The cynic may notice only how Hearts in Atlantis plays like a Stephen King best-of compilation, a reheating of familiar stories and favorite themes. At times it feels so much like Stand by Me — with its nostalgic flashback tale of cherubs and bullies accompanied by sad and weary narration…
If you were to hear that Our Lady of the Assassins is one of the most genuinely shocking films you’ll ever see, what would that suggest to you? Some new level of extreme violence and explicit sex, no doubt. But that’s not what’s at play in this eerily cool melodrama…
Filmmakers don’t get any more sensitive than Paul Cox. When it comes to jerking a tear or tugging a heartstring, this Dutch-born, Australian-raised veteran is a master. Just ask anyone who saw My First Wife (1984), in which a workaholic disc jockey falls to pieces when his neglected wife has…
The beautiful little conceit at the heart of Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents is that audiences will sit still once more for the crackpot notion of time travel — and in a movie that’s not science fiction. To his credit, and with an implied bow to Back to the Future and…
Together is the second feature from Swedish director Lukas Moodysson, whose 1998 Fucking Amal was shown in the United States two years ago under the title Show Me Love, renamed for obvious reasons. Together is an ensemble piece — a sharp, perceptive look at a Swedish commune in a suburb…
Faced with yet another sports movie in which a group of lovably troubled kids triumphs over adversity, it’s easier to scoff and grumble than to feel even partially uplifted. So let’s do it — let’s scoff and grumble. At least for a moment. In Brian Robbins’s Hardball, a degenerate gambler…
After the next apocalypse, hundreds of thousands of years from the moment we clever humans smugly call “now,” the great philosopher-scientists will gather to assemble the remaining traces of our present time and species. In particular, these evolved beings will find fascination in the structure of our crania, which will…
Julie Davis’s All Over the Guy is yet another entry in the ever-growing genre of gay romantic comedy. Ten years ago, one would have led off by saying, “It’s a romantic comedy, but with a twist: They’re both men!” or “It’s When Harry Met Solly…!” It’s a step in the…
The Italian film Bread and Tulips is a first cousin once removed of the American comedy Home Alone. A tremendous hit in Italy (it won nine Donatello awards last year, the Italian equivalent of the Oscars), it concerns a woman who, on a bus holiday with her family, accidentally gets…
A year after Cameron Crowe climbed back aboard the tour bus for one last spin through rock’s golden days of giddy hedonism and phony heroism comes a film set a decade later, in the mid-1980s, when the parties got harder, the music louder and the musicians prettier. The world of…
Only committed horticulturists and compulsive readers of the New York Times obituaries (this writer falls into the latter category) likely noticed the recent passing of Rosemary Verey, an aristocratic Englishwoman whose sophisticated but egalitarian approach to gardening took some of the stuffiness out of what previously had been a rather…
So why is it that every time they make a movie about a nerd, the character in question is always white? What’s Hollywood trying to tell us? Caucasians have a corner on the market in failing eyesight, office jobs and undernourished physiques? Or is it legitimately a white thing –…
Woody Allen’s latest romp through old New York combines (among other things) a skirt-chasing insurance investigator with the charm of a rodent, a wise-cracking Vassar grad who takes no guff and a nightclub hypnotist in a sequined turban who doubles as a major jewel thief. The year is 1940. The…
After nearly a decade’s absence from the big screen, Suture auteurs Scott McGehee and David Siegel finally deliver a second feature with The Deep End, an exciting, sharply realized, melodramatic film noir based on Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s novel The Blank Wall, which was also the source for the 1949 Max…
If Sergeant York and Captain Willard ever run into each other on the battlefield — or the backlot — they’ll have plenty to talk about. Army food. The firepower of the Springfield ’03 versus the M-16 carbine. Mud and grime. The night sweats. Overwrought assistant directors. They might even discuss…
The social lessons of Captain Corelli¹s Mandolin, all of them suitable for framing in just about any dorm room, are these: War is bad. Love is good. The Italians love to sing, even when they’re supposed to be at war. The Greeks are freedom fighters. And whatever you do, don’t…
Well, my goodness, look at you! You are so alternative, so fringe, so punk! So artsy and alienated! So utterly aimless and oozing with angst! Tell us, girl, what ought we to call you? Edwina Scissorhands? That’s one easily justified reaction a viewer may take away from Thora Birch’s power-moping…
Tran Anh Hung’s beautiful meditation on family ties and family traumas, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, marks a captivating new chapter in the career of the writer-director who was the first to give Americans a glimpse of Vietnamese filmmaking. In 1994, Tran’s The Scent of Green Papaya made its…
During this cinematic Summer of Dumb, it would be all too easy to celebrate half-assed cleverness as a virtue, especially when proffered by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who elevated the gross-out to an art form in Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary. Osmosis Jones, one of two films the Booger…
The most telling scene in Rush Hour 2 comes during the closing-credits montage of outtakes that has become the most enjoyable part of Jackie Chan’s Hollywood outings. Chris Tucker — the poor man’s Eddie Murphy, who now pockets more than the real thing per picture — and Chan have just…
Times certainly have changed. Twenty years ago, a musical about an East German transsexual rock singer would have premiered in one of New York’s Off-Off Broadway theaters or cabarets, run for a couple of weeks and remained the pleasant memory of a select few. But when John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig…
There are scenes in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes redo that are so hysterical they drown out minutes’ worth of dialogue that follow, which is hardly a knock. Indeed, the film is often so comical, so ridiculous in that self-aware, wink-wink sort of way, that it plays like a…
