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…
The Sergio Leone Anthology (MGM) Sergio Leone made Westerns like Wagner made ditties. This essential boxed set — four films with four discs of supplemental material, much of it scholarly and insightful — shows the Italian director supplanting the elegiac Monument Valley iconography of John Ford with a darker, ruder,…
Eli Roth is obviously a poseur, but on the evidence of Hostel: Part II, he’s also kind of a pussy. Anyone can string a naked woman up by the ankles and slit her throat, and while I admit it takes a little extra something to position a Eurotrash villainess beneath…
A few friends of mine who adored Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up at early screenings have nonetheless voiced a similar complaint: There’s no way pin-up-pretty Katherine Heigl would end up with soaked-in-bongwater Seth Rogen, not even while drunk on a gallon of Everclear and stoned on a field of your finest…
Mr. Brooks — in which Kevin Costner plays a respectable Seattle businessman who kills for thrills, thanks to the goading of an imaginary friend who looks a lot like William Hurt — is stunningly tepid, neither the clever and poignant metaphor for addiction it strives to be nor the darkly…
Once, written and directed by John Carney, is a deceptively simple movie — a narrative strung together by pop songs, but without the sheen (or arrogance) of most cinematic musicals. By day, a Dublin busker (Glen Hansard) sings Van Morrison on a street corner for spare change, which, on occasion,…
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…
Hannibal Rising (Weinstein) Pointless beyond belief, Hannibal Rising serves more as cautionary tale than horror story. Made for $50 mil, the movie pocketed half that during its U.S. run and likely wound up in the red — an appropriate adios for a franchise starring a peripheral character better served by…
Last weekend, as Jerry Bruckheimer’s pirates were once again storming the international box office, the Cannes Film Festival (May 16-27) bestowed its two top prizes on a gut-wrenching Romanian movie about backroom abortion and a plaintive Japanese drama about a sad old man who wants to dig his own grave…
Cannes, France — The 60th Cannes Film Festival was a generous one — and so was its jury, bestowing the Palme d’Or on the least heralded, most critically acclaimed movie in an unusually strong competition, namely Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Mungiu’s skillfully directed,…
Cannes, France — The Coen brothers’ pulpy, ultimately pretentious neo-Western No Country for Old Men screened early in the Cannes Film Festival and by the end had maintained its standing as the most widely approved Yankee feature to bow here since Pulp Fiction (though it didn’t win any awards). Once…
Cannes, France — I never gave much thought to the subject of health insurance until, in October of 2005, an odd swelling in my groin prompted me to make one of my infrequent trips to the doctor’s office. A referral to a urologist and one ultrasound later, the diagnosis was…
Cannes, France — Sometimes the competition is actually competitive. No one disputes that the official section at the 60th Cannes Film Festival has been the strongest in recent memory. The heavy favorites are the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men; Julian Schnabel’s surprisingly restrained and bizarrely chic French-language adaptation…
Cannes, France — “Whaddya love about it so much?” Abel Ferrara — director of the strip-club-set Go Go Tales, my favorite film at Cannes — is interviewing the interviewer. Well, I say, it’s consistent with the Ferrara oeuvre — King of New York, Bad Lieutenant, Dangerous Game, et cetera —…
And so Disney’s immense, booty-busting, pro-piracy epic has come to an End. I doubt very much that Pirates of the Caribbean: At World¹s End is, in fact, the last we’ll be seeing of Captain Jack Sparrow and, you know, all those other people. How could it be? Treasure remains to…
William Friedkin has mellowed since unleashing The Exorcist, sliding into box-office hell and marrying a major studio boss. Indeed, the recovering bad-boy movie brat — now 71, believe it or not — has directed more operas than motion pictures in the past decade. But his new Bug, made on the…
“I don’t mind if you take a shot of me eating,” says William Friedkin, in between bites of an avocado sandwich, to the photographer busily taking his snapshot. “People know I do that.” Friedkin and I are downing a quick dinner in the green room of Skirball Cultural Center in…
Mystery man of the long-ago Australian new wave, Ray Lawrence has evidently grown less finicky. Lawrence, now 59, made his feature debut with the phantasmagoric Bliss, famous flop of the 1985 Cannes Film Festival; he then licked his wounds and directed TV commercials for sixteen years before reappearing with somewhat…
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…
Porky’s: The Ultimate Collection (Fox) When writer-director Bob Clark was killed by a drunk driver in April, the obits trumpeted his holiday classic A Christmas Story . . . but were somewhat reluctant to mention that, oh, yeah, he also wrote and directed Porky’s. But there’s no question which is…
CANNES, France—The world’s preeminent film festival celebrated its 60th birthday party — the opening banquet catered by the world’s hippest, or is that once-hippest? — filmmaker. Hardly the disaster many feared, but far from the triumph others anticipated, Wong Kar-wai’s first English-language feature, My Blueberry Nights — starring Norah Jones…
CANNES, France—The Cannes Film Festival is chiefly revered as a showcase for prolific, careerist auteurs, so the appearance of Savage Grace, the first feature in 15 years by New Queer Cinema co-instigator Tom Kalin (Swoon), was certainly striking — not that a film in which Julianne Moore stars as a…
