael Caine’s kind-but-firm patriarch Dr. Wilbur Larch in The Cider House Rules will find it in Jim Broadbent’s horrid, one-eyed headmaster, Wackford Squeers, in the new adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. Author John Irving cribbed extensively from Charles Dickens to create his delightful (and…
It’s easy to presume About Schmidt isn’t much of a movie, since its protagonist, Warren Schmidt, isn’t much of anything. He’s portrayed by Jack Nicholson, but the actor is actually someone who looks like he used to be Jack Nicholson. This Warren, this rinky-dink actuary banished to the wasteland of…
Here’s a tricky little movie to review, as it’s going to divide audiences fairly drastically. Conservatives, especially black ones like Larry Elder and Ken Hamblin, will likely laud Antwone Fisher as a heroic story of a triumphant black man who conquers all of his inner demons and outer obstacles (of…
Everything about Catch Me If You Can, the loosely based-on-fact tale of a teenager who swindled millions while posing as, among other things, a Pan Am pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer, is breezy and easy to swallow. Its maker, Steven Spielberg, hasn’t had so much fun in two decades,…
Based on the true story of three young Aboriginal girls who walked 1,500 miles across the Australian Outback to be reunited with their mothers, Rabbit-Proof Fence might well be subtitled True Grit in recognition of the courage and single-minded determination that drove the trio to undertake such a perilous journey…
Fantasy is at its best when it ennobles our reality, and at the movies this year no fantastic adventure towers above The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The second installment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s delightful yarn is here adapted just as handily as last year’s The Fellowship of the…
Adaptation is the most overrated movie of the year (of all time?) by people who should know better. Film critics have either been suckered in by its gimmick (Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman can’t adapt a book for the big screen and winds up writing himself into his screenplay,…
Of all the movies you could be spending your December with — and there are many good choices, from Oscar-bait to better-than-expected sequels like The Santa Clause 2 — why would you want to end up at Drumline? It’s either an extremely canny bit of counter-programming or a tremendously heinous…
Maid in Manhattan, in which Jennifer Lopez goes from pauper to princess, comes not from a screenplay but from a handful of self-help books, fairy tales, and fashion magazines cut and pasted together in a glossy montage committed to celluloid. It has all the spunk of a math problem, all…
Robert De Niro has always loved an acting challenge, but lately those challenges have been less along the lines of “Can I convincingly play a boxer?” and more like “Can I alone be good enough to make this formulaic mess worth watching?” Yes, it was impressive that he played a…
Transcribed verbatim from the DVD commentary track of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, here’s an informative sci-fi concept from director George Lucas: “[A]s we go through the movie, there’s all these little funny moments like Jango bumping his head because in Star Wars one of the Stormtroopers…
It’s doubtful Robert Louis Stevenson imagined his Treasure Island populated by cyborgs and scored to Goo Goo Dolls outtakes. And one has to wonder what the author would have made of his characters being turned into talking and walking dogs and cats who (gulp!) copulate and reproduce mangy hybrids. Far…
The smart sci-fi fan knows that, technically speaking, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris is not a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film at all but rather a newly filmed interpretation of a Polish novel penned by Stanislaw Lem. Still, the new film stands in a mighty big shadow. If someone tried to make…
