“Industrial-strength boredom” is a vicious term to unload on anybody — friend, foe or former actress. Considering the lingering discomfort the epithet inspires, you should be wary of its impact, even around a seemingly invulnerable producer returning to the screen to melt our hearts in yet another variation on the…

Everybody’s a princess at one point or another. Rich girls work it from birth to final crackup. Bourgeois girls play the precious-‘n’-misunderstood game through adolescence, shifting it into ruthless ambition shortly thereafter. Poor girls can blow an entire lifetime just screwing up their hair and pretending they’re Tolkein’s Galadriel. As…

There is a killing late in Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s new heroic epic, and it is one of those wonderfully cathartic extinguishings that make wide-eyed audiences rise and cheer. We’ve been herded across much of western Europe by this point, through Germanic mud, Spanish fields and Italian dust, and we’ve seen…

Go get a few grains of salt to accompany these observations of tenable consistency and enduring potential: The movie industry is run by big kids; nifty sci-fi trickery may distract an audience from emotional shoals; cops and criminals are divided by a fine line; nostalgia and evil are cheaper by…

Although its themes are about as revelatory as those of an average Cathy comic strip (clothes don’t fit, job too busy, male not clairvoyant, AACK!), there’s something irrefutably charming about Philippa “Pip” Karmel’s debut feature, Me Myself I. The editor of the Academy darling Shine has scripted a laundry list…

O! Sweet vulture of love! Picking through the bones and sinew of doe-eyed fools the world around! How exquisite is thy rending, how blissful the release! Spirits in crimson rivulets swirled, souls as carrion shredded! Two vibrant hearts made still as one, to sate thy gnashing beak! Blessed bloody bird,…

In the closing years of the twentieth century, lowbrow white America finally learned to enjoy an ironic laugh at itself, led by Hollywood’s cheerful mockery of the culturally challenged working class. Outside the system, John Waters had this stuff pegged from the get-go, but the American grotesqueries of the original,…

Step right up, youth of the world, and receive the boomer inoculation that is Wonder Boys, the first feature from director Curtis Hanson since his much-lauded adaptation of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. Then marvel at Michael Douglas showing off his wide spectrum of inert doldrums and tedious self-pity. Thrill to…

The evening of March 14, 1885, was an auspicious one in the annals of musical theater. Less than four years had passed since the opening of London’s Savoy Theatre, which was built specifically for the productions of librettist William Schwenk Gilbert and composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan. The partners’ first six…

Boo hoo! Frank McCourt had a miserable childhood! Honestly, who can say their childhood wasn’t impoverished in some way…or in many ways? That Mr. McCourt survived and eventually published his inescapable memoir is nice, of course, and the book is indeed a poignant and crafty piece of work. Nonetheless, it…

I sincerely hope that Jodie Foster gets a chance to relax and unwind this holiday season, because the lady has obviously worked like a horse to instill her latest role with humanity and significance. As intrepid British widow Anna Leonowens, in the huge and poetic new Anna and the King,…

Nobody is innocent in America, but there is one segment of the population that seems doggedly determined to deny its own ignorance, ugliness and violence. So hands up: Who really likes rednecks? The sludge on the bottom of the melting pot, this embarrassing offshoot of European ancestry continues to this…

Have you ever endured a relationship in which your partner beat you up mercilessly just so he could “heal” you and play the redeemer later on? Granted, that’s a weird question perhaps better explored via Akbar and Jeff in Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell” comic strip, but it relates closely…

“Yesterday I wasn’t even sure God existed,” laments Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), the reluctant yet divinely touched heroine of Kevin Smith’s ambitious new film, Dogma. “Now I’m up to my ass in Christian mythology.” As it turns out, so are we. Strutting to a spiritually snappy groove not observed in mainstream…

The first rule of Being John Malkovich is, you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich! Plot-spoiling critics are harmless compared to what these filmmakers have opted to disclose in their own promotional art. (This package is second only to Kevin Smith’s Dogma for foolishly trotting out…

“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed somewhere in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To,” from New Sensations), but as has often been…

When I was growing up, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was the closest thing I had to a paternal mentor, the only authoritative voice I consistently trusted. Novel after freakish, scattershot, infinitely humane novel, the man provided tools to identify and cope with the daily horrors of America — this vast sea…

David Fincher needs a hug, the poor bastard. Or possibly a diaper change. Ever since 1992, when he ruined the Alien series with the excrescence of his pointless, senseless third installment, he’s been making the same bratty, obnoxious movie over and over again: gloom, doom, indestructible protagonist, bureaucratic evil, quasi-religious…

Insomniacs, rejoice! During the first several decades of Sydney Pollack’s bloated, interminable Random Hearts, your eyelids will droop, your pulse and respiration will slow, and you’ll get that $8 nap you’ve been craving. Once the credits roll and the lights come up, you’ll awaken refreshed, undisturbed by vague dreams about…

There is nothing gratifying about watching a bullet blast through a woman’s skull. Exploding helicopters and splattered cattle are utterly indefensible. And few would smile at the image of a little boy being obliterated by a flashy missile. So why is David O. Russell’s Three Kings such rousing entertainment? This…