Occasionally I can be convinced that it’s the singer, not the song. I’ve no love for Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time,” but I can’t get enough of Brit band Travis’s laconic redo of said iconic single, which squeezes out the then-teen temptress’s toxic sugar till it’s just a bittersweet…
Time was that Dad stuffed the Mercury full of eager children (including, perhaps, one or two secreted in the trunk) and motored off to the drive-in for a double feature and a double order of corn dogs. Alas, the drive-in movie, with a few exceptions, is as dead as James…
A startling new film from Iran, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Under the Skin of the City, gives American viewers a rare and vivid glimpse of day-to-day life in contemporary Tehran — altering some of the politically based preconceptions we may have about the place and opening our eyes to a society that…
In March 2002, days before President Bush was scheduled to visit Peru, a car bomb exploded near the U.S. embassy in Lima, killing nine and injuring dozens. Government officials here and in Peru blamed the attack on Shining Path — a Marxist terrorist organization with roots dating to the 1960s,…
Talk about tough acts to follow: The original 1999 Matrix, a critical and commercial smash, came almost as a revelation out of nowhere — if the combination of Joel Silver, Warner Bros. and roughly 60 million bucks qualifies as “nowhere.” After more than four years, The Matrix Reloaded — the…
One of the enduring curiosities of twentieth-century pop culture — and now 21st-century pop culture — is the tenacious hold The Rocky Horror Picture Show has exerted on audiences everywhere in America — and in some foreign countries, too — since its none-too-encouraging initial release in 1975. An outrageous spoof…
Neil LaBute is back to his old self again, and the cinematic world is a better place for it. Honestly, what was he thinking when he made Possession? Did the charges of misogyny, still lingering from In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors get to him so…
An Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film and winner of five Golden Lola Awards (the German Oscars), Nowhere in Africa recounts the true story of a Jewish family who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and found refuge in Kenya. Although exquisitely shot and acted, the film is hampered…
Long ago, Eddie Murphy grew tired of Eddie Murphy parts: the fast-talking high-jiver, the preening put-on. Even before he began parodying himself in Bowfinger and Showtime and I Spy — the latter two perhaps accidentally — he accepted high-paying roles in low-rent movies that neutered and humiliated the character he…
What a strange enterprise, making a movie about reading a book. It’s the kind of paradox that philosophy students chew over at three in the morning — and a prospect any Hollywood producer would flee as fast as his Ferragamos could carry him. But for Mark Moskowitz, a lifelong bibliophile…
At some fast-approaching point in pop-culture evolution, we’re due to hit Total Outsider Saturation, wherein everybody is an outsider and therefore there is no longer an outside. In the fleeting meantime, we have scintillating reminders of the struggle, like X-2: X-Men United, the latest bid from comic-book land to increase…
If you have never heard of Lizzie McGuire, you are not a female child between the ages of six and fourteen, nor are you a parent with a female child between those ages. For the uninitiated, then, Lizzie is the eponymous heroine of the three-year-old, wildly popular Disney Channel TV…
Hooray for the altruists and art lovers at Madstone Theaters. Recognizing that distribution can be a nightmare for young and/or unknown indie filmmakers, the art-house chain is showing six promising new films, through May and June, that have played the festival circuit but haven’t yet attracted distributors. In Denver, Madstone’s…
The soundtrack of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s spare and beautiful new film, The Son (Le Fils) contains not a bar of music, not a tinkle of bell, not a whisper of breeze. Much of the film is set in the carpentry shop of a Belgium vocational school for troubled teenagers,…
You can’t be sure what to make of Identity for its first hour: Director James Mangold’s initial foray into the horror genre plays so much like a joke, it’s almost impossible to tell whether he’s making you laugh on purpose or because he is director James Mangold, maker of the…
Among Hollywood’s emerging directorial talents, Paul Thomas Anderson merits special notice for the boldness of his subject matter and the energy of his style. He is, after all, the fellow who vividly proposed, in Boogie Nights, that a houseful of variously drugged and deranged L.A. pornographers could be more devoted…
The Harry Potter phenomenon — on the page, in the movies, at the bank — has aroused in publishers and studio heads alike a sudden new appreciation for our children’s needs. These people understand that no consumer is more motivated than the parent of a kid in the heat of…
I’ll just admit this up front: My ideal concept of musical comedy involves Bryan Adams and Dave Matthews garroting each other on stage with their own damnable guitar strings. Nonetheless, even viewers with a more centrist appreciation of the genre may feel disappointed by this friendly new folk-music curiosity called…
Can we please, for the love of God, declare a moratorium on the use of Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” on the soundtrack of any and all movies? (While we’re at it, “We Want the Funk” can go, too.) At the very least, if the plot of the movie…
I don’t know about you, but I love Billy Ray Valentine. Whenever Trading Places pops up on the boob tube, I tune in to watch the ebullient Eddie Murphy in one of his most uproarious performances and what could be his most deftly directed comedy. A penniless street hustler refurbished…
Imagine a large, dead Saint Bernard with its bones removed. Then visualize a hefty bellows inserted into it from behind with a gorilla hopping up and down on it, causing the huge dog’s bag-like corpse to twitch spasmodically, wheeze and croak. Voilà — this is today’s Nick Nolte. What’s amazing…
In 1997’s The Apostle, Robert Duvall took on a subject near and dear to his heart: Southern Pentecostal preachers. No one would make the film for him, so he went ahead and directed it himself, garnering much acclaim from media both secular and religious for his warts-and-all portrayal of a…
