It is as you’ve always suspected: Rob Zombie’s house is way cooler than yours. For one thing, the punk/metal god turned filmmaker has a twelve-foot stuffed polar bear in his living room. (Zombie to dumbstruck interviewer: “I know, right? How fuckin’ big is that bear?”) The bear presides over dozens…
By late summer, when director James Wan’s Death Sentence is playing side-by-side with Neil Jordan’s The Brave One at many of our nation’s multiplexes, movie-goers will be forgiven for thinking that they’ve traveled through a time warp and landed in the late 1970s, when first-class cinemas and seedy grindhouses alike…
The American Landscape and Carny. Rule Gallery has typically presented single solos since landing in its new space several months ago, but this time, there are two different shows in that long and narrow sales room. The two work well together, though, as both are made up of photographs about…
Year of the Dog (Paramount Vantage) It’s just about the First Commandment of Hollywood: Don’t kill the dog. So it’s a testament to the clout of writer-director Mike White (School of Rock) that killing off the dog is the first of many rules broken in this weird-ass movie. Folks fooled…
Shortly after graduating from film school, I took a part-time job as the assistant to a successful movie and television director who told me I’d be handling a mix of personal and professional responsibilities. Not long after, I was put to work maintaining the good humor of the tenants at…
Masterfully edited and cumulatively walloping, Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight turns the well-known details of our monstrously bungled Iraq War into an enraging, apocalyptic litany of fuckups. You may have already heard some or all of the absurd, shameful, appalling details that Ferguson collects and still be driven to…
It seems fitting that a movie about debate competition should produce ambivalent feelings. As a master debater says early on in Jeffrey Blitz’s Rocket Science, a strong opinion is a luxury the great ones don’t allow themselves; it only gets in the way. What matters is being able to argue…
Back in 1995, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise gave flesh to a Yank’s fantasy of worldly European womanhood: Julie Delpy’s Celine, a sprite who materialized on a passenger train for one sweet Viennese night of courtship and flirtation, as if willed from the fevered dreams above a thousand hostel beds. As…
Eight years ago, the philosophy professor-turned-cineast Bruno Dumont debuted his sophomore feature at the Cannes Film Festival. Set in a banal French village on the northeastern coast, the plot involved an investigation by police superintendent Pharaon, a repressed, mouth-breathing mama’s boy, into the rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl…
The American Landscape and Carny. Rule Gallery has typically presented single solos since landing in its new space several months ago, but this time, there are two different shows in that long and narrow sales room. The two work well together, though, as both are made up of photographs about…
The Lives of Others (Sony) Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film, easily the best of last year, exists on many levels: as tragedy, dark comedy, and love story — not between a man and a woman, but between two seemingly opposite men bound by the same damnation. On the one hand…
The latest comic meteorite to hurtle forth from the galaxy of producer Judd Apatow, Superbad is about a couple of chronically unpopular best friends who, after four years stuck on the lowest rung of the high-school social ladder, find themselves invited to a legitimately cool party. Goodbye, Friday nights chugging…
It’s impossible to write about David Wain’s The Ten without first making passing reference to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. The former, originally made for Polish TV twenty years ago and first shown in the United States in 2000, offered a modern-day take on the…
No less than Spider-Man 3, Oren Rudavsky’s The Treatment is an urban fairy tale. It’s an Upper-West-Side story, adapted from publishing powerhouse Daniel Menaker’s well-reviewed 1998 novel, first published in the New Yorker, in which a smart-mouthed, if diffident, hero (Chris Eigeman) wins a wise, beautiful princess (the versatile, sometime…
The American Landscape and Carny. Rule Gallery has typically presented single solos since landing in its new space several months ago, but this time, there are two different shows in that long and narrow sales room. The two work well together, though, as both are made up of photographs about…
Taxi Driver: Collector’s Edition (Sony) “Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads: Here is a man who would not take it anymore.” Martin Scorsese’s 1976 vision of hell as city-of-night New York rips through the reverential treatment on this special edition like a hunter’s blade through deerskin. A second disc of eight…
Chris Tucker still believes in Michael Jackson. You can tell because in the very first scene of Rush Hour 3, the actor-comedian squeals melodically, grabs his crotch and throws his arms up to the heavens. All that’s missing is a giant off-stage fan to make Tucker’s shirt billow out behind…
Stardust is less an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 1999 novel than of its dust-jacket synopsis. That will come as disconcerting news to fans of the author, who thus far has avoided the fate of fellow fantasy writers and comics creators who’ve had their works mangled by the studios’ clumsy assembly…
Right before Segway scooters were unleashed onto the world, there was talk of this new machine that was going to change the way America travels. A social revolution, the press releases promised. Then they hit the streets and people asked, “Why would I pay $4,000 for a machine that walks…
The American Landscape and Carny. Rule Gallery has typically presented single solos since landing in its new space several months ago, but this time, there are two different shows in that long and narrow sales room. The two work well together, though, as both are made up of photographs about…
Bubba Ho-tep Limited Edition (MGM) Intentional camp is difficult to do well. It’s a contradiction that usually comes off cutesy and forced. The old Batman series pulled it off, and it’s been B-movie god Bruce Campbell’s livelihood. But in a long career of overacting and mugging, Campbell’s peak may be…
The Bourne Ultimatum opens in Russia as the amnesiac super-spy Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) does what he does best: elude capture, crack skulls, brood. Lickety-split, he’s en route to Paris, nursing his wounds and breaking out with a bad case of those itchy-scratchy hallucinations known as Hollywood Flashback Syndrome. Choice…
