The pleasures of Michael Winterbottom’s relentlessly hip 24 Hour Party People, released in 2002, still reside in what Village Voice critic Dennis Lim called the film’s “brazen impatience.” The place is Manchester, between 1976 and 1992, and the ruling presence — loud, pompous, delightfully full of himself — is Factory…
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…
Boston Legal: Season One(Fox) David E. Kelley’s latest legal drama is nothing more than a TV show about TV shows; hence the casting of Captain Kirk and Murphy Brown, with guest shots by Diane Chambers, Golden Girl Rose Nylund, and Alex Keaton. It’s like a Nick at Night mash-up, with…
At this late date, it’s hard to tell one digitally rendered talking animal from another. Madagascar blends into Ice Age looks like A Shark’s Tale sounds like Shrek might as well be A Bug’s Life turns into Antz feels like Chicken Little could be Over the Hedge, which is really…
You know its hard out here for a screenwriter. Youve got a surefire hit on your hands — an adaptation of the runaway bestseller The Da Vinci Code — and yet its all about talking and solving cryptic riddles, which isnt exactly suited to the visual medium. Its also a…
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…
Trotted out like ol’ Trigger whenever there’s a movie with saddles and six-shooters, the term “revisionist Western” would surely be a cliche if there were enough Westerns to warrant its use more than once every few years. Fact is, any movie in a genre as depressingly out-to-pasture as the Western…
A new interpretation of Macbeth, filmed in Denver and the mountains west of Golden and set in contemporary corporate America, will have its world premiere on Friday, May 19, at Starz FilmCenter. The first feature produced by Commerce City-based Ionogen Studios, this Macbeth stars Clyde Sacks in the title role…
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…
Winter Passing (Fox) Try this, should you be inclined to rent this downer from writer-director Adam Rapp: Skip from chapter to chapter and see whether they all don’t begin with exactly the same image, accompanied by exactly the same sound. There is always someone (usually Zooey Deschanel as a would-be…
The lovable hero of Goal! The Dream Begins is the kind of guy some Americans don’t find very appealing these days — a Mexican immigrant who’s trying to make a better life in East Los Angeles. Little matter that young Santiago Muñez (Kuno Becker) busts his butt working two crappy…
Art School Confidential is very much like every movie pilfered from the Saturday Night Live playbook, in which the slight giggles of a four-minute sketch are wrung into two-hour yawns. The work upon which it’s based is a four-page excerpt from a fourteen-year-old comic book called Eightball, written and drawn…
Our anemic movie industry recycles so relentlessly that even our complaints about such plasticized repackaging comes off as recycled product of its own, offered primarily to draw the line between concerned aging cinephiles and the target consumers who don’t care a whit. Still, we’ve become a culture not merely tantalized…
Mission: Impossible III finds Tom Cruise downplaying the world’s single greatest piece of action music in deference to an Age of Fear vibe that’s a lot more grueling than rousing. Seems Lalo Schifrin’s adrenaline-pumping “dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum” is now as dated as the Cold War from which it sprang; maybe the star-producer…
If that plucky seeker of bliss Bridget Jones lived in the Czech Republic, she might be something like Laura (Zuzana Kanoczova), the 23-year-old heroine of Filip Renc’s spirited comedy From Subway With Love. When Laura discovers that the billboards on her commuter train have been replaced by overheated love letters…
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…
Fateless (THINKFilm) I’ve no patience for the Holocaust docudrama — didn’t even see Schindler’s List till years after its 1993 release, to my parents’ everlasting shame. And so it was I avoided Lajos Koltai’s acclaimed adaptation of Imre Kertész’ Nobel Prize-winning autobiographic novel; are we not already gorged on the…
World-weary skeptics might be tempted to pass on Icíar Bollaín’s Take My Eyes the moment they learn its heroine is yet another victim of domestic violence. But that would be a mistake. The brilliant Spanish filmmaker who directed and co-wrote this harrowing look at a sick marriage has no interest…
If some religious extremists in India had gotten their way, the gorgeous fury of Deepa Mehta’s Water never would have reached the screen. As it is, these self-appointed censors shut down the production for years by staging demonstrations, torching Mehta’s sets and threatening her life. Eventually, the filmmaker moved her…
Coming closer even than Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers to resembling the Chinese cover art for an Iron Butterfly album, Chen Kaige’s The Promise is psychedelia extremis. Hardly a minute of it passes without a concentrated dose of digital frou-frou and lavish cartoon-poetic imagery: floating ocean goddesses, flying swordsmen,…
It seldom fails. Every year, just in time for the Oscar deadline, a movie is released that doesn’t necessarily have a remarkable plot or director, but does feature an aging master (or mistress) thespian from the U.K., whom one might assume is an automatic shoo-in for an award nomination, ensuring…
Let’s say you’re a teenage boy dying of cancer. A well-known charity dedicated to helping people like you offers to make your fondest wish come true — as long as it’s something realistic, as opposed to, say, finding a cure for cancer. Would you choose a VIP pass to Disneyland…
