Not a lot of people know this, but our word “actress” is derived from the Greek phrase strumpetos luckyos, meaning “prostitute who somehow landed an agent.” The reason that this etymological root remains largely unappreciated is that it is entirely fake, fabricated for the present purpose of irritating a lot…
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year — which often seems advantageous — you may have noticed that there’s a pugnacious air of defiance among today’s young women. Far be it from a film critic to attempt an essay on gender studies, but hey, look around:…
You know how it’s often the ones we love whose flaws are most apparent? Well, when it comes to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, I am smitten. This film is a miracle, an extravaganza equal to its predecessors and in some ways more stunning. It…
Michael Crichton seems pretty clever. The doctor-screenwriter-novelist digs odd history (Eaters of the Dead, a.k.a. The 13th Warrior), clashing cultures (Rising Sun), and cutting-edge biotechnology (Jurassic Park, and virtually his whole canon). His 1999 novel and its inevitable new movie adaptation, Timeline, both attempt to deliver all this and more,…
If you’re hankering for a movie about an awkward yet lovable “outsider” type who wanders into a pastel mockup of Middle America and cajoles the straights to get saucy, you’re in luck. It’s called Edward Scissorhands and it’s been available on video for years. Renting it will absolve you of…
Russell Crowe to his agent: “More Oscar-bait. Now.” Agent, considering his cut of Crowe’s $20 million payday: “Yes, sir.” A possible scenario, anyway. Thus Crowe is back in another iconic, self-serious performance, and his beefy mug will stare down upon us from this season’s heroic movie posters until Tom Cruise…
“I really like the cold — it makes me feel really alive.” There are few more attractive things a woman can say, and when wunderkind Sarah Polley says this in My Life Without Me — to a gullible dork she is seducing with totally unconscious malice, no less — thinking…
Recently ornithologists in Antarctica made a startling discovery: Female emperor penguins, being forced against their wills to endure stern patriarchal societal norms, tend to practice iffy mating habits. Close scrutiny revealed that most adult females go bonkers struggling to choose between an exciting-but-destructive “bad-boy” penguin and a dependable-but-boring “good-boy” penguin,…
You gotta love John Sayles. No, really — you gotta, or else a mob of indie-minded cineastes will club you into submission. Sometimes it’s easy to comply, as with City of Hope and Sunshine State, both astute portraits of uniquely American class, race, and real estate struggles boiling down to…
Visualize Tokyo. Got it? Now add popular favorite Bill Murray, doing his “lovable schmo” shtick. Toss in American Rhapsody’s up-and-comer Scarlett Johansson, doing her standard “like, duh” face. Dip them both into emotional torpor in the sleek Park Hyatt, add local color, stir. Et voila: Lost in Translation. For Sofia…
Most will deny it, but inside every grown man lurks a hypersensitive adolescent girl. Allow me to tell you all about mine and to share some of my poetry … Whoa! Relax. Put away that gun. Just seeking to emphasize that in the case of director Catherine Hardwicke’s debut feature,…
Ah, Paris — City of Light, of Love, of Liver Damage and Lung Cancer. C’est formidable, non? Who in need of a posh vacation would turn down the opportunity to luxuriate in its finest hotels, to stuff oneself with sumptuous snails, and to work on a terribly flat romantic drama…
When was the last time you said to yourself: “Y’know, what I seek for my viewing pleasure is a boring, obscenely diluted remake of Fight Club set in the fascinating world of dentistry”? Indeed it is a grave displeasure to announce that stellar director Alan Rudolph (The Moderns) has delivered…
Chiwetel Ejiofor is phoning in from Montreal. Sounds like a Tom Waits lyric, but it’s true: The fresh, gifted actor with the tricky handle is too busy at present (just finished doing The Canterbury Tales for BBC-TV, currently working on the feature Slow Burn with LL Cool J and Jolene…
If, in keeping with current fads, you seek movies featuring females kicking a bunch of ass, your appetite will be tended (and cultivated) at the multiplex all summer long. Wander into your local art-house, however, and you may find a fine if somewhat challenging import called The Legend of Suriyothai…
What is it with women, anyway? They want to be safe walking the streets at night; they want to be able to trust strangers; they want the world to be beautiful, free, and wild. Are they nuts? Before you click SEND with the hate-mail (or, worse, with the “You said…
Once in a while a film comes along that is as sound, smart, sweet, and significant as can be, and Whale Rider is such a film. Fault the project on various counts if you like (I’ll try), but ultimately the tale is beyond reproach, a bane to cynics and a…
French putz Xavier (Romain Duris) is depressed. The poor guy lives in Paris, has Amélie’s Audrey Tautou as a girlfriend, eats gourmet vegan dinners prepared for him by his free-spirited mother, and is being set up for a graduate degree in economics by a friend of his father’s. “I don’t…
At some fast-approaching point in pop culture evolution, we’re due to hit Total Outsider Saturation, wherein everybody is an outsider and therefore there is no longer an outside. In the fleeting meantime we have scintillating reminders of the struggle like X-2: X-Men United, the latest bid from comic-book land to…
Imagine a large, dead Saint Bernard with its bones removed. Then visualize a hefty bellows inserted into it from behind, with a gorilla hopping up and down on it, causing the huge dog’s baglike corpse to twitch spasmodically, wheeze, and croak. Voila, this is today’s Nick Nolte. What’s amazing is…
It was only in 1967 that Great Britain struck from its jurisprudence the “common scold,” essentially a crime of catty insolence for which the convicted party — almost always a woman disturbing the peace by nagging a man — was punished via a public ducking into cold water. Nobody likes…
In nature, living things prey upon each other all the time. Humanity, on the other hand, has a choice. It is flouting this choice that excites director Gaspar Noé. In his latest project, Irréversible, he basically swipes Christopher Nolan’s backward-narrative structure from Memento to tell a lurid tale of rape…
