Casino Royale (Sony) James Bond gets a stirring shake-up in the best — yeah, Goldfinger fans, the best — film in the series’ 44-year history. Daniel Craig’s 007 has more going on above the neck and below the waist than even Sean Connery’s. He’s a genuinely compelling character — a…
Long ago, there reigned a clan of Speedo-wearing militaristic psychopaths called the Spartans. They lived beneath a copper-colored sky, on a copper-colored land, amid copper-colored fields, in copper-colored homes made from copper-colored stone. Legend has it that they would outline their copper-colored pecs and abs with ash to enhance their…
I am sorry to say that Peter did not feel very well that evening. His mother put him to bed and gave him a dose of chamomile tea. ‘One tablespoon to be taken at bedtime.’ But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper. — Beatrix…
A dozen years ago, Kelly Reichardt made her feature debut with a wonderfully desultory, nearly avant-garde riff on the last romantic couple. Reichardt’s River of Grass was a comic, slacker Bonnie and Clyde, set on the edge of the Everglades. Her belated followup, the more elegiac but no less site-specific…
Gross-out horror is never far from comedy, and The Host, Bong Joon-ho’s giddy creature feature, has an anarchic mess factor worthy of a pile of old Mad magazines. A broadly played clown show full of lowbrow antics, Bong’s big splat is itself a sort of monster — the top-grossing movie…
Alberto Lattuada’s tricky-to-parse Mafioso dates from 1962, but with its abrupt tonal shifts and disturbing existential premise, the nearly forgotten dark comedy could be the most modern (or at least modernist) movie in town. Released by Rialto on the heels of its triumphantly rediscovered Army of Shadows, Lattuada’s tale of…
(Mexico City) Less than 24 hours after the Oscars capped the remarkable year of the so-called three amigos by handing out three awards to Pan’s Labyrinth and one to Babel, I boarded a plane bound for Mexico City and the fourth edition of the Mexico City International Contemporary Film Festival…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Revenge of the Nerds: Panty Raid Edition (Fox) Revenge of the Nerds is a great movie. No, really. It’s got a bitching new-wave soundtrack and some truly inspired performances — memorable enough to wreck the careers of Robert Carradine (Lewis) and Curtis Armstrong (Booger). But mostly it’s the mix of…
It may be hard out there for a pimp, but it ain’t too hard for a writer-director to make a movie whose marketing hinges on the lurid spectacle of Samuel L. Jackson pulling a half-naked Christina Ricci around on a chain. This sort of cheap trick is what they used…
When the editorial cartoonist turned amateur sleuth Robert Graysmith published Zodiac, he wrote that the tale was “the most frightening story I know.” His sprawling and meticulously researched account of the eponymous San Francisco serial killer was written in 1985, some sixteen years after the Zodiac’s last confirmed attack, and…
Wild Hogs — in which John Travolta, William H. Macy, Tim Allen and Martin Lawrence play emasculated suburbanites taking a cross-country motorcycle trip to rediscover their masculinity — doesn’t even sound like a real movie when you describe it to people. They give you that yer-shittin’-me stare, as though it…
Let us applaud, on principle, Anthony Minghella’s return to small-scale storytelling. Breaking and Entering marks his first original screenplay since the oddball romantic comedy Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991), and a retreat from the jumbo-sized period pieces of his Miramax-to-the-max phase. Overrated as they are, The English Patient, The Talented Mr…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny (New Line) You probably already know where you stand on Tenacious D, the pudgy hard-rock comedy duo that made Jack Black famous. And if you haven’t heard of them, this isn’t the place to start: Their DVD of short films and music videos…
The Number 23 grips hold of one stupid idea and runs so far with it, in so many directions, to such little purpose, that it nearly won me over from sheer berserkoid effort. In a nutshell, this nutso movie observes what happens to a man (Jim Carrey) under the impression…
In 2003, Mark and Michael Polish made Northfork, though just barely. The brothers — who are also responsible for art-house fave Twin Falls Idaho, about conjoined twins who fall for the same woman — lost funding just before shooting began and had to beg for money to finish their reverie…
Morally irreproachable and flat as a pancake, Phil Anschutz’s latest movie endeavor, Amazing Grace, is set among bickering House of Commoners in late-eighteenth-century London, but it belongs squarely in the blooming subgenre of Whites Saving Dark-Skinned Victims of Empire. Or at least it would be were Apted able to bring…
We Americans complain of Big Brother’s unblinking eye in the post-Patriot Act, corporate e-mail era — as well we should. But, as The Lives of Others makes plain, things could be worse. Set in East Berlin circa 1984, when one in every 100 citizens of the German Democratic Republic was…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Shut Up & Sing (Genius) It’s a shame that one of 2006’s best documentaries is being released without extras; it would have been nice, for instance, to hear feisty Natalie Maines talk with directors Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck about her reaction to the film, in which the Dixie Chicks…
In December 2002, ABC’s 20/20 ran a story on Eric O’Neill, an undercover surveillance specialist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The piece was titled “Spycatcher,” because it was O’Neill who, at a mere 27, helped bring down Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who sold thousands of secrets to the…
