Brassbound skeptics may see the complex, provocative docudrama What the #$*! Do We Know!?, which poses the Big Questions of Life, as just another product of new-age self-absorption, an act of pompous navel-gazing that might best be confined to screenings at the local ashram. Certainly, these 108 minutes are singularly…
It was only a matter of time before Hollywood capitalized on the sympathy and admiration that have enveloped the nation’s firefighters since 9/11, and here we are. Jay Russell’s action-packed, flame-broiled Ladder 49 is an all-out valentine to the firehouse fraternity that might never have gotten to the screen were…
The return to the screen of the ravishing Chinese actress Gong Li, who may have the most expressive face in film, should be cause for rejoicing among her millions of admirers around the world. After starring in a series of memorable and politically controversial films directed by her former paramour,…
Sheathed in a custom-tailored gray suit and sporting expensively barbered silver hair, Tom Cruise looks like an older, harder version of the self-absorbed L.A. sharpie he played sixteen years ago in Rain Man. But in Collateral, a frenetic Michael Mann thriller that runs up a Baghdad-level body count, Cruise’s character…
The dramatically useful accident that befell Davaa and Falorni happened in the spring of 2002. According to Mongol legend, if a mother camel rejects her newborn calf, the herding family must call in a musician to perform a kind of seduction ritual. The musician plays. The mother camel becomes enchanted…
Getting stranded at snowbound O’Hare for the night is one thing. You call home, maybe knock down a couple of martinis, then grab a blanket. A century ago, being quarantined at Ellis Island for eight months because you were, say, a part-time anarchist from Campobasso with a big mustache and…
In the mood to launch a thousand ships? Fine, but it’s gonna cost you. Feel like sacking the Temple of Apollo? Okay, but bring drachmas. Depending on who’s counting, Warner Brothers’ presummer blockbuster Troy budgeted out at anywhere between $175 million and $250 million, including the big wooden horse, assorted…
When a pleasant Italian comedy called Mediterraneo won the 1992 Academy Award for best foreign language film, a lot of observant American moviegoers scratched their heads. Gabriele Salvatores’s fairy tale of Italian soldiers happily stranded on a gorgeous Greek island during World War II was an outright charmer, but it…
Pour a couple of old-fashioneds into the average golf historian, and it won’t be long until he gets misty-eyed over Robert Tyre Jones, Jr. Jones not only ruled golf in the 1920s, the fellow will tell you; he also epitomized the gentlemanly ideal of the old Scottish game, transplanted to…
In Israeli writer-director Nir Bergman’s Broken Wings, we never see an automatic weapon, a military roadblock or a horrific explosion on a city street. Rather than dealing with the volatile politics of the Middle East, this quiet, soul-wrenching film examines the unresolved traumas of one middle-class family trying to cope…
When we first see the title characters of Connie and Carla, a penny-dreadful imitation of one of Hollywood’s most inimitable comedies, they are loud-mouthed junior high girls mugging in the school cafeteria. A minute later, they are loud-mouthed grownups (well, they’re the size of grownups) screaming out show tunes in…
At first glance Hidalgo seems to be nothing more than an old-fashioned, flat-footed adventure epic plunked down on a vast stretch of desert and amply furnished with the usual Hollywood conventions — a strong, silent cowboy on horseback, a couple of villains with nasty black mustaches, a killer sandstorm, and…
It is by now clear that Meg Ryan, the bubbling sweetheart of half a dozen romantic comedies, means to bring new substance and seriousness to the latest phase of her career. Witness the lonely New York English teacher she played in last year’s brainy slasher flick, In the Cut: In…
When the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, consisting of twenty raw college men, beat the seemingly invincible, state-hardened Soviets and went on to win the gold medal at Lake Placid, the event was regarded, even in palm-lined Miami and iceless Honolulu, as the most amazing feat in U.S. Olympic history…
This year’s British assault on the Yank funnybone is a spirited, hard-trying farce called Calendar Girls, plucked straight from a 1999 news story and dolled up with all the heartwarming charm we’ve come to expect from recent films made by our former rulers. The film recounts the slightly naughty daring…
William H. Macy’s plain-vanilla features and hangdog screen demeanor have served him well. Who could resist him as the clueless car dealer who hatched the disastrous kidnapping plot in Fargo, or as the distraught husband of a frisky porn star in Boogie Nights? A splendid character actor with a gift…
The dispute at the heart of House of Sand and Fog concerns the occupancy of a rundown little bungalow near the northern California coast. It’s not much of a place, really. And to get a glimpse of the Pacific you’d have to climb up to the roof and stand on…
Anthony Minghella’s magnificent film version of the Civil War epic Cold Mountain has much more going for it than Hollywood grandeur. Beyond its striking set-pieces and gruesome battle scenes populated with thousands of extras, in addition to its movie-star glamour — Jude Law and Nicole Kidman are like beautiful pieces…
In his career as a Hollywood action figure, Tom Cruise has been dressed in some pretty hip outfits — a macho fighter pilot’s sleek leather jacket, a NASCAR driver’s logo-speckled fire suit, assorted silken Armani sports jackets, even black cape and fangs. So it’s a bit unsettling to see the…
In the annals of fraud and fakery, a discredited ex-magazine reporter named Stephen Glass will likely wind up a mere footnote. The people who forge Van Goghs and the con artists who bilk naive grandmothers out of their life savings (not to mention certain fast-dancing corporate executives) even more richly…
The spooky beauty of Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s strange take on the Columbine massacre, arises not from the shock of sudden violence but from the filmmaker’s steady gaze at the numbing routines of life inside a suburban high school. With what first looks like cool detachment, Van Sant (My Own…
The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes’s best-selling travel memoir Under the Tuscan Sun is a virtual case study of Hollywood’s irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take. Mayes’s 1996 book is a nicely written, carefully observed meditation on buying a decrepit Italian villa…
