By conservative estimate, Tim Burton stands to rake in half a billion dollars at the box office this year, thanks to a childlike chocolate maker in mauve rubber gloves and, now, to a lively dead girl with marriage on her mind. As inventive as it is original, Tim Burton¹s Corpse…
In the tradition of A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting comes Proof, a psychological drama about a math genius and the people who worship, care for and endure him. Based on the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play by David Auburn, Proof is a strong film with intense focus. Its characters…
Flightplan, starring Jodie Foster as a mother who’s either lost her daughter or her mind during a flight from Berlin to New York, is a wonderful movie for about an hour — a moving, gripping rumination on loss, grief and sanity. It works primarily because of its star, whose delicate,…
In 2001, Jonathan Safran Foer made an astounding literary debut. “A Very Rigid Search,” published by the New Yorker, was his hilarious, heartbreaking account of an attempt by a young American man (named, cheekily, Jonathan Safran Foer) to find a Ukrainian woman who had saved his grandfather from the Nazis…
When one goes to see a movie titled El Crimen Perfecto (literal translation: The Perfect Crime), it might seem unlikely that the title of this Spanish film has been altered for American audiences. But it has — in Spain, the title is Crimen Ferpecto, which makes the crime a general…
It would take a critic more churlish than this one to sneer and bare chicken-like talons at Roll Bounce, a formulaic crowd-pleaser that hits familiar marks but does so well enough that it’s hard to fault anyone involved. The retro-’70s vibe seems kind of obvious, and the irritating Mike Epps,…
Da Ali G Show (HBO Home Video) Sacha Baron Cohen’s inching closer to Tom Green territory; come this time next year, his HBO show is likely to be on the pop-culture junk pile. Which isn’t to say this double-disc set doesn’t hold up; it’s just wearing thin, as evidenced by…
Andy Warhol’s Dream America. Hot on the heels of its smash hit, Chihuly, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is presenting yet another blockbuster devoted to the work of a household name in contemporary art: Andy Warhol’s Dream America. The exhibition was curated by Ben Mitchell of Wyoming’s Nicolaysen Museum…
If you’re a character in a movie and the rain is coming down so heavily that you cannot see out of your car’s windshield, for the love of God, don’t drive! Mack truck drivers interpret such conditions as carte blanche to be reckless and will assume that honking their horn…
Back in the mid-’90s, when MTV still flirted with (intentional) comedy shows, it ran one called The State, which featured performers who now appear on the Comedy Central hit Reno 911. There wasn’t all that much worth remembering about The State, but the show did make one significant attempt at…
Andrew Niccol’s first two films as writer-director, 1997’s Gattaca and 2002’s S1m0ne, were hollow, sterile sci-fi masquerading as earnest satire: The former told of a near future in which parents could genetically engineer perfect children; the latter proffered an actress who became the most famous and beloved movie star in…
Ain’t nothing in this world more tedious than highbrow erotica, which works itself into a lather and then wipes off the sweat before anyone notices how awfully and inappropriately worked up it got. Asylum, adapted by Closer’s Patrick Marber and Chrysanthy Balis from the novel by Patrick McGrath, is just…
If The Memory of a Killer were not mostly in Flemish, it would be easy to mistake for a Hollywood movie. The story of a hit man with a conscience and the cop who’s always a step or two behind him as they pursue the same villains, it’s full of…
It seems just about any movie featuring a positively gay character scares the bejeezus out of religious film critics like Michael Medved and Ted Baehr. So it was merely a matter of time before someone embraced that notion and made an all-out (pun intended) gay film that’s deliberately scary. That’s…
The Blues Brothers 25th Anniversary Edition (Universal Studios Home Video) Dan Aykroyd and John Goodman’s modern-day revival of the Blues Brothers is less a stroke of comedy genius than a dose of karaoke night at Hooters. Fight off those thoughts and pop in this 1980 classic. John Belushi and Aykroyd,…
Andy Warhol’s Dream America. Hot on the heels of its smash hit, Chihuly, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is presenting yet another blockbuster devoted to the work of a household name in contemporary art: Andy Warhol’s Dream America. The exhibition was curated by Ben Mitchell of Wyoming’s Nicolaysen Museum…
Fans of the last two Miramax films from Swedish director Lasse Hallstrm — Chocolat and The Shipping News — may be happy to know that he has stuck to the exact same formula for his latest, An Unfinished Life. Like its predecessors, this is the tale of an itinerant single…
The Man isn’t so much a movie as it is a parody of one, the kind of thing people in movies about the movie business pitch as outrageous, inept ideas when a director’s going for the cheap and quick giggle. Only in movies like The Player or Bowfinger or Christopher…
The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which is based on a true story the same way Harry Potter and the Star Wars movies are, is the latest — though certainly not the last — movie of this bloody (awful) year trying to scare the money right out of your wallet. It…
Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder” is right up there with Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” for the sheer number of movies that seem to have been inspired by it. Both are receiving ostensibly faithful adaptations on the big screen this year, but why bother?…
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance hits these shores now in large part due to the recent positive reception for Oldboy. Both films make up two thirds of Korean director Chanwook Park’s “Vengeance” trilogy, with the third, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, due out next year. If you haven’t yet seen Oldboy, which…
Floundering mimics and hopeless imitators come and go behind the camera, but there is only one Alfred Hitchcock. The “master of suspense,” the committed ritualist who combined sadism and satire with the ease of a god, the schemer who created what critic Anthony Lane once called “a whole new etiquette…
