The Armory Group. In a summer art calendar that’s uncharacteristically filled with significant exhibitions, The Armory Group: 40 Years has got to be one of the most important of them all. The story begins back in 1966 in Boulder — specifically, in the fine-arts department at the University of Colorado…
The Devil’s Sword (Mondo Macabro) Few trash movies live up to their reputation, but here’s a balls-out wonder that surpasses it. Grab a 12-pack of Bintang and cue up this jaw-unhinging slab of Indonesian sword-and-sorcery circa 1983 — a start-to-finish feast of martial arts, mullets, flying heads, vestal virgins, dry-ice…
About three-quarters of the way through Waist Deep, the hero of the piece — an indestructible ex-convict who calls himself O2 (2 Fast 2 Furious star Tyrese Gibson) — peers out through the swirling smoke and the bloody mayhem of an urban killing ground and experiences a revelation. “Somethin’ ain’t…
Click may be the first Adam Sandler movie in which the high concept isn’t dependent upon the star. Sandler comedies tend to take his standard character of the petulant man-child with anger-management issues and place him in different wacky situations: elementary school (Billy Madison), the golf course (Happy Gilmore), the…
It may not be an “iconic manifestation of civilization,” as documentarian Ken Burns proclaims, but the New York Times crossword puzzle is undoubtedly an institution. Printed every day for the past 64 years in weekly cycles of increasing difficulty, the puzzle draws politicians, working stiffs, comedians, musicians, coders and homemakers…
UC-Berkeley gymnast Dan Millman (Scott Mechlowicz) is one of the best at what he does, and he has it all: perfect abs, a big bulge in his crotch (the camera focuses on it early on), beautiful girlfriends and the ability to balance full beer glasses on his feet. There’s just…
In case you’ve been snoozing on the couch for a couple of decades, here’s an update: Edward R. Murrow is dead, and most television journalism has degenerated into shlocky infotainment. That’s the none-too-startling conclusion of documentarian Brian Malone’s Breaking News, which presumes to explain all over again that the boob…
The Armory Group. In a summer art calendar that’s uncharacteristically filled with significant exhibitions, The Armory Group: 40 Years has got to be one of the most important of them all. The story begins back in 1966 in Boulder — specifically, in the fine-arts department at the University of Colorado…
Night Watch (Fox Searchlight) Every once in a while, Hollywood needs somebody else to steal a genre and totally reimagine it; it keeps old ideas young, like celluloid Botox. Well, Hollywood’s gonna need one big needle to absorb Night Watch, an insane, insanely cool Russian action/horror/sci-fi brew that’s like nothing…
There is no movie more overrated in recent history than Napoleon Dynamite; it’s to cinema what the Doors are to rock and roll, a thing blindly and inexplicably championed as though it were a religion above being blasphemed by non-believers. And every time someone tries to explain its appeal –…
Remember what a fun couple Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves were in Speed? Well, forget that. In The Lake House, Warner Bros.’ slow and heavy kickoff to the summer-romance season, Bullock and Reeves play the mopiest lovers to hit the big screen since Tony and Maria channeled Romeo and Juliet…
About ten minutes into Michael Cuesta’s 12 and Holding, the following thought came to mind: Not afraid to put children in harm’s way. Twenty minutes later, not afraid was replaced with compelled. As he did in L.I.E. , which introduced child molestation into a fetid tale of adolescent obliteration, Cuesta…
By now, for masses of believers in mad Korean pulp as it has been epitomized by Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy, the blood-on-alabaster-skin montage behind the credits of Park’s new Lady Vengeance portends a familiar dynamic. Exercises in Asian horror like we haven’t seen before, Park’s films…
Given that John Singleton directed the second movie in the Fast and the Furious franchise, it makes a perverse kind of sense that Justin Lin would follow. Just as Singleton did with Boyz N the Hood, young Lin quickly made a name for himself with a powerful breakthrough film that…
In Coastlines, the final installment of director Victor Nunez’s “Panhandle Trilogy,” a wary ex-con named Sonny Mann (Timothy Olyphant) returns to his fly-bitten Florida home town to collect the debt that’s owed him for taking the fall in a drug deal gone wrong. But the slippery local crime lords (William…
Apparition. The brand-new Gallery Severn, which is owned by art collector and retired executive Andy Dodd, aims to be what he has called a “launch pad” for emerging artists. This specialty in fresh faces instantly makes the place interesting. Also interesting is Dodd’s decision to feature only one artist at…
Valley of the Dolls Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Fox) Behold The Godfather and Godfather Part II of drag-queen cinema — two movies that provide the gateway to a lifetime of wig addiction. The films couldn’t be more different in temperament — the 1967 original is mile-high Hollywood kitsch,…
Like the Grand Ole Opry plopped into a fragrant barn at the county fair, Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion befits its roots in frosty Minnesota soil through its worldview, Buddhist by way of Scandinavia: Life is about suffering. The wind chill is below zero, and so is your spouse;…
Cars, the latest vehicle to roll off a Pixar assembly line that has thus far yielded nothing but spit-shined classics, answers that age-old question: What would Doc Hollywood have been like had it been populated entirely by, ya know, cars? If the promise of that particular premise — in which…
With ice caps melting, sea levels rising and Poseidon sinking fast, this is no environment for any disaster movie — particularly a real one — to take our interest for granted. Thus An Inconvenient Truth, named for the super-bad news of global climate change, isn’t just another lefty doc for…
Mel Brooks, the goofy great mind behind Broadway’s comic smash The Producers, may never direct another movie — the poor guy’s eighty years old, after all — but that’s okay, as long as we get to watch Young Frankenstein once in a while. The masterpiece of the Brooksian ouevre, this…
Apparition. The brand-new Gallery Severn, which is owned by art collector and retired executive Andy Dodd, aims to be what he has called a “launch pad” for emerging artists. This specialty in fresh faces instantly makes the place interesting. Also interesting is Dodd’s decision to feature only one artist at…
