We’re Americans. We go into other countries when we need to. It’s tricky, but it works.” So declares Michael Moore in the midst of his new documentary, Sicko. Moore could be riffing on the war in Iraq, to name only our most recent intervention, but he’s actually referring to U.S…
Still an all-American bloodhound after all these years, Bruce Willis’s Detective John McClane begins Live Free or Die Hard by sniffing around a Rutgers-Camden parking lot and busting the frat boy trying to cop a feel off his daughter, Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Oh, Dad! Since much of the ol’…
Parked uneasily between sensitive indie and studio chick flick, Lajos Koltai’s Evening makes star-studded hash of Susan Minot’s beautifully written, if emotionally constricted, novel about a terminally ill woman trying to wrest meaning out of the shards of her memories. Floating in and out of delirium in her Cambridge, Massachusetts,…
Anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great.” So goes the personal mantra of the late celebrity chef Auguste Gusteau, whose disembodied spirit materializes — Jiminy Cricket-style — to guide the rodent hero of Brad Bird’s Ratatouille toward his goal of gastronomic excellence. He also seems to be…
It takes Bruce Willis a while to get warmed up. He’s always just a bit below room temperature — a cool brother, dig, dating back to his Moonlighting days as a private dick belting out “Tighten Up” while going undercover as a man of the cloth in Wayfarer shades. He’s…
Altar Girls. Two very different exhibits roughly collide into one another in the middle of the Museo de las Américas. One part, put together by Museo curator Kristi Martens, is an extravaganza of santos made mostly in Colorado, Mexico and New Mexico, and primarily culled from a recent gift to…
Black Snake Moan (Paramount) The best place to see Craig Brewer’s mash-up of blood-boiling exploitation elements would be a Mississippi drive-in circa 1972. His tale of a black bluesman (Samuel L. Jackson) who chains up a seething, scantily clad cracker nympho (Christina Ricci) would’ve had the lot under martial law…
Evan Almighty, the followup to Bruce Almighty, is the work of an angry God. At 89 minutes that last a lifetime, it’s a sanctimonious sitcom dolled up as the most expensive comedy ever made — $175 mil, so they say, no doubt choking — and marks an unfortunate low point…
Bamako, the latest by acclaimed African director Abderrahmane Sissako (Waiting for Happiness), arrives heavily lauded by the usual suspects: festival love galore, including a privileged slot at Cannes and placement in the New York Film Festival; lengthy coverage in the highbrow movie magazines; strong reviews on pointy-headed film blogs. Structurally…
A skilled actor vanishes into a role; a movie star appropriates it. As presence trumps character, the star personifies Brecht’s alienation effect and the movie becomes a vehicle — the latest installment in an ongoing career or, in the case of a great star, a public myth. Angelina Jolie is…
Mike Enslin, the travel writer played by John Cusack in 1408, could use a better travel agent. Every hotel room in which he finds himself booked is said to be occupied by the ghost of some suicidal creep or a murderous goon who left behind a pile of bodies in…
In 2005, a Seattle man was anonymously delivered to the Enumclaw Community Hospital and died shortly thereafter. The cause of the death was an internal puncture wound inflicted during anal sex with an Arabian stallion. An investigation led to the discovery of a farm where a community of zoophiles, organized…
Altar Girls. Two very different exhibits roughly collide into one another in the middle of the Museo de las Américas. One part, put together by Museo curator Kristi Martens, is an extravaganza of santos made mostly in Colorado, Mexico and New Mexico, and primarily culled from a recent gift to…
Uplifted beyond its merits by a stunning performance from Marion Cotillard, the humdrum biopic of Edith Piaf, La Vie en Rose, jogs obligingly along with Piaf the legend rather than Piaf the woman. It’s not hard to do, given the fuzzy borders between Piaf’s undeniably scarred life and her relentless…
Night Watch, you may recall, told of an ancient feud waged between the forces of Light and Dark. In the interest of maintaining a fragile detente, they organized themselves, as Russian super-combatants are wont to do, into complex bureaucracies, with the Night Watch heroes monitoring the vampiric shenanigans of the…
So lame it’s…cool? Nancy Drew, writer-director Andrew Fleming’s attempt to jump-start a new Warner Bros. franchise, is a movie flaunting a most obvious demographic strategy: a teen flick with a sensibility, or at least a sense of humor, that’s most definitely parental. Invented in 1930 by the same Stratemeyer syndicate…
Altar Girls. Two very different exhibits roughly collide into one another in the middle of the Museo de las Américas. One part, put together by Museo curator Kristi Martens, is an extravaganza of santos made mostly in Colorado, Mexico and New Mexico, and primarily culled from a recent gift to…
Glastonbury (THINKFilm) Only a Julien Temple concert doc would get the R rating — for nudity (male, mostly, and not terribly flattering at that), drug use (weed, mostly — yawn), language, and sexual content. Also dig the overwrought BBC narration, in which Glastonbury is described as a former refuge for…
Lowest Common Denominatorism writ large and engraved in stone like the Ten Commandments according to Cecil B. DeMille, the Hollywood blockbuster is often an allegory for itself. Walt Disney, the notoriously litigious studio that successfully changed the nation’s copyright laws to protect its trademark Mickey Mouse but more recently declared…
A true-crime yarn told largely by the criminal, with supporting testimony from his curiously forgiving victim, Crazy Love comes billed as a documentary. But it can’t really be considered journalism — unless you count as journalism the sort of lurid tabloid exposé whose hundred-point headline blurts “ACID-ATTACKER MARRIES HIS VICTIM!”…
Afrail-looking young woman, outfitted with a bomb, wanders through Times Square — finger on the switch, searching for the moment to blow up. That, in a sentence, is the premise of Julia Loktev’s outrageously abstract Day Night Day Night. Terror is existential in this highly intelligent, somewhat sadistic, totally fascinating…
The idea of “getting axed” is exploited for maximum double-entendre value in Severance, a grisly horror-comedy from the U.K. that has its tongue planted so firmly in its cheek that you half expect it to pop out the other side. Yes, heads (and, in one indelible bit, a severed foot)…
