What, have we already exhausted the world’s reserves of recyclable Seventies schlock? Apparently not — is that a poster in the megaplex lobby for the goddamn Hills Have Eyes 2? — but nobody told music-vid whiz Dave Meyers, who sets his way-back machine for dimly remembered 1986 and fetches a…
Cocaine Cowboys (Magnolia) Slam! Bang! Pow! Snort! This tawdry and giddy documentary tells the story of Miami’s transformation from a place where old people go to die to a place with so much drug money that the Mercedes dealers were constantly out of stock, where the hit men would rather…
Maurice Russell, a septuagenarian actor facing the end of his career and life, gazes raptly at the present that fate has given him: the company of a sullen but strangely desirable teenage girl. At first, his appraising looks give her the creeps, but something about his courtliness piques her curiosity…
A car speeds down a forest road, only to be surrounded in an instant by armed crazies who materialize from the nearby woods. In the visual grammar of big-budget action films, the sequence that ensues should be a scattergun barrage of images: Wheels! Guns! Blood! Shriek! Fireball! Crash! Add a…
For progressives lifted, however temporarily, by the swell of a turning tide, Bobby can be seen clearly for what it is — an Airport movie with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as the central calamity and an all-star cast deployed like multiple George Kennedys. Juggling some 22 main characters…
Cops-gone-wild movies and TV shows are the Angry White Guy counterpoint to thug-life melodramas: fantasies of abusing rather than seizing power, operating above the law rather than outside it. This caffeinated fit of antihero worship — the directorial debut of screenwriter David Ayer, who made detective with his bad-cop thrillers…
Once an actor gets big enough to take whatever kind of role he wants, it makes sense that the biggest stretch imaginable, given his current situation, is the part of a powerless man with no control over the world around him. Call it a “nice” movie — a vehicle designed…
The sex is real in John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus; only the setting — an animated New York cityscape, benignly watched over by a fluorescent Statue of Liberty — is fake. To an extent, that describes the movie: a sexually daring, dramatically timid roundelay that employs unsimulated twosomes, threesomes, and even…
Like the shambling VW van its hapless characters steer from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach, this antic extended sitcom from first-time feature makers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris is a rickety vehicle that travels mostly downhill. When his seven-year-old daughter (Abigail Breslin) gets a surprise slot in a beauty contest, a…
Snakes on a Plane represents the ideal of contemporary major-studio filmmaking — which is to say, major-studio marketing. Who needs word-of-mouth screenings or critics when you can sell the four-word pitch as written on a napkin? It points to a future that takes all the guesswork out of moviegoing. A…
As a consideration of the power of storytelling — and the urge to mythologize one’s own life as well as the lives of others — The Night Listener could serve as creepy paranoid cousin to the current Lady in the Water. The specters of J.T. LeRoy and James Frey haunt…
Feed (TLA) Remember the old jokes about “What’s grosser than gross”? The makers of Feed do, as they prove in the first 10 minutes — one-upping their opening scene featuring a voluntary victim of cannibalism by bringing in a guy who gets nekkid and shoves cheeseburgers down the throat of…
Perhaps no one can pinpoint the exact moment Vaudeville died, but there’s a moment early in Strangers with Candy when you’d swear you had just witnessed the death of visual comedy. En route to her first day of high school, a tarty middle-age jailbird — this is not a Disney…
The Devil’s Sword (Mondo Macabro) Few trash movies live up to their reputation, but here’s a balls-out wonder that surpasses it. Grab a 12-pack of Bintang and cue up this jaw-unhinging slab of Indonesian sword-and-sorcery circa 1983 — a start-to-finish feast of martial arts, mullets, flying heads, vestal virgins, dry-ice…
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,…
For the twin offenses of being French and not starring Tom Cruise, District B13 — a fanboy mashup of John Carpenter’s greatest hits — is getting exiled to the art-house ghetto. Spread the word: This delirious import is the most (maybe the only) fun action movie of the summer —…
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…
If you can tell a society by its smut, America in the Fifties couldn’t have been just a Frigidaire of repressive hysteria. Hidden somewhere in the closets of Pleasantville and Peyton Place, after all, was a stack of fetish mags bearing the face and hourglass figure of Bettie Page, and…
Doug Atchison’s sweet-natured, immensely likable family film recasts the innate human drama of the spelling bee — captured memorably in the 2002 documentary Spellbound — in the familiar but satisfying terms of an after-school special. Keke Palmer plays a bright eleven-year-old languishing in an underfunded, underequipped South Central L.A. public…
