Good Lord, there hasn’t been this much yellow hair on screen since the Von Trapp children sang and danced their way across the Alps in The Sound of Music. The fact that these latest golden locks belong to the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Wright Penn and Renée Zellweger suggests…
I might as well just come out and say it: Spirited Away is the best movie I’ve seen all year. Though it would be a masterpiece in any language, Hayao Miyazaki’s animated spectacular (and Japan’s highest-grossing film ever) is being released by Disney in two versions simultaneously: one in the…
Ordinarily it would seem somewhat odious to put so fine a point on this, but what the hey: Gather up your gay friends, because here’s a movie they’re going to dig, dig, dig. Well, probably, anyway. That general demographic seems to be the target audience of the radical, whimsical French…
Whatever white America doesn’t know — or refuses to acknowledge — about the grim realities of life on the nation’s Indian reservations has been coming to light through a growing body of Native American writing and the long-overdue emergence of films shot on location in Indian country, using largely indigenous…
Chris Smith’s brief but thoroughly entertaining Home Movie carries on a grand tradition of American documentary: seeking out the eccentrics and contrarians among us. In the space of an hour, Smith provides glimpses of five U.S. houses and their owners, and — thank goodness — his whirlwind tour is less…
For most of us living west of New Brunswick and south of Saskatchewan, Canadian humor and curling are both acquired tastes. But that hasn’t stopped the Calgary-born actor, writer and director Paul Gross and Artisan Entertainment from releasing an odd duck of a movie called Men With Brooms in such…
Among the more preposterous rumors spread by Harry Knowles (whose Ain’t It Cool News movie-biz-gossip Web site garners undue attention from studios too craven to do their own thinking) was one from the year’s beginning: Terrence Malick, Knowles “reported,” was working on an adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye…
For those with any kind of pop-culture memory, it’s more than a little surprising to see Ice Cube in a movie like Barbershop. Not because it’s a light comedy — Friday was, too, and that was certainly in character. What’s odd about Barbershop is its seeming embrace of positions that…
Since average folk can’t often afford to fly to Paris (unless they live, say, in Lyon), 93-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira offers some consolation in the form of I¹m Going Home (Je Rentre à la Maison). Shot more than two years ago, it’s a seemingly sweet and deceptively simple…
Like Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro is one of those guys who can make just about any material inherently enjoyable. Also like Clint, he will sometimes make you wish he’d pick roles that are a little more challenging. His recent record of relatively disposable films speaks for itself: Tough-yet-sensitive cop…
Iranian films that make it to American shores generally fall into two categories: sensitive dramas featuring young children, à la The White Balloon and Children of Heaven, or pointed political statements about the plight of women, such as The Circle and The Day I Became a Woman. Secret Ballot is…
Any young movie director seeking to make a mark in the underworld gravitates to certain conventions of the crime genre. Major bloodletting is a must. It doesn’t hurt to stage a power struggle between an established mob boss and his overly ambitious protégé, preferably with undertones of Greek tragedy. There…
When Robin Williams was America’s favorite funnyman in films like Mrs. Doubtfire, it always felt a little strange admitting that the guy seemed kinda creepy. When he “got serious” in irritating tearjerkers such as Hook and What Dreams May Come, it was certainly in vogue to proclaim him annoying, but…
As heroes go, the two just-released mental patients struggling to make a new life in Peter Naess’s touching social comedy, Elling, are notably short on glamour. When we meet him, the shy, middle-aged title character, portrayed by an exquisitely subtle actor named Per Christian Ellefsen, is a quivering bundle of…
Between the onset of Greta Garbo’s tuberculosis and the victory over Russell Crowe’s schizophrenia, moviegoers have endured a relentless barrage of disease — and they have relished almost every tearjerking, Kleenex-wringing minute of it. Who but a soulless curmudgeon could resist the emotion (no matter how manufactured) of Ali McGraw’s…
Citizen-soldiers eager to renew hostilities in the American culture wars can shoot a couple of spitballs at each other this week over Little Secrets, a teen-anxiety movie that leaves no doubt where it stands on “family values” and moral absolutes. It approves. The shock troops of the Cinema Without Limits…
Sometimes when a director shoots at a barn, the satisfaction comes in simply watching him hit it dead center. So it is with The Good Girl, wherein Miguel Arteta (Star Maps) targets middle-American ennui with wit, compassion and no shortage of ornery malaise. Like Arteta’s second feature, Chuck&Buck, this one’s…
Robert Evans wrote his autobiography in 1994 out of desperation as much as hubris. It cried, “Damn it, look at me…please?” He’d produced one film during the previous ten years, The Cotton Club, which was such a colossal failure that it rendered Evans a moot point in Hollywood. It was…
Blood Work, Clint Eastwood’s 23rd film as a director, is another crime thriller in the mode of True Crime (1998) and Absolute Power (1996) — although it’s better. More than these, however, it resembles In the Line of Fire (1993), the Eastwood vehicle directed by Wolfgang Petersen, arguably the best…
The past is a foreign country — they do things differently there.” So goes the immortal line from The Go-Between. And in the brilliant new documentary The Cockettes, that “foreignness” comes through stronger than ever, even for those who lived though the fabled and reviled 1960s. The film, by David…
Like George Clooney says in Ocean’s Eleven, “Do the math”: four Canon XL1 digital cameras, one dual 800 MHz Power Mac G4, a copy of editing software Final Cut Pro 3, eighteen shooting days, a two-million-buck budget, one Oscar-winning Best Director and nine high-profile actors (among them Julia Roberts, Brad…
This time around, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan puts the surprise at the beginning of his film, and it’s a subtle, shimmering clue — one easily missed and, frankly, one that might not even be there at all. Such are the temptations offered by the maker of The Sixth Sense and…
