It is no great joy to review Palindromes, the latest film from writer-director Todd Solondz, who is loved by those who do not loathe him for such movies as Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness and Storytelling. Advance word deemed Palindromes Solondz’s most shocking film, which seemed impossible given its predecessors…

Much of Crash, an L.A.-stories portmanteau about the suffocating embrace of racism, is hard to watch, harder still to listen to. Its characters — creations of co-writer and director Paul Haggis who could also live next door to and perhaps even inside of you — say and do things they…

Author Douglas Adams died at age 49 on May 11, 2001, of a heart attack suffered during a workout at a Santa Barbara, California, gym. His biographer, M.J. Simpson, blamed Adams’s demise in part on his unending battle to get The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on a big screen,…

Among the many mysteries surrounding The Interpreter is the one that finds Sydney Pollack heralded as a major American director, a maker of Serious and Important Movies. His filmography, marked by mawkish mediocrities (Out of Africa, as vibrant as a coffee-table book; The Way We Were, its romance as plausible…

Sahara is a stunning piece of work — stunningly inept, stunningly incoherent, stunningly awful in every way imaginable. How this didn’t go direct to video or cable or airplane or bootleg is unfathomable. Actually, that’s not entirely true. It gets a proper blockbuster theatrical release through Paramount Pictures because its…

A spinoff of a sequel, Beauty Shop plays like most Hollywood comedies these days: as tepid sitcom, benign product and cynical afterthought. If last year’s Barbershop 2: Back in Business was little more than a dilapidated retread of 2002’s charmingly lightweight hit Barbershop, consider this incarnation condemned for teardown. It’s…

If nothing else, Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, co-directed with Frank Miller (and Quentin Tarantino, for a few seconds), will be remembered as the most faithful comic-book adaptation ever put on film (or high-def video, anyway). Rodriguez uses Miller’s hyper-noir serial, published over a ten-year period, as storyboards for the movie,…

Damian Cunningham has the face of an angel — calm, cool blue eyes perched above freckled cheeks and a benevolent grin — which is only appropriate for a seven-year-old boy who speaks with the late, great saints, among them Peter, Joseph, Claire and, of course, Francis of Assisi. Damian sees…

The Upside of Anger belongs to Joan Allen, who plays Terry Wolfmeyer, a wife abandoned by her husband and left to pick up the pieces and collect them in a giant bottle of vodka. Terry’s is the cold, composed visage of a woman struggling to keep it together; through her…

The Pacifier, starring human battering ram Vin Diesel as a Navy S.E.A.L. ordered to protect five kids from baddies out to steal their dead dad’s invention, was written by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, two members of the defunct MTV comedy troupe The State. Lennon, however, is best known…

The novel Be Cool, written by Elmore Leonard in 1999 while the ink was still wet on the publisher’s advance, existed only because the beloved writer of seedy thrillers and Westerns knew it was guaranteed gold — the sequel to the 1991 hit novel Get Shorty, which became a hit…

One should expect little from the man who has directed an Olsen twins movie (It Takes Two, the one with Steve Guttenberg, no less), Matthew Perry’s first Friends-to-film entry (Fools Rush In, its title an apparent nod to audiences who went to see it), and Sweet Home Alabama, one of…

Assault on Precinct 13, the sluggish remake of John Carpenter’s grungy 1976 movie of the same name, begins with a bang to which it never lives up. In a smoky den of all manner of iniquity, Ethan Hawke’s trying to close a drug deal. With his girl splayed out on…

Together with his brother Chris, Paul Weitz wrote and directed 2002’s adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel About a Boy, in which a cocky grown man (Hugh Grant) learned how to actually act like a grown man by observing a gawky young boy (Nicholas Hoult) who was nearly abandoned by his…

The early reviews for Beyond the Sea, the Bobby Darin biopic on which Kevin Spacey did everything except feed the crew and sweep the set, have been so hateful that a latecomer to the bashing bash is tempted to head straight for the spiked eggnog and let the man pass…

At first glance, White Noise looks like one more supernatural thriller aimed at an audience that’s easily scared and easily parted from its hard-earned cash. It will be lumped in among the Rings, Grudges, Otherses and other gotcha creepshows inhabited by rancorous ghosts and pissed-off ghouls out to off those…

While Michael Moore and Mel Gibson garnered most of this year’s critical attention, plenty of fine films opened to little or no fanfare. Following are our reviewers’ favorite movies that didn’t draw the adulation they deserved. Consider yourself armed for the next trip to Blockbuster. Control Room. In a year…

The Gospel According to Mel Who needs studio publicists when every fundamentalist pastor in the country is herding his flock to the multiplex? Why waste good money on TV spots when the Vatican is handing out rave reviews? No doubt about it, Thomas, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ…

Our best movies of the year may actually have been anything but the best to a few of our critics: Such is the dilemma of offering employment to writers of dissenting opinion. In other words, the No. 1 film of 2004 wasn’t universally heralded by our team of Bill Gallo,…

The critic who takes notes during The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou will ultimately fill a notepad only with scribbled details: “All the crewmen wear red stocking caps with their tuxedos”; “Some names of Zissou’s movies: The Battling Eels of Antibes, Shadow Creatures of the Lurisia Archipelago, Island Cats!”; “One…

When your movie gets riotous laughter from endless utterances of the word “Focker,” it doesn’t have to try very hard. So it’s no surprise that much of Meet the Fockers, the inevitable sequel to the 2000 hit Meet the Parents, barely breaks a sweat. When in doubt, after all, just…

The parade of real-life figures strolling into the googolplex has been endless this year: Look, there’s Jamie Foxx as musical Mount Rushmore Ray Charles; Johnny Depp as Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie; Kevin Spacey as forgotten teeny-popper Bobby Darin; Liam Neeson as sexologist Alfred Kinsey; Kevin Kline as standards composer…