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…
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 Munez (Kuno Becker) busts his butt working two crappy…
It feels like I’ve already seen this movie four times, after witnessing the parade of commercials for junk Over the Hedge’s characters are pimping. Perhaps it makes perfect sense: The entire movie is built on a scenario that involves the stealing and hoarding of junk food. A swindling raccoon named…
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…
All You’ve Got (MTV) American Soldiers (Velocity) The Big Valley: Season One (Fox) Con Air: Unrated Extended Edition (Buena Vista) Crimson Tide: Unrated Extended Edition (Buena Vista) Doogal (Weinstein) Duma (Warner Bros.) Funny Games (Kino) Garçon Stupide (Picture This) Hill Street Blues: Season Two (Fox) My Mother’s Smile (New Yorker)…
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…
The makers of this Belgian drama, about a twenty-year-old hustler who sells his infant son like a bag of weed, have referred to it as a “love story,” and so it is. As the film opens, we discover that Bruno (Jérémie Renier), a panhandler and petty thief, has traded his…
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…
The Barbie Diaries Gift Set (Family Home Entertainment) Battle in Heaven (Tartan) The Best of Rocky and Bullwinkle: Volume 1 (Sony Wonder) Big Momma’s House 2 (Fox) Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist: Season One (Paramount) The Facts of Life: The Complete First and Second Seasons (Sony) Grandma’s Boy: Unrated Edition (Fox)…
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,…
The most important thing to know about the new movie Hoot, adapted from the children’s book by Carl Hiaasen, is that it’s coproduced by Jimmy Buffett, who also appears in a small role and provides new music for the soundtrack. Middle-age drunks and boat owners might possibly rejoice at the…
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…
Tennessee Williams Film Collection (Warner Bros.) All that’s missing from this boxed set — six movies, one doc, eight discs — is a jar of sweat; even Williams is here, in a 1973 documentary. Then there’s Brando, Beatty, Newman, Taylor, Burton, Gardner, Leigh, Malden, Huston, Kazan — the last of…
BTK Killer (Lions Gate) Chubby Hubby Workout (On Air Video) Dinosaurs: The Complete First and Second Seasons (Disney) The Family Stone (Fox) Flight 93: The Movie (UAV) Jargo (Picture This!) King of Thieves (Picture This!) Last Holiday (Paramount) Lie With Me (Lance) Life in the Undergrowth (BBC) Misaki Chronicles: Volume…
Casanova (Disney) Dr. Dolittle 3 (Fox) Elevator to the Gallows (Criterion) 50 Greatest Kid Concoctions (Time Life) Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (Sony) The Heirloom (Tartan) Inspector Gadget: 4-Disc Set (Shout Factory) The Intruder (Fox Lorber) Magic (Dark Sky) Match Point (DreamWorks) The Passenger (Sony) The Patriot: Extended Cut (Sony)…
United 93 — which uses the hijacking of one plane on September 11, 2001, to tell the story of what happened to all four aircraft seized that morning — may be the most wrenching, profound, and perfectly made movie nobody wants to see. There is no reason to think that…
The Darwinian theory that schlocksploitation must tighten its twist of the nuts with each new release will be tested strenuously for years — or at least several weeks — by Hard Candy. A pointedly s(l)ick cross between Oleanna and I Spit on Your Grave, thrown like raw meat to Lions…
This thing sucks in comparison to the charming Kirsten Dunst cheerleading movie Bring It On, which was also penned by Stick It writer-director Jessica Bendinger. That film was charming in its exploration of teenage-girl athletics; too bad this one shares all of Bring It On’s flaws while lacking most of…
Aeon Flux (Paramount) Many things about this surreal sci-fi flick defy explanation, but nothing more so than the mystery of how it got made in the first place. On paper, it’s an archetypal setup for a bomb: a mostly forgotten cartoon, notable for its visual style and incomprehensibility, revived as…
This is the year of Brokeback Mountain, in more ways than one. On one hand, it has been proven that queer movies can be a hit in Middle America. On the other, yahoos are frothing at the mouth, and a place like the Bahamas has banned the picture because of…
We’ve all done it — killed an afternoon drinking in a pleasantly grungy roadhouse, boozily enjoying the illusion of having fallen off the grid, playing semiforgotten blues songs on an outdated jukebox, and thinking aloud: See, I should capture this feeling. This should be a movie. Sobered up, we don’t…
Americano (MTI) Before he is due to take a high-powered corporate job, college graduate Chris (Joshua Jackson) heads off with two friends (Timm Sharp and Ruthanna Hopper) to Europe, where they end up in Pamplona for the running of the bulls. There, he encounters one of those saucy Latinas (Blade…
