For an industry notorious for its test screenings, focus groups and obsession with what will play best in the heartland, the movie business occasionally and spectacularly drops the ball with respect to its mainstream entertainment. Last year, someone decided what the public most wanted to see was America’s Sweethearts, a…
Over the last half-century, countless filmmakers great and obscure have stood in serious debt to The Bicycle Thief. But for my money, no one has borrowed so cleverly or shifted the weight of Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 masterpiece so gracefully as young Wang Xiaoshuai, whose Beijing Bicycle embodies the spirit…
To call a movie the most accessible film ever made by the Dogme 95 group is not merely damning with faint praise. It also threatens to alienate the two segments of the population who might consider going to see such a film in the first place: fans of the back-to-basics,…
After a long absence from American screens, British stage director Richard Eyre, best known for his agreeably nasty The Ploughman’s Lunch in 1982, makes his return with an alternately depressing and uplifting drama about Dame Iris Murdoch’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease and the heroic efforts of her husband, John Bayley,…
Hart’s War is little more than a movie about the movies, which is the case with most mediocre films. Set in a POW camp during the final months of World War II, it owes much of its existence to far superior films, mainly La Grande Illusion, Stalag 17 and The…
If they teach the work of Todd Solondz someday, assuming he’s not already in the curriculum somewhere, the lectures are bound to be rather short. To grasp the material without actually attending, just bone up on a little bargain-basement Freud, a whiff of primal therapy and a sprinkle of Jerry…
In case the season has you feeling shamefully joyous, here’s a stark little oasis of misery to remind you that America sometimes sucks and its denizens aren’t all heroes. Featuring painstaking attention to the copious warts of this big, proud country, Monster¹s Ball moseys down South to issue the staggering…
Those who spend Sunday morning in church — or every morning watching The 700 Club — will likely embrace the new Welsh film Taliesin Jones as an affirmation of Christian faith. Agnostics, drunkards and horse players will probably see it as evangelical propaganda. Never the twain shall meet. By any…
It’s astonishing just how open Screen Gems has been about showing Slackers to the reviewing press well in advance of deadlines. Dim, youth-oriented sex comedies like this often slip into theaters under cover of darkness. Not that critical appraisal really matters to such films; if it did, Freddie Prinze Jr…
Ray Lawrence’s Lantana is high-toned Australian soap opera, which is to say that its philandering police detective and its grief-stricken psychoanalyst are a bit quirkier than their all-too-familiar televised counterparts. Its unhappy wives, gloomy husbands and alienated teenagers are more carefully constructed than similar characters in less ambitious movies. This…
All of those war epics the big movie studios have rushed into release are certainly meant to reflect the present national mood, and if We Were Soldiers or Behind Enemy Lines or Black Hawk Down also happen to strike it rich, that will be fine with the box-office bean counters…
Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down — based on reporter Mark Bowden’s factual account of a 1993 U.S. Army operation gone dreadfully awry in Somalia — doesn’t just kick your ass. It pummels your entire body; it leaves you trembling. Once the premise and setting are established, this brutal combat adventure…
It would be easy and tempting to hail Kandahar as a masterpiece without even seeing it: It’s a foreign film; it takes on social issues; it’s directed by Iranian master Mohsen Makhmalbaf; it speaks to the causes of our war on terror and first hit U.S. shores right as the…
The combatants in Patrick Stettner’s compelling first feature, The Business of Strangers, are a middle-aged software executive (Stockard Channing) wearing a steel-blue suit and an air of professional hauteur; the executive’s mysterious new assistant (Julia Stiles), fresh out of Dartmouth and full of self-righteous aggression; and a cocky “headhunter” (Frederick…
Attended by a rather sexy air of intrigue, the hit French film Brotherhood of the Wolf (Le Pacte des Loups) arrives upon our shores; refreshingly, it’s left up to us to figure out just what the hell it is. Monster movie? Costume drama? Martial-arts extravaganza? To say the least, it’s…
In the Bedroom. First-time director Todd Field turns a dark tale by the late short-story master Andre Dubus into a precocious film masterpiece about murder, grief and repressed marital rage set in quiet Camden, Maine. Tom Wilkinson and likely Oscar nominee Sissy Spacek star as the highly civilized parents of…
Who would have guessed that 31 years after M*A*S*H, the film that made Robert Altman’s reputation, he would still be turning out movies as good as his latest release, Gosford Park? Full of the director’s usual energy, powered by the sense of controlled chaos that marks all of his ensemble…
The most daunting role for an actor is to portray a god, and when the god comes equipped with a tangle of myths and the quickest left jab in history, the actor’s job can soon veer into guesswork. To Will Smith’s credit, he has managed to get at least partway…
The tricked-up charms of James Mangold’s Kate & Leopold may be precisely what the moment demands — as long as you accept the existence of chivalry, the possibility of time travel and the stream of bubbles emanating from Meg Ryan. Skeptics need not apply. Having toured the psychiatric ward in…
Since the horrors of the dominant Hollywood culture — destruction, devastation, dumb-assness — do not appear to be receding of their own accord, there’s a great poignancy to the new cinematic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The film succeeds as massive,…
The air of danger that surrounds Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (À Ma Soeur) never lets up, which is unusual for a film that wasn’t meant to be a thriller. Rather, it’s a merciless look at adolescent insecurity, the mixed signals of emerging desire and the ruthlessness of carnal gamesmanship that,…
Beneath the hazy, mystifying layers of Vanilla Sky lies a remarkable Tom Cruise performance — one that, to a large extent, takes place beneath a makeup artist’s piled-on scars and a costumer’s blank “prosthetic” mask. As David Aames, hipster publisher of Maxim-like magazines, Cruise plays a lothario so vain he…
