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…
The John Wayne/John Ford Film Collection (Warner Bros.) Featuring the most epic pairing of director and actor in Hollywood history, this 10-disc box spews machismo all over. Wayne and Ford defined not only the western and war-movie genres, but also our culture’s image of rugged manhood. Among the highlights is…
The Old West has vanished, John Wayne is dead and — this just in — the two most famous ranch hands in America are gay. But there would be no point in telling any of that to Harlan Fairfax Carruthers, the deceptively charming protagonist of Down in the Valley. Like…
You know how in most romantic comedies, the best friends are nearly always more interesting than the actual leads we’re supposed to care about? The Break-Up doesn’t play that game. Vince Vaughn is the focus and the primary source of entertainment, which is all the more impressive when you consider…
There was a time when people moaned whenever Hollywood would remake — and thus suck the life out of — a classic movie. These days, Hollywood just sucks the life out of movies that weren’t that great in the first place. Ah, progress. Well, June 6, 2006, is upon us,…
Let’s trade, action fans. Give up all 126 minutes of Mission: Impossible III’s digitized bloat and torture games, along with Poseidon’s more modest (yet somehow more numbing) 99 minutes in a computer-generated rain barrel. In exchange, you get roughly 1.7 seconds of a movie you’ve never heard of — a…
Long before Steven Spielberg tackled the horrors of Nazi Germany or set out to save Private Ryan, he came up with the most captivating fish story since Moby-Dick. To be fair, pop novelist Peter Benchley made his own fair-sized contribution to the Jaws phenomenon, but it was Spielberg who transformed…
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…
Will & Grace: Series Finale (Lions Gate) The way this got hustled to shelves, mere days after Will Truman and Grace Adler said their mushy farewells, you’d think it were some classic adios — another M*A*S*H or Cheers wrap-up. Alas, it was just another Very Special Episode of a show…
When kids of all ages discuss comic books and superheroes, there is inevitably one question that comes up time and again: If that one guy and that other guy had a fight, who would win? Comics companies occasionally indulge these debates with special issues pitting Thing against Hulk, or Wolverine…
Such is the currency of lies these days that “Based on an Untrue Story” might well be a shrewd tagline, if an unusually honest one. Still, the recent discovery that teen-prostitute-turned-hardcore-memoirist J.T. LeRoy is merely the fanciful invention of failed-musician-turned-moneymaking-writer Laura Albert won’t necessarily boost the box office of The…
Most memoirs, like off-brand hot dogs, should come with labels that list their suspect ingredients. Outrage over James Frey aside, does anyone still believe that a person’s reconstructed narrative of his or her life isn’t going to mix some snouts or tails among the meat? The best one can hope…
