Evan Almighty, the followup to Bruce Almighty, is the work of an angry God. At 89 minutes that last a lifetime, it’s a sanctimonious sitcom dolled up as the most expensive comedy ever made — $175 mil, so they say, no doubt choking — and marks an unfortunate low point…
Bamako, the latest by acclaimed African director Abderrahmane Sissako (Waiting for Happiness), arrives heavily lauded by the usual suspects: festival love galore, including a privileged slot at Cannes and placement in the New York Film Festival; lengthy coverage in the highbrow movie magazines; strong reviews on pointy-headed film blogs. Structurally…
A skilled actor vanishes into a role; a movie star appropriates it. As presence trumps character, the star personifies Brecht’s alienation effect and the movie becomes a vehicle — the latest installment in an ongoing career or, in the case of a great star, a public myth. Angelina Jolie is…
Mike Enslin, the travel writer played by John Cusack in 1408, could use a better travel agent. Every hotel room in which he finds himself booked is said to be occupied by the ghost of some suicidal creep or a murderous goon who left behind a pile of bodies in…
In 2005, a Seattle man was anonymously delivered to the Enumclaw Community Hospital and died shortly thereafter. The cause of the death was an internal puncture wound inflicted during anal sex with an Arabian stallion. An investigation led to the discovery of a farm where a community of zoophiles, organized…
Altar Girls. Two very different exhibits roughly collide into one another in the middle of the Museo de las Américas. One part, put together by Museo curator Kristi Martens, is an extravaganza of santos made mostly in Colorado, Mexico and New Mexico, and primarily culled from a recent gift to…
Uplifted beyond its merits by a stunning performance from Marion Cotillard, the humdrum biopic of Edith Piaf, La Vie en Rose, jogs obligingly along with Piaf the legend rather than Piaf the woman. It’s not hard to do, given the fuzzy borders between Piaf’s undeniably scarred life and her relentless…
Night Watch, you may recall, told of an ancient feud waged between the forces of Light and Dark. In the interest of maintaining a fragile detente, they organized themselves, as Russian super-combatants are wont to do, into complex bureaucracies, with the Night Watch heroes monitoring the vampiric shenanigans of the…
So lame it’s…cool? Nancy Drew, writer-director Andrew Fleming’s attempt to jump-start a new Warner Bros. franchise, is a movie flaunting a most obvious demographic strategy: a teen flick with a sensibility, or at least a sense of humor, that’s most definitely parental. Invented in 1930 by the same Stratemeyer syndicate…
Altar Girls. Two very different exhibits roughly collide into one another in the middle of the Museo de las Américas. One part, put together by Museo curator Kristi Martens, is an extravaganza of santos made mostly in Colorado, Mexico and New Mexico, and primarily culled from a recent gift to…
Glastonbury (THINKFilm) Only a Julien Temple concert doc would get the R rating — for nudity (male, mostly, and not terribly flattering at that), drug use (weed, mostly — yawn), language, and sexual content. Also dig the overwrought BBC narration, in which Glastonbury is described as a former refuge for…
Lowest Common Denominatorism writ large and engraved in stone like the Ten Commandments according to Cecil B. DeMille, the Hollywood blockbuster is often an allegory for itself. Walt Disney, the notoriously litigious studio that successfully changed the nation’s copyright laws to protect its trademark Mickey Mouse but more recently declared…
A true-crime yarn told largely by the criminal, with supporting testimony from his curiously forgiving victim, Crazy Love comes billed as a documentary. But it can’t really be considered journalism — unless you count as journalism the sort of lurid tabloid exposé whose hundred-point headline blurts “ACID-ATTACKER MARRIES HIS VICTIM!”…
Afrail-looking young woman, outfitted with a bomb, wanders through Times Square — finger on the switch, searching for the moment to blow up. That, in a sentence, is the premise of Julia Loktev’s outrageously abstract Day Night Day Night. Terror is existential in this highly intelligent, somewhat sadistic, totally fascinating…
The idea of “getting axed” is exploited for maximum double-entendre value in Severance, a grisly horror-comedy from the U.K. that has its tongue planted so firmly in its cheek that you half expect it to pop out the other side. Yes, heads (and, in one indelible bit, a severed foot)…
Altar Girls. Two very different exhibits roughly collide into one another in the middle of the Museo de las Américas. One part, put together by Museo curator Kristi Martens, is an extravaganza of santos made mostly in Colorado, Mexico and New Mexico, and primarily culled from a recent gift to…
The Sergio Leone Anthology (MGM) Sergio Leone made Westerns like Wagner made ditties. This essential boxed set — four films with four discs of supplemental material, much of it scholarly and insightful — shows the Italian director supplanting the elegiac Monument Valley iconography of John Ford with a darker, ruder,…
Eli Roth is obviously a poseur, but on the evidence of Hostel: Part II, he’s also kind of a pussy. Anyone can string a naked woman up by the ankles and slit her throat, and while I admit it takes a little extra something to position a Eurotrash villainess beneath…
A few friends of mine who adored Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up at early screenings have nonetheless voiced a similar complaint: There’s no way pin-up-pretty Katherine Heigl would end up with soaked-in-bongwater Seth Rogen, not even while drunk on a gallon of Everclear and stoned on a field of your finest…
Mr. Brooks — in which Kevin Costner plays a respectable Seattle businessman who kills for thrills, thanks to the goading of an imaginary friend who looks a lot like William Hurt — is stunningly tepid, neither the clever and poignant metaphor for addiction it strives to be nor the darkly…
Once, written and directed by John Carney, is a deceptively simple movie — a narrative strung together by pop songs, but without the sheen (or arrogance) of most cinematic musicals. By day, a Dublin busker (Glen Hansard) sings Van Morrison on a street corner for spare change, which, on occasion,…
Altar Girls. Two very different exhibits roughly collide into one another in the middle of the Museo de las Américas. One part, put together by Museo curator Kristi Martens, is an extravaganza of santos made mostly in Colorado, Mexico and New Mexico, and primarily culled from a recent gift to…
