Newsday's Movie Reviews
Newsday's movie critics provide their opinions and ratings.
Nice to know that even John Waters has his limits. One would have thought, once upon a time, that thresholds and low tolerance were alien concepts to the director who dared to make his late, larger-than-life muse Divine gobble dog feces in 1972's "Pink Flamingos." (Nov 24, 2006)
The mating and migratory rituals depicted in the documentary "March of the Penguins" proved to be so irresistible to moviegoers that we now have a smash hit animated musical, a veritable "Arctic Idol" showcasing chorus lines of penguins shaking their booties to Stevie Wonder. (Nov 24, 2006)
Since winning the best actor Oscar for playing a bad cop, Denzel Washington has cleaned up his image with a vengeance. In the past year alone, the actor with the brisk investigative manner and shutter-quick smile has made significant inroads toward clinching the next opening for head of the Department of Homeland Security. (Nov 22, 2006)
Since "Elf" and "Bad Santa" came out three years ago, the bar should have been raised on making movies for the holidays. One would think that you now have to go all out to either placate or challenge traditional expectations. "Deck the Halls" strains to be both naughty and nice with much clamor and not much conviction. (Nov 22, 2006)
"The Fountain" staggers into theaters with baggage and bruises picked up over a long gestation period, marked by cast changes and production delays, and its cat-calling welcome at its premiere at September's Venice Film Festival. (Nov 22, 2006)
Even if your first-born isn't the best boy, or even the key grip, it's occasionally fun to read all of a movie's credits. In the case of "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny," they include a gratuitous thank-you to The Who, and a "set medic." Also, "tarot card consultant." And "sasquatch researcher." (Nov 22, 2006)
 In the beery Outback of contemporary Australia, young Kellyanne (Sapphire Boyce) is the village weirdo - she'd be a loner if not for her invisible pals, Pobby and Dingan. (Nov 22, 2006)
For Hector, the orotund pied piper of Yorkshire who teaches general studies at the Cutler Grammar School, the discipline is a misnomer. "There is no such thing as general studies," he tells his A-level class, explaining, "All knowledge is specific." (Nov 21, 2006)
Daniel Craig could have been a dead ringer for Sean Connery and fans of the James Bond movies would still have found excuses to razz his anointment as the new 007 well before his first turn at bat. Some of these people haven't warmed to any movie Bond since Connery said, "Never Say Never Again," way back in 1983. By then, Roger Moore had attracted his own legion of devotees and there may well also be those who wonder how the franchise will ever survive without Pierce Brosnan. (Nov 17, 2006)
"Happy Feet" is just about as cute as it looks from the trailers and posters. From the first minute, the movie shows every indication of being an oldies jukebox dressed up in computer animation. Emperor penguins singing Grandmaster Flash, Prince and Elvis? Ratchet up that cuteness meter! Add to this the prospect of Robin Williams providing voices for not one but two characters and there's every indication that this kids' movie is one of those to which grown-up frontal lobes aren't invited. (Nov 17, 2006)
You probably don't need to hear this if you already know this movie's subject matter, but heed our warning anyway: If you're planning to make "Fast Food Nation" the focal point of an evening out, make sure you've eaten beforehand. A good while beforehand. (Nov 17, 2006)
What you didn't know about the shooting of Robert F. Kennedy could fill several volumes or, at the least, one movie with the nose of a small-town gossip columnist and the roving eye of a hotel detective. (Nov 17, 2006)
They came to laugh. (Nov 17, 2006)
The tormented specters of Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon hover over Abbie Cornish and Heath Ledger throughout "Candy," a piercing drama from Australia that retraces the punishing geography of addiction. (Nov 17, 2006)
 That something as elusive as this gothicized, imagist romance from the curious Quay brothers should be considered their most accessible film might be considered odd. But so might they. (Nov 17, 2006)
 As raw and biting as a December morning in Montauk, writer-director Jeff Lipsky's depiction of modern metropolitan romance honors the sensibilities of both John Cassavetes and Ingmar Bergman, whose "Scenes From a Marriage" could have easily provided Lipsky with a title. (Nov 17, 2006)
 Argentine filmmaker Fabián Bielinsky cemented a class-A reputation for flinty crime thrillers with just two films, "Nine Queens" and his latest (and regrettably his last), a hypnotic journey into the head of an epileptic taxidermist with a photographic memory. (Nov 17, 2006)
When word got out that Ridley Scott was preparing a romantic comedy with Russell Crowe, it made absolute sense to me. I mean, who didn't come away from "Gladiator" thinking, wow, man, these guys should be doing a remake of "Roman Holiday"? (Nov 10, 2006)
As a working-class white guy whose comfort level with ethnic minorities exists alongside his capacity for self-destruction, Christian Bale skillfully brings to life one of the more complex rough beasts of our enervated times. His performance as Jim Davis is the molten core of "Harsh Times," writer-director David Ayer's messy, exasperating, but fascinating excursion through the darker corners of neighborhoods at risk - and of one man's mind. (Nov 10, 2006)
Sometimes I think movies like "Stranger Than Fiction" don't experiment with narrative and character as much as cop out on them. Young writers and directors have lately made it their business to toy with reality and see what kind of stuff shakes loose. I'm all for shaking things up. But if what results is about nothing except how clever it is to shake things up, then it's a puffy, windy stunt. (Nov 10, 2006)
"Copying Beethoven" wants very badly to lift our creative and spiritual horizons. It's too bad that the movie is so leaden and earthbound. Such strain is perhaps inevitable for any project that tries to distill or evoke the spirit of its eponymous musical giant. But if you're going to tackle Ludwig van Beethoven, you've got to go as hard and high as he did. All this movie does is flounder and flail around his tempestuous spirit. (Nov 10, 2006)
Lucille Fowler, the good ol' girl and barfly played with such trembling conviction by Ashley Judd in "Come Early Morning," remedies her morning hangovers with a Diet Coke and a paper envelope filled with something white and granular. Peruvian marching powder? No, Goody's, the loosely packed painkiller so ubiquitous in the South, but virtually unheard of north of South Carolina. (Nov 10, 2006)
If it's good enough for Dick Cheney, it should be good enough for the rest of us, but the unprintable title of Steven Anderson's funny, indignant and hypocrisy-mining documentary is still the most taboo word in English, for all its overuse. Its place in our language lies somewhere between repulsion and reverence: One thinks of Ralphie in "A Christmas Story" with a bar of Lifebuoy in his mouth, while listening to his friend Schwartz being beaten by his mother halfway across town. It's not a word to trifle with. (Nov 10, 2006)
"How can you cut a country in pieces? With a saw?" asks a Kurdish boy in "Iraq in Fragments," considering an elder's opinion that their nation will have to split in three in order to resolve the current unrest. (Nov 10, 2006)
Early into Steven Schainberg's fantasia on the genesis of Diane Arbus' photography, a restless Arbus informs her husband, Allan, that she is going to take an evening walk. His response? "Be careful." He's too engrossed in his own work as a commercial photographer to ask where she's off to, and besides, what kind of trouble could his mousey mate get into, anyway? (Nov 10, 2006)
The steppes of Mongolia, as harsh as they might be, are a welcoming mat of grass and family drama in this gorgeous, affectionate and anthropologically captivating feature from writer-director Byambasuren Davaa ("The Story of the Weeping Camel"). (Nov 10, 2006)
Christina, the 16-year-old high schooler at the center of this good political thriller, is described by the press notes as a "typical Argentine teenager." But there is nothing typical about the ferocity and independence with which she challenges her teacher on government corruption. (Nov 10, 2006)
Paraphrasing Kurt Vonnegut, there are few things more quintessentially American than embarrassment. If you acknowledge such wisdom, then it's possible to accept "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America to Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" as the quintessential American movie comedy of our times. (Nov 3, 2006)
Alejandro González Iñárritu can be counted among the charmed circle of directors who have mastered the ability to step back and see the larger picture. (Oct 27, 2006)
In 1991, Patrick Chamusso was released after serving nearly 10 years on Robbin Island, the African jail whose guest list of political prisoners included Nelson Mandela. He had been convicted under the Terrorism Act for bombing an oil refinery, and had 14 more years to serve at the time the apartheid system was dismantled. (Oct 27, 2006)
A film about terrorism, "Shut Up & Sing" is the story of the Dixie Chicks from 2003, when singer Natalie Maines told a U.K. audience she was "ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas," and country music decided that appeasing the nuts was better than embracing the talent. (Oct 27, 2006)
Just the mere mention of "Death of a President's" central conceit was enough to light up switchboards at talk-radio stations and give politicians and other guardians of decorum room for public denunciation. Most, if not all, of these critics hadn't yet seen the movie and some of them said they wouldn't go near it even after its theatrical release. The refusal of two U.S. theater chains to show the film should buttress their refusal - and stoke intense curiosity among almost everyone else (Oct 27, 2006)
These days, the suggestive, open-ended narrative style of Michelangelo Antonioni doesn't emit the siren call to moviegoers that it once evoked in its early 1960s heyday. But Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan proves the approach still offers plenty of possibilities with "Climates," his visually rich portrait of loss, loneliness and remorse. (Oct 27, 2006)
 In the 1980s, Miami went from a fraying tropical resort town to a sexy megalopolis, its skyline transformed by a construction boom, fabulous new nightspots and a glut of banks with multibillion dollar surpluses. (Oct 27, 2006)
Marieta (Monica Cerver) isn't just a pre-op transsexual prostitute, but a narcoleptic as well: Falling asleep at awkward moments, she wakes up in awkward positions. (Oct 27, 2006)
On Feb. 23, 1945, Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal snapped a war shot that would become an icon for American valor: five Marines and a Navy corpsman hoisting a heavy Japanese water pipe bearing the Stars and Stripes. Most of those who read the moment as a signal of victory, however, were indulging in a bit of collective wishful thinking. (Oct 20, 2006)
No matter how tied-up-in-knots this review will get in talking about "Marie Antoinette," one unequivocal point needs to be made: Its director, Sofia Coppola, is the real deal, a gifted moviemaker with a distinctive, absorbing vision. (Oct 20, 2006)
"Every magic trick consists of three acts," explains Michael Caine at the top of "The Prestige," provoking us into a state of wary alertness that we will hold until the curtain falls, more than two hours later. The prestige is the final act: "the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance." It is the piece de resistance, the communal release of breath, when objects or people that disappeared in the first act reappear to general astonishment. (Oct 20, 2006)
Writing bestselling tell-alls can be a sweet revenge, especially if they are powered by monster women and turned into movies with virtuoso roles for actresses of a certain age. (Oct 20, 2006)
"Sweet Land" seems on the surface to be one of those movies we've all seen before and don't necessarily need to see again. But this debut feature from veteran advertisement director Ali Selim turns out to be the kind of humane, absorbing, subtly powerful film that we keep wishing for and never expect to see anywhere, except, perhaps, on a premium cable station. (Emphasis on "perhaps.") (Oct 20, 2006)
It may be sleeker than ever this year, but the Hamptons International Film Festival isn't necessarily built for comfort. With an established program titled "Conflict and Resolution" helping to define its identity, the Hamptons festival knows that its patrons expect movies that confront their subjects - and maybe, make a little trouble along the way. (Oct 19, 2006)
From the rising camera that brings us into the "no-summer" mountains of Wyoming, to the herd of quarter horses running along the grassy bowl of a valley, "Flicka" seems to be a movie made on a slant. More evidence? How about Nell (Maria Bello), the rancher's wife who's so mellow and leisurely she makes dinner dishes served with creme fraiche? You kinda suspect she sits home and smokes pot all day. What kind of Western is this? (Oct 20, 2006)
REQUIEM (unrated). This review isn't the first -- and it likely won't be the last -- to describe Hans-Christian Schmid's gritty, disturbing "Requiem" as a German version of "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" filmed in the raw style of the Danish "Dogma" school. In fact, "Requiem" is inspired by the same true-life events that spurred "Emily Rose." But Schmid, working from a script by Bernd Lange, keeps clear of the American movie's special effects and hyperkinetic horror in order to focus on the more down-to-earth awfulness faced in the early 1970s by a reserved young girl named Michaela (Sandra Huller in a blistering performance). Though plagued most of her life by epileptic seizures, Michaela desperately wants to leave her pious, provincial family for college to study teaching. Hesitantly, she makes friends with a less-inhibited girl (Anna Blomeier) from her hometown and becomes infatuated with a pleasant young man (Nicholas Reinke). But her seizures begin coming on with greater force and with an alarming soundtrack of harsh voices. A priest suspects she may be in need of an exorcism while her college friends think she needs psychiatric help. Schmid and Lange show no favor toward either the secular or spiritual explanations for Michaela's seizures. They -- and Huller -- want to let her torment be viewed from different angles without cheap phantasmagoria or easy judgment. The result is, if anything, just as haunting as a horror film and far more heartrending. In German with English subtitles. 1:29 (intense scenes, sexual material, drug use, violence, vulgarities). Screening at the Hamptons International Film Festival and at select theaters.
51 BIRCH STREET (U). The personal documentary, like its cousin, the literary memoir, has become a daunting prospect: What fresh hell, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, are we going to be subjected to this time around? And yet Doug Block's very moving, honest and even suspenseful autopsy of his parents' marriage is the kind of film audiences leave the theater talking about, and which keeps them talking days later. Begun as an exercise in nostalgia when his widowed father decided to sell the family's longtime Long Island home (the title is its address), the film, as many great documentaries do when allowed to, takes on a life of its own. Block's father, Mike, was a World War II vet who moved his family to the suburbs and spent his life being a good provider; Mina Block, the filmmaker's mother, was a frustrated
intellectual and romantic. Both sacrificed themselves for their children, and their story is bittersweet and emblematic of its era. But it is Doug Block himself whose journey is the heart of the movie: How intimate is anyone with the real people behind the titles Mom and Dad? How intimate does one really want to be? What Block explores is the story of two strangers who happen to be his parents. To call "51 Birch Street" doc noir would be exaggerating, but the shadowy elements are there. 1:28 (adult content). At Cinema Village, 12th Street near University Place, Manhattan.
Does the present moment call for a movie with Frank Capra's heart and Oliver Stone's paranoia? It's more than likely that it does. But you'd expect such a movie to be better assembled than "Man of the Year." Writer-director Barry Levinson, returning to "Wag the Dog" territory with his "Good Morning, Vietnam" star Robin Williams, doesn't come up empty exactly. But somehow, without knowing what one expected, one is left wondering why this movie was made in the first place. (Oct 13, 2006)
"There is the Slim camp and the Pamela camp," declares Truman Capote in "Infamous," dividing New York's social circles along party-hostess lines. "Babe and I are hard Slim-ites." (Oct 13, 2006)
What does it take to be a top-level 14-year-old spy in the United Kingdom? The futuristic gadgetry of a James Bond? The ingenuity of a Harry Potter? The traffic-stopping beauty of Thomas Mann's young Tadzio in "Death in Venice?" (Oct 13, 2006)
It's possible to imagine audiences of varied faiths and persuasions viewing the prospect of yet another documentary about pedophilia by Catholic priests with any combination of wariness, fatigue or trepidation. Yet "Deliver Us From Evil" deserves their complete attention -- and their absolute respect. It's more incisive than any other film on its subject. (Oct 13, 2006)
The movie debut of wrestler John Cena, "The Marine" overflows with half-witted one-liners, women in tank tops, big guns, fistfights, explosions (lots of explosions), careening cars and even alligators. In other words, it's like an action movie from the 1980s somehow transported through a bizarre wormhole to the strange future of 2006. (Oct 14, 2006)
Everybody in "Driving Lessons" is working very hard to show how affecting and touching their movie can be. Indeed, the collective effort invested in this ragged mongrel of a coming-of-age story may con even the most jaded moviegoer into thinking there's something profound being put forth here. Forewarned, you may find it sweet enough to fill an empty afternoon. (Oct 13, 2006)
Any movie that would use Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" to accompany a scene of young romantic bliss has got some issues. The issues with Rick Rosenthal's "Nearing Grace" -- from the late Scott Sommer's "Nearing's Grace," which is an even worse title -- are really defects rooted firmly in the movie's DNA. An unsympathetic lead, a story that's been told a million times (the Scarlett-Ashley/star-crossed lovers story), relationships that don't make sense and an unfamiliarity with basic physics. An example: When young Henry Nearing (Gregory Smith), his brother, Blair (David Moscow) and Dad (David Morse) try to spread Mom's ashes over the Hudson from a moving airplane, anyone could have seen the outcome. (Oct 13, 2006)
Terry Gilliam has never been a man of small gestures. With "Tideland," the director of such daft extravaganzas as "Brazil" and "The Fisher King" has taken what amounts to a tawdry carnival sideshow and moved it into the big tent. (Oct 13, 2006)
SO MUCH, SO FAST (unrated). It would not require a huge leap of imagination to picture Steven Heywood stealing the heart of Jennifer Aniston in a big-budget romantic comedy. Instead, this winsomely good-looking, irrepressibly good humored building contractor from Newton, Mass., was destined to play himself in a documentary about a young man's bout with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and his brother's fight to save him. Shortly after Steven was diagnosed with the degenerative muscle condition, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, his brother Jamie launched a foundation to fast-track research for a cure. Jamie Heywood's barnstorming campaign would be profiled in the New Yorker and garner the participation of scientists and pharmacologists from around the world. It would also cost him his marriage. This affecting, slightly overextended film by Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan divides its attention among Jamie, whose determination to keep the foundation afloat approaches the monomaniacal, Steven's adoring wife Peggy, and Steven, who struggles to maintain his upbeat spirit despite an unrelenting downward spiral. In one of those crashing life ironies you couldn't possibly script, paralysis begins to overtake Steven as his baby son finds his feet. The chair-bound young father empathizes with the baby in his bewildered attempts to crawl across a bed. You don't know whether to laugh or cry. 1:27. At Quad Cinema, Manhattan. -- Jan Stuart (Oct 13, 2006)
The idealism that both informs and inspires Warren Beatty's "Reds" seems so distant from the present day that it's not only impossible to imagine any movie like it being made today, it's hard to believe it was ever made in the first place - especially by a major Hollywood studio. (Oct 15, 2006)
One hears there were actually movie mavens who believed matching Martin Scorsese with the 2002 Hong Kong police thriller "Infernal Affairs" was a bad idea. Either these guys didn't see the original Andrew Lau-Alan Mak movie or they have no idea what Scorsese's been about since "Mean Streets." Who but Scorsese would be better at wallowing in the story's blood-soaked grit and probing the moral-spiritual conundrums it raises - from being either a cop pretending to be a crook or a crook pretending to be a cop? (Oct 6, 2006)
Big box stores like Costco and Wal-Mart would seem to offer the perfect setting for comedy, if not science-fiction: They are at once disorienting and absurd in their vastness, otherworldly in their sense of order and robotic in their gung-ho team spirit of customer service. (Oct 6, 2006)
It's billed as a prequel to the 2003 remake, but "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning" owes much to the brutal brilliance of Tobe Hooper's 1974 original (pointedly unmentioned in the new movie's press kit).
You remember that scene in "Annie Hall" where all the kids in Alvy Singer's elementary school flashback testify in their younger selves how they eventually turned out as grown-ups. ("I'm into leather," one says.) The conceit of "Little Children," which screened this week at the New York Film Festival, is that you can somehow discern from each of its allegedly adult characters what they must have been like as kids. (Oct 6, 2006)
It can't be easy having your life invaded by a camera crew every seven years and trotted out for public inspection. And indeed, many of the pushing-50 subjects in the documentary series - which has been checking in with a group of socially diverse Englanders since they were 7 - are showing signs of rebellion. As John, a well-to-do barrister who curses the headmaster who pushed him into participating, puts it, "Every seven years, a little poison pill is injected." (Oct 6, 2006)
Given all the coupling, tripling and swapping of body fluids aboard this journey into sexual mass transit, the assumption about "Shortbus" will be that John Cameron Mitchell is straining for the Big O - outrage. But it turns out he's really an old-fashioned girl. (Oct 6, 2006)
Playwright and benevolent political gadfly Tony Kushner won the 1993 Pulitzer for the first half of "Angels in America" ("Millennium Approaches") and Tony awards for both the first and second parts ("Perestroika") and has been honored so many times there's not enough room here to list all the statuettes, obelisks and honorary degrees he's gotten since leaving NYU in 1984. And "Wrestling with Angels" makes it clear he deserves every one. (Oct 6, 2006)
SO GOES THE NATION (unrated). Two years seems long enough for wounds to have healed and perspective to be gained from a presidential election. But, while filmmakers Adam Del Deo and James D. Stern go out of their way to give voice to both sides of the 2004 presidential election, one still feels twinges of rue at the fair and foul means through which voters were persuaded to re-elect a president widely considered unpopular and, thus, vulnerable to defeat. Indeed, even the Republican strategists interviewed here seem somewhat surprised, even in retrospect, at some of the short-sighted maneuvers of their Democratic counterparts. The documentary, as with others, hints at monkey business with balloting; still, you get the feeling in hindsight that the jig might have been up for John Kerry and supporters well before. And yet ... well, at one point, Democratic consultant and frequent talk-show guest Paul Begala is shown in a "post-game" interview wondering what's fair about Paris Hilton paying as little taxes as possible while the waitress serving Hilton's latte has to fork over what seems like most of her salary. What you're wondering at that moment is where, in all the campaigning that went on that year, was THAT speech? And would it have made a difference anyway? 1:30 (mild profanity). At the IFC Center, Manhattan. - Gene Seymour (Oct 6, 2006)
Having recently emerged from a summer lost in the wilds of New England, I have spent long hours at home playing catch-up with a tower of DVDs that would cast a shadow over the Berkshires. The following short takes spotlight some of the happier discoveries, a few recently made available, a few on the verge of release and at least one ("Monterey Pop") that has made repeat visits to my disc player since its release a few months back. (Oct 8, 2006)
Every film festival has its unofficial prom queen and king, actors whose shadow dominates by virtue of a single commanding role or by seeming to be everywhere at once. Media acclaim (and opening night glare) have already installed Helen Mirren as queen of the 44th New York Film Festival for her work as real-life royal Elizabeth II in "The Queen." For king, I would coronate the indefatigable French star Michel Piccoli, who effervesces with the joy of his craft in Manoel de Oliveira's compact lark "Belle Toujours," and provides the chief reason to see Otar Iosseliani's overstated social satire "Gardens in Autumn." (Oct 3, 2006)
Stand at crisp attention, like you've just been dipped in a vat of Niagara starch and blow-dried. Now, bark in your best football-huddle, crush-the-visiting-team growl, "Hoo-ra!" Louder. "Hoo-ra!" Make my day. "Hoo-ra!" I can't hear you. "Hoo-ra!" (Sep 29, 2006)
The colonialist spirit is alive and well in "The Last King of Scotland," a return to the pandering celluloid depictions of African turmoil that insist on putting a white face on black suffering. (Sep 29, 2006)
I have an idea for a movie. It's called "Cash Cows," and it's about these digitally animated Guernseys who were supposed to star in their own feature-length cartoon. Someone else beats them to the punch - or have you forgotten "Barnyard" already? Undaunted, the cows escape from their computerized drawing boards and take matters into their own hooves. After all, even a make-believe cow mired in "development hell" knows that big-screen cartoons are sure bets at the opening weekend sweepstakes for box office supremacy. (Sep 29, 2006)
According to the nihilist strain of comedy Hollywood has been popping out with increasing frequency, the world is peopled with nothing but the boorish and calculating, who conspire daily to take down the sole hold-out for innocence and decency. The broader the humiliation and the deeper the misanthropy, the bigger the laughs. (Sep 29, 2006)
The temptation to declare Helen Mirren some kind of acting genius becomes irresistible while watching her play Queen Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears' delightful and poignant "The Queen." It's only when the details of Mirren's performance drift back into memory that one realizes that "genius" is at once too broad and too restrictive to characterize what she does here. (Sep 29, 2006)
Memory, in "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," arrives in static bursts of inchoate emotional energy. People talk at once, connect haphazardly, act without thinking and lose the ability to render their regrets. (Sep 29, 2006)
LOUDQUIETLOUD: A FILM ABOUT THE PIXIES (unrated). During the late 1980s and early '90s, the indie-rock band Pixies (they never used the "the") released five albums of brilliant and utterly original music with an arresting style that provides the title of this modest documentary. (Sep 29, 2006)
When a man sticks a fish hook through his cheek, it's one thing. When this same man dives into shark-infested waters with this same fish hook attached to another man's fishing line, it's another thing. When this man is one errant kick away from having his face sliced by the hook and a leg chewed off by a tiger shark, it's at least a couple more things. (Sep 22, 2006)
As an aerospace-besotted 11-year-old, I knew almost as much about World War I aces Frank Luke and the "Red Baron" as I did about the Mercury astronauts and the X-15. I loved reading Landmark Books' chronicles of how the Air Force came to be and how many pilots crashed and burned trying to cross the Atlantic before Lindbergh finally touched down at Le Bourget. Go on. Ask me how many planes Richard Bong shot down during World War II. Forty - and I know for a fact that some of you don't really care, right? (Sep 22, 2006)
To watch Sean Penn unleash his showmanship at full blast in "All the King's Men" is to wonder how he ever shared a quiet breakfast table with a rock star who lords over stadium crowds from a disco-ball-plated crucifix. (Sep 22, 2006)
With "The Science of Sleep," director Michel Gondry labors to refine his brand of cerebral sci-fi romantic fantasy as exemplified by "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Human Nature" (both of which he co-conceived with writer Charlie Kaufman). As one who feels that screen romance should be insulated against the analytical maunderings of, say, microbe hunters and string theorists, I would be inclined to file this hybrid subgenre in the drawer with slasher musicals and slapstick disaster flicks. (Sep 22, 2006)
Just about everything about "Renaissance" screams "hand-me-down" except for its animation. And even that process, the technical term for which is "motion capture," has already had its publicity parades, first with "The Polar Express" and then with this summer's "Monster House." Even so, it says something about the seductiveness of basic black-and-white that some time passes before one's interest drifts off. (Sep 22, 2006)
All you needed to be part of the scene chronicled in "American Hardcore" were attitude, amplifiers and three chords you could pound as if you were forging horseshoes for a cavalry about to make the final assault. Next, you'd find a room where people were as ticked off about everything in general and nothing in particular as you were. Start your engines, scream real loud and jump all over the place. Watch out for flying debris. (Sep 22, 2006)
Director Aureaus Solito can't quite maintain the casual virtuosity of his film's opening moments - in which a group of gay preteen Manilans mount a mini-Miss Universe pageant - but the intent is seduction, and it works. (Sep 22, 2006)
FEAST (R). This middling horror-genre item from the Matt Damon-Ben Affleck-Chris Moore Project Greenlight folks is set inside the lonely, remote Beer Trap Tavern. "Feast" follows a common horror flick recipe, adding a dash of humor. (Sep 22, 2006)
JESUS CAMP (unrated). Becky Fischer, the resourceful, moon-shaped director of Kids in Ministry International, cheerfully concedes that children are "more open and usable" than adults. Which is why she has steered the full force of her proselytizing energies into refashioning kids into an army of impassioned, self-abnegating Christians who would "give up their lives for Jesus" with the same fervor that turns some Muslim youths into martyrs for Allah. (Sep 22, 2006)
You could tell from the very beginning of "The Black Dahlia" that a lot of work went into its imagery. You also don't have to think too hard about the source of its visual splendor with such names as Dante Ferretti, the redoubtable production designer, and Vilmos Zsigmond, the legendary cinematographer, in the credits. Having those guys on your team guarantees a movie that comes across as a finely wrought dreamscape of 1940s Los Angeles at its tawdriest. (Sep 15, 2006)
Perhaps the most provocative argument for seeing "Artie Lange's Beer League" is that it offers a glimpse into the fantasy world of adolescent boys. It's a world full of sex, whiskey, beer, cocaine, foul language, bachelor parties, hookers, illusions of grandeur, slow-pitch softball, the sweet satisfaction of hitting a home run against your nemesis. (Sep 18, 2006)
When you're young, you're convinced things will work out fine. When you're older, you're just as sure they might not. "The Last Kiss" - like "Huckleberry Finn," utopian political rhetoric and dairy products - will be digested differently, depending on one's place on the big cafeteria line of life. Acid reflux is a distinct possibility. (Sep 15, 2006)
In "Gridiron Gang," The Rock plays real-life juvenile probation officer Sean Porter, who molded some of the toughest residents at California's Camp Kilpatrick, a "last chance" facility for under-age felons, into a football team. Porter convinces his charges that they're playing to raise the stakes of their entire future - to change themselves from losers to winners - and that the first step is to overcome gang allegiances and put the team he forms, the Mustangs, first. (Sep 15, 2006)
The last five years have not been kind to the individual and collective sense of humor. Oh, there's still plenty to laugh at. One dose of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" will bear that out, even when it's chased down with rue and bitters. But it's our ability to take a joke with equanimity and goodwill that seems to have been brutalized in the post-9/11, post-Iraq invasion cultural climate. (Sep 15, 2006)
To the many dubious deeds that Strom Thurmond has to answer for in the afterlife, one can now add his suggestion to the Nixon White House in February 1972, that it neutralize John Lennon's powerful impact on the politics of America's youth by getting him deported back to England. So began a protracted four-year legal battle, which found the former Beatle and his artist wife Yoko Ono in and out of courtrooms and the halls of Congress in pursuit of a green card. (Sep 15, 2006)
Outside of trying to drive Barry Bonds totally insane, why would a 2006 kids' movie choose Babe Ruth, a player whose best year was in 1921, to set up as the paragon of baseball perfection, idol of millions and unlikely ally of a plucky young kid named Yankee Irving? Probably because Ruth played in an era that now seems as simple and heroic as "Everyone's Hero" would like the world to be. (Sep 15, 2006)
For baby boomers of a certain age, the violent death of George Reeves on June 16, 1959, was almost as distressing as James Dean's was to older siblings and cousins. Every headline of that event - "TV's Superman Kills Self" blaring loudest of all - seemed to ridicule our collective wish-fulfillment fantasies. (Sep 8, 2006)
"Give me my elephants!!!" isn't exactly "Hasta la vista, baby" or "Make my day." But Thai action star Tony Jaa - playing a member of an ancient Thai order of elephant keepers - isn't really big on words. Dislocations, hematomas, and demolished decor, yes, he delivers. Just as "The Protector" will deliver him on a flower-strewn path into the consciousness of the American young and kung-furious. (Sep 8, 2006)
Somehow you just knew that if they were ever going to remake "D.O.A." for the 21st century, it was going to be amped up to the 11th power. So what was in previous incarnations a deadline of a couple days for a man to track down his own killer has now been boiled down to a single sordid hour.
The undistinguished brown cottage squats along one of the lushest stretches in contemporary American real estate. (Sep 3, 2006)
"Crossover" begins and ends with dazzling displays of "streetball" - quick-and-dirty basketball games played in abandoned buildings with teams of hot-dogging, trash-talking playground samurai competing for bragging rights and under-the-table money. (Sep 1, 2006)
Thanks to a television series that began in 1954 and lasted an astonishing 20 years, the image of Lassie that pervades pop culture is that of the ultimate Power Pooch. Week after week, she seemed capable of not only saving lives and fighting off cougars, but also winning poker tournaments, building superconductors and translating Thomas Pynchon novels into Czech. (Sep 1, 2006)
There's a deliriously delightful weird streak that runs through
"The Wicker Man," at least for a while, with Nicolas Cage as a
cop investigating the disappearance of a child from a creepy,
private island in Washington's Puget Sound. (Sep 1, 2006)
RIDING ALONE FOR THOUSANDS OF MILES (PG). At his most elegant ("Raise the Red Lantern") or politically provocative ("To Live"), China's Zhang Yimou has always been a sentimentalist - even if sentiment has always been the premium, not the objective. "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles" (the title of the 1,000-year-old mask opera at the center of the film) deals with a number of subjects - age, parenthood, estrangement, generosity - all guaranteed to have you reaching for your hankie. So bring three. As the aging, gruff Takata, veteran Japanese screen star Ken Takakura is a mine of unresolved regret, attempting to atone for his perceived paternal sins by doing what his opera scholar son had intended to do himself - film the title work, in China, starring its greatest interpreter. The singer (Li Jiamin) is in prison, however; bureaucracies must be overcome, and Takata's preoccupation evolves from the making of the film to reuniting the singer with his young son, to the boy himself (Yang Zhenbo). In the midst of all this is a lesson about cell phones, foreigners managing to communicate despite language barriers, and a consideration of the question of why sons can't talk to fathers. 1:48. In Manhattan at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and the Quad Cinemas. (Sep 1, 2006)
"Rocky" with goalposts? (Aug 25, 2006)
Throughout its opening sequence and at various points thereafter, "Idlewild," the 1930s musical featuring the pop duo OutKast, revels in the admonition once put forth by bebop icon Charlie Parker to "hear with your eyes and see with your ears." Writer-director Bryan Barber, OutKast's video director of choice, announces his considerable big-screen promise at the start, chronicling the early lives of its main characters, Rooster (Antwan A. "Big Boi" Patton) and Percival ("Andre 3000" Benjamin) with a tapestry of images that shift and jump with the buoyant mischief one finds in both Betty Boop cartoons and OutKast videos. Colors impulsively fade and sharpen, heads swell and shrink and musical notes become animated characters. The reverie is so ingratiatingly cagey, you're ready to buy whatever exotic Depression-era brew the movie's selling. (Aug 25, 2006)
Sensitive souls be warned: "How to Eat Fried Worms," based on the 1973 children's book by Thomas Rockwell, makes good on its title. Worms are indeed fried, and they are eaten. They're also chopped, scrambled, pureed, microwaved and sentenced to death by magnifying glass. Viewers are assured no real worms were harmed during filming, but some might find the goopy special effects - and the depictions of casual cruelty - more than a little gag-worthy. (Aug 25, 2006)
The most convincing and engaging of the six features Edward Burns has turned out since "The Brothers McMullen" (1995), "Looking for Kitty" boasts its share of Burns-isms: the occasional feeling that it's all being made up as the director goes along; the constant bemusement of middle-class white men with the women who don't want them; the chin-jutting indignation over Irish-Americans no longer running the world (or, at least, the Greater New York metropolitan area). This time, however, Burns has made a small batch of lemonade. (Aug 25, 2006)
"Surviving Eden" unapologetically borrows its methods from such Christopher Guest pseudo-documentaries as "Best in Show" and "Waiting for Guffman." It even has a Guest perennial, Jane Lynch, donating some of her antic composure to writer-director Greg Pritkin's media satire. (Aug 25, 2006)
From where I'm sitting, $15.2million doesn't seem so small a haul. But I don't happen to sit in a Hollywood boardroom where standards for success are different and higher than yours or mine. (Aug 25, 2006)
There are times when you go to the movies to peer into a window on the human condition that might otherwise be closed. There are other times when you go to the movies to have your heart tugged by simple acts of bravery or love. There are still other times when you go to movies to find out stuff you never knew before.
There's something mildly intimidating about the craftsmanship put into "The Illusionist." Each groove in the story is so finely curved, each scene so immaculately rendered and polished within an inch of its life that you almost forget that magic is consequential to the storytelling. But the high gloss doesn't intrude on the narrative cunning - or, for that matter, the foxy grandeur of the performances. (Aug 18, 2006)
Brain-numbing movies in August are as common as cicadas and tropical humidity. And, like both of those things, they can put you right to sleep.
Early in "Down and Out in Paris and London," George Orwell writes of the odd consolation one can find when mired in society's rock-bottom reaches. "It is," Orwell says, "a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out." If you've "gone to the dogs" and can take it, he concludes, "it takes a lot off anxiety." (Aug 18, 2006)
Paying homage to Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese even as he borrows from them, director Bobby Moresco has crafted a brutal, cinematic vision of underworld power plays and arrogant youth in a film that blurs the lines between hero and betrayer. (Aug 18, 2006)
From where one sits, it looks as though the point of "Trust the Man" was to show how smart people tie themselves in knots talking around their problems instead of confronting them. (Aug 18, 2006)
(UNRATED) Kinetic, hyper-violent and aching with weltschmerz, the "Pusher" films of Danish contrarian Nicolas Winding Refn have attracted audiences via action, and seduced them with a classicist's take on star-crossed tragedy. Only 26 when he directed the first "Pusher" (1996), Refn's accomplishment - other than forging a driving narrative - is creating plausibly human characters who are never, ever endearing, yet fully capture the imagination. Now being released, fittingly, as a package by Magnolia Pictures, the films follow a number of low-life Copenhagen criminals, some of whom will survive, most of whom will drop by the wayside. The upshot is highly moralistic even as the viewer is being taken on a sewer tour of the human soul. In a world where the most banal events seem to derail the tawdriest dreams, Frank (Kim Bodnia) loses the drugs he hasn't paid for and has to scramble for survival; in "II" ("With Blood on My Hands") the striking Mads Mikkelsen is Tonny, a dim Danish bulb caught in a vise grip of poisoned patrimony, and in "III" ("I'm the Angel of Death"), the ex-Yugoslav kingpin Milo (Zlatko Buric) splits his time between drug-dealing, 12-step meetings, cooking a dinner for 50 to celebrate his daughter's birthday and butchering his enemies. Individually, the films resonate, but as a whole they are sordidly sublime. 1:46 (I), 1:36 (II), 1:47 (III) (violence, vulgarity, sexual content, nudity). At Cinema Village, 12th Street west of University Place, Manhattan. (Aug 18, 2006)
(PG-13) Like his rival in misery, Adolf Hitler, King Leopold II of Belgium left a legacy as actively poisonous today as it was 100 years ago. And when "King Leopold's Ghost" listens to those more contemporary echoes, it is an indispensable treatise on Western hegemony and capitalist plunder - as seen through the troubled history of the Congo. But as written and directed by Pippa Scott, and co-directed by Oreet Rees, the documentary seems to have insufficient confidence in its (Aug 18, 2006)
Dan Dunne, the teacher doing such a bad job of hiding his cocaine addiction in "Half Nelson," has an enviable way with young adolescents. He doesn't try to be cool. He just is - by being confident and honest and thus maintaining authority over a group of urban hormone cases who would ordinarily see a white, middle-class history geek as a sitting duck. (Aug 11, 2006)
If David Lean and William Faulkner had ever collaborated, and brought in Henry Moore to do set design, "House of Sand" might have been their troubling brainchild. An exercise in Brazilian existential anxiety, the film does for sand what "Das Boot" did for water, and "Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)" did for ice, presenting human beings as all but irreconcilable to either the natural world or themselves. (Aug 11, 2006)
The opiate-of-the-masses quality of "Step Up" recalls all the Great Depression comedies that made the wealthy look so miserable; the ubiquitous sports movies in which touchdowns are scored by the halt and lame, and a million "42nd Street"-inspired fables in which someone goes out a nobody and comes back a star. Fantasy, pure and simple. And only objectionable when you're so aware of the fantasy. (Aug 11, 2006)
The Circle of Love, a la "Conversations with Other Women," spins around and around until it finally spirals down and down. (Aug 11, 2006)
Although he can save the day because he's a super-powered runner, Tim Allen can't carry the bantam weight of "Zoom" on his only-human shoulders. (Aug 11, 2006)
The technophobic horror flick "Pulse" is a cautionary tale that could have been dreamed up by a frustrated parent: If you don't get off of that computer, kids, you'll turn into a zombie. (Aug 11, 2006)
You look at the title and think: Finally! Someone's going to explain it! No such luck. "The Trouble With Men and Women" doesn't illuminate anything, including the compulsion among some filmmakers to recycle the hoariest romantic situations, in the presumed hope that a charming cast might save the day. Despite the likability of his actors, however, writer-director Tony Fisher makes his feature debut (which dates back to 2003) with a Brit-lite romance that barely rises above soap opera. Matt (Joseph McFadden) has been dumped by a girlfriend who, via flashback, he seems well rid of. His subsequent sorties into the erogenous zone become a series of calamities, until he finally winds up with the girl he seemed destined for all along, his best friend's girlfriend, Susie (Kate Ashfield). Are we giving too much away? Don't worry: If you can't see it all coming a mile away, you won't be able to find your way to the theater either. 1:14 (sex, vulgarity, pointlessly bleary slo-mo). At the IFC Center, Sixth Avenue at West Third Street, Manhattan (Aug 11, 2006)
. A bad dream leads to constant conscious nightmares in this wacky, surreal creepshow from over-the-edge Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer. (Aug 11, 2006)
Pedro Almodóvar's "Volver," may have had critics kvelling at the Cannes film festival earlier this year (it won awards for screenwriting and best actresss), but the rest of us will have to wait until November to see the acclaimed Spanish filmmaker's latest offering. (Aug 11, 2006)
It's every high schooler's dream: going to a college with courses like Preparing the Perfect Slurpee, Motorcycles in the Swimming Pool, Slacking 101, 201, 301, 401. Majoring in Tank Tops or Heavy Metal. (Aug 11, 2006)
How many people do you suppose expected "World Trade Center" to come across as a shrill screed? There seem to be great waves of folks throughout this great nation who see red (in more ways than one) whenever the name Oliver Stone catches their collective eye. To read some of the more hysterical blogs greeting the news that Stone was directing a movie about the September 2001 terrorist attacks on America was to find more conspiracy theorizing than even Stone bothered to indulge in in "JFK." (Aug 4, 2006)
(PG-13) A middling and sometimes muddling comedy with occasional bursts of wicked-funny stuff. 1:50 (crude humor, language, drug references). At area theaters. (Aug 4, 2006)
Assuming it was "The Night Listener's" purpose to show how looks can be deceiving, the movie's mission has been accomplished in ways it hadn't intended. There's so much menace and portent in this adaptation of Armistead Maupin's novel that you're psyched for a high-voltage compound of shock and awe that never materializes. (Aug 4, 2006)
There's a good reason why more movies are not set in deep underground caves. (Aug 4, 2006)
Accept that cows come in male and female categories and you've vaulted the first hurdle necessary to accepting "Barnyard" as the goofball lark it's intended to be. Some of the smarter kids in the movie's target audience may be moved to ask why some cows, with their udders in full (if not overly emphatic) view, talk with men's voices while others don't. Unless you want to engage in on-the-fly speculation about experiments in bovine estrogen treatments, you're better off telling them to hush up and enjoy the picture. (Aug 4, 2006)
Like the proverbial, typhoon-provoking flutter of a butterfly's wing, "Quinceañera" is an ostensibly innocent act, with vibrations that travel around forever. A doubter's parable, the film's story is built on one ironic juxtaposition after another and told in a manner so devoid of irony, that one begins to wonder how the filmmakers could keep their balance in such a gale of metaphysics. (Aug 4, 2006)
It's hard to believe, but way back when there were only three TV networks to choose from, one could easily imagine one of those networks broadcasting a documentary like "My Country, My Country." Network news divisions believed, for a while, that it was their duty to present viewers with longer stories that dared to go beneath, behind or beyond the two-to-three-minute stories they were transmitting daily at the dinner hour. (Aug 4, 2006)
(Unrated) Veteran French filmmaker Claude Chabrol induces chills with a sophisticated touch in "The Bridesmaid," based on Ruth Rendell's psychological mystery novel about a young bachelor who gets lucky at his sister's wedding. Make that terribly unlucky: Moments after Philippe (Benoit Magimel) makes love to the enigmatic Senta (Laura Smet), she's using words like "destiny" and talking about eternal love. "Does that scare you?" she asks. It should, but the otherwise level-headed Philippe can't tear himself away from this clearly unbalanced beauty, even when he begins to doubt her unlikely tales of acting for well-known directors. (Philippe is so smitten that he never bothers to pay a visit to www.google.fr.) Soon, Senta is demanding that Philippe prove his love in a dramatic, Nietzschean fashion: She wants him to kill someone. Like Hitchcock or Clouzot, Chabrol excels at building a sense of dread: The slightest hiccup in a bit of banal dialogue is enough to set off alarm bells, and all the louder because the people on screen keep ignoring them. The build-up is more compelling than the climax (which raises more questions than it answers) but by then "The Bridesmaid" has already made its deep, dark impression. 1:50 (sexual situations). In French with English subtitles. At Angelika Film Center, Manhattan. (Aug 4, 2006)
Because we believe in full disclosure in this publication, I feel compelled to report that at the preview screening of "Miami Vice" I attended, there was a problem with one of its reels. You could see everything just fine. You could hear the music and most of the guns and the engines of boats, copters and cars. But you weren't sure of what anyone was saying. (Jul 28, 2006)
Man has been fascinated by the ant since natural history began, and, most especially, since Flik made ants really cool. (Jul 28, 2006)
By now, you would be better off waiting for Godot than for Woody Allen to make another "Manhattan" or "Annie Hall" or even another "Shadows and Fog." (I'd settle for another "Alice" at this point.) Filmmaking for Allen appears to have settled into little more than personal habit, like shaving, dining or playing clarinet once a week with his jazz band. The result has for some time been a hit-and-miss process. (Jul 28, 2006)
Forest Hills High School, situated somewhere in the torrid, hormone-agitated Pacific Northwest, is less an institution of learning than it is a sanitarium for the chronically aroused. Having apparently adopted a policy of "No child's behind left behind," Forest Hills High is a debauch on the brink of an orgy. (Jul 28, 2006)
Even with enough foreknowledge to suggest otherwise, you may make your way through the first few scenes of "Brothers of the Head" wondering whether this is real or made up. The movie's glitzier, tricked-up elements don't help. As the feature-length documentary has become prevalent in pop culture, audiences are accustomed to fancy narrative embellishments as part of the package. (Jul 28, 2006)
Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear) is a motivational speaker who, like too many of his fellow Americans, believes that people come in only two categories: winners and losers. If you suspect this is the kind of single-mindedness that marks the consummate loser, you would be correct. Richard's nine-step program to success, "Refuse to Lose," is so cheesy that he can't find anyone to swallow it. (Jul 26, 2006)
M. Night Shyamalan wants to scare his audiences toward higher moral and spiritual ground. While there are far worse artistic callings to heed, it's not exactly what one would have expected from the writer-director who caught lightning in a bottle seven years ago with the soulful, cunning ghost story, "The Sixth Sense."
Historically, common folk don't regularly figure into family cartoons. Instead, there are talking toys, talking cars, wise-cracking pigs and bunnies, or monsters full of anxiety, ants with responsibilities and the occasional sympathetic dinosaur. (Jul 21, 2006)
What Owen Wilson has to do pronto is find a story that would put him on the open road with his sprung-from-the-loony-bin dad - to be played, of course, by none other than the great Bruce Dern. If not that story, then something, anything needs to be done soon to keep Wilson's stoner-savant persona from becoming as generic a product as dairy-case cookie dough. (Jul 14, 2006)
The best parts of any Edward Burns movie come when his characters, especially the guys, just kick back and yap away. They could be spinning yarns, as they frequently do in Burns' latest, "The Groomsmen," about childhood slights, real and imagined. They could be doing a can-you-top-this jam session of mutually accepted invective. However you label such blarney, talking junk gives Burns' movies a cozy, lived-in texture. So long as the banter doesn't hit a wall or get too stupid, you could listen to it all night. (Jul 14, 2006)
"A Scanner Darkly" is by no means the first Philip K. Dick story to inspire a movie. But unlike such predecessors as "Blade Runner" (1982), "Total Recall" (1990) and "Minority Report" (2002), writer-director Richard Linklater's experiment in gritty animation doesn't settle for merely spinning off one of Dick's high concept ideas. The movie literally crawls beneath the surface of this hack-genius' most personal work of quasi-fantasy to achieve its own hallucinatory vision of psyches tweaked, twisted and overpowered by whatever it is we consider "real life." (Jul 7, 2006)
As long as you accept it for the sprawling live-action, feature-length cartoon that it is, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" will neither disappoint nor drag on the senses. There may even be times when you find yourself giving in to the kind of crafty mayhem that made icons of Chuck Jones and Jackie Chan and bestowed effervescence to such comparably mixed blessings as the second and third Indiana Jones movies. (Jul 6, 2006)
(PG-13). Director Bryan Singer establishes himself as the comic-book movie's mightiest virtuoso as he brings the Man of Steel back to the big screen with inexorable energy and passionate engagement. Brandon Routh ably assumes the mantle of Krypton's Last Son along with alter ego Clark Kent's mild-mannered visage. Kate Bosworth is a frosty Lois Lane while Kevin Spacey all but steals the show as archvillain Lex Luthor. With Parker Posey, Frank Langella, James Marsden and Eva Marie Saint. 2:29 (some intense violence). At area theaters. (Jun 26, 2006)
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