To the woman who broke Adrian Lyne’s heart all those years ago: Stop what you’re doing right this minute. Drop everything; pick up the phone, and call him. Apologize profusely for cheating on him. Tell him it’s all your fault and you’re a worse person for leaving him. Offer him…
Anybody who takes a second, sorrowful look at the charred rubble in lower Manhattan, the body counts in the West Bank or the brazen denials of Slobodan Milosevic will have to conclude that the brotherhood of man isn’t attracting many good recruits these days. Neither, for that matter, is the…
The most compelling element of Dogtown and Z-Boys, Stacy Peralta’s valentine to a crew of footloose Southern California teenagers who set a radical new style in skateboarding in the 1970s, is the documentarian’s heartfelt belief in the lasting importance of the enterprise. As a member of the tribe and an…
Deuces Wild is, like Vulgar and Chelsea Walls, yet another new release that is now inexplicably being distributed theatrically — rather than slinking away to the video/cable market — after having explicably sat on the shelf for more than a year. The film’s age is immediately evident both from how…
Kick a boy enough times and he’ll become a man. The question is, of what sort? In his long-awaited feature portrait of the comic-book hero Spider-Man, director Sam Raimi brings forth a kaleidoscopic answer full of hope and verve. Flashy enough for kids and insightful enough to engage adults, the…
Poor William Randolph Hearst. The snapping dogs of Hollywood just won’t leave the guy alone. It’s been barely sixty years since a little epic called Citizen Kane portrayed the great newspaper tycoon as a ruthless dictator who degenerated into an emotional basket case, and already there’s more bad publicity in…
The thoroughly unlikable heroine of Life or Something Like It is a vain, starlet-like bleached blonde employed by a Seattle TV station. To call her a reporter is to defame reporters. Her hairspray outweighs her brain, and everything in her life — from her obsessive workouts at the health club…
Women who exchange descriptions of their sexual encounters are certainly no more appealing than men who boast in locker rooms, but they seem to get more free passes. If, in the name of social candor, Jerry Springer can induce sisters to confess what they’ve done with barnyard animals and every…
I don’t know what most devout Christians expect from the Second Coming, but in a relentlessly inspirational new movie called Joshua, the Son of God does it all for the citizens of a small town in Alabama. He tosses a 500-pound log onto his shoulder as if it were a…
The perpetrators of the new Sandra Bullock vehicle, Murder by Numbers, could be hauled in on any number of charges, including plagiarism and child abuse. But their most obvious crime is first-degree dullness. A thriller without thrills, a mystery devoid of urgent questions, this merely bloody piece of business spends…
The two slacker anti-heroes of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother Too) come furnished with all the usual glitches of late adolescence: raging hormones, impatient wanderlust, contempt for their elders and a jones for dope and beer. In fact, Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna)…
The work of Henry Jaglom is an acquired taste that, for many of us, remains unacquired. While his new film, Festival in Cannes, is not a huge departure from the usual, it may be his most accessible effort for non-fans since 1991’s Eating. Not surprisingly, the movie is set at…
The eternal beauty and constant surprise of baseball are always getting sabotaged by Hollywood’s urge to reduce the grand old game to a set of cliches as tedious as spring-training drills. The ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson elevated Field of Dreams, the Wild Thing’s errant fastball gave momentary charm to…
With Panic Room, about the night Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her teenage daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) are home-invaded by a trio of burglars seeking hidden treasure, dyspeptic director David Fincher reveals himself as little more than a derivative visionary. For some, this will be plenty enough: As mainstream, studio-financed…
It’s readily apparent that Danny DeVito’s Death to Smoochy deals with a thoroughly debauched children’s television host (Robin Williams) who plots, amid much dark zaniness, to destroy his squeaky-clean successor (Edward Norton). It’s also quite easy to proclaim it the greatest movie ever made…about a singing vegan in a fuchsia…
One of the fun things about the media is that many people who work in it lie almost constantly, creating a social minefield that keeps everybody hoppin’. For instance, take the big studios (please). Sometimes we call them up and say, “Hiya, we noticed that you have a major motion…
Looking at the original Blade now, it’s not as impressive as it seemed at the time; its hugely positive reception among the comic-book crowd may have been simply because it didn’t suck. It came out before The Matrix brought Hong Kong-style wires and trenchcoats to the world’s attention, and also…
Kissing Jessica Stein ends several times — a likely explanation of why a film with so short a running time, 94 minutes, feels as though it lasts much longer — and each conclusion satisfies; each feels real, natural and, best of all, inevitable. That is, except for the actual finale,…
Ice Age poses a heretofore unfathomable question: Is it possible for computer-generated characters to go through the motions? Everything about this endeavor — from 20th Century Fox, playing cartoon catch-up after 2000’s Titan A.E., which seemed to be stolen from Saturday-morning television — feels pilfered and stitched together. There’s not…
Science fiction can wow us with gadgetry, but only the truly ambitious stuff lights up our imaginations with disturbing and unshakable aberrations, be they incredible shrinking men, fifty-foot women or Sting’s winged panties from Dune. Within this vast genre, it figures that the ultimate human construct — time — proves…
Cell phones and silk saris, dot-coms and arranged marriages — Monsoon Wedding, the latest film from Indian-born director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala) captures the heady mix of old and new, rich and poor, traditional and modern that defines contemporary India. A sort of Father of the Bride set…
If We Were Soldiers smells at all familiar, perhaps you’re confusing it with the stench emanating from a nearby theater screening Black Hawk Down. After all, on their shiny blood-drenched surfaces, they’re damned near the same movie: Both are based on books that recount real-life battles that claimed the lives…
