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 her…
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,…
It seldom fails. Every year, just in time for the Oscar deadline, a movie is released that doesn’t necessarily have a remarkable plot or director, but does feature an aging master (or mistress) thespian from the U.K., whom one might assume is an automatic shoo-in for an award nomination, ensuring…
Let’s say you’re a teenage boy dying of cancer. A well-known charity dedicated to helping people like you offers to make your fondest wish come true — as long as it’s something realistic, as opposed to, say, finding a cure for cancer. Would you choose a VIP pass to Disneyland…
The most important thing to know about the new movie Hoot, adapted from the children’s book by Carl Hiaasen, is that it’s co-produced by Jimmy Buffett, who also appears in a small role and provides new music for the soundtrack. Middle-aged drunks and boat owners might possibly rejoice at the…
Among Warners Brothers’ classic gangster movies, the post-war gem White Heat (1949) may outrank even Little Caesar, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang and Scarface, thanks in large part to aging James Cagney’s spectacular performance as a psychopath who has such a thing for his sour, hard-bitten mother…
Apparition. The brand-new Gallery Severn, which is owned by art collector and retired executive Andy Dodd, aims to be what he has called a “launch pad” for emerging artists. This specialty in fresh faces instantly makes the place interesting. Also interesting is Dodd’s decision to feature only one artist at…
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…
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 impassioned new documentary Sir! No Sir! never mentions the words “Iraq” or “Afghanistan.” It doesn’t have to. Unseen and unremarked-upon, those bloody venues nonetheless inhabit the entire 84 minutes of David Zeiger’s film like some deadly, creeping virus for which there’s no cure. Zeiger’s actual subject, which he says…
The Boys of Baraka, a fine documentary about a group of inner-city, at-risk boys who travel to Kenya to attend a special school, comes very close to greatness. For over an hour, the film is a sharp and blazing account of how boys with multiple challenges and little hope for…
At the opening of Lonesome Jim, a terrific new film directed by Steve Buscemi, a country song plays behind scenes of small-town desolation. “Good times’r comin’,” it promises, in the movie’s first joke. Nothing about these initial scenes — not the stark Midwestern landscape, not the sole figure running with…
Criticizing an action movie for being empty-headed is like calling out Brokeback Mountain for its lack of car chases. Likewise, when a teen gymnastics movie is derided as formulaic and dumb, one might logically ask: compared to what? Very well. Stick It sucks it compared to the modestly charming Kirsten…
If you’re a regular movie-goer with a gift for remembering unusual names, chances are you’ve started paying attention to Chiwetel Ejiofor, the black English actor with a chameleon’s talent for disappearing into a role. You may not have caught his breakthrough performance in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, but you…
The Darwinian theory that shlocksploitation 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…
Every year, when ESPN broadcasts the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a tiny flutter of hope rises in anyone who cherishes the life of the mind. Spelling is a sport? Sweet Jesus! For the duration of the competition, the brainy kid who gets his glasses stomped by knuckle-draggers on the playground…
Apparition. The brand-new Gallery Severn, which is owned by art collector and retired executive Andy Dodd, aims to be what he has called a “launch pad” for emerging artists. This specialty in fresh faces instantly makes the place interesting. Also interesting is Dodd’s decision to feature only one artist at…
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…
Vast legions embrace the thing as gospel. Skeptics dismiss it as ecstatic nonsense. In any event, James Redfield’s peculiar novel, The Celestine Prophecy, has been a bulwark of new-age metaphysics since it first hit the bestseller lists back in 1993. By recent estimates, there are 14 million copies in print,…
Wanna knock the prez? Let’s make a show — preferably on television. Paul Weitz’s new satire American Dreamz imagines the Bush regime as an episode in the history of American entertainment and American Idol as the quintessence of U.S. democracy. So what else is new? The vision of America as…
If you can tell a society by its smut, America in the 1950s 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…
Amid brutal competition from A History of Violence, Caché (Hidden) and Last Days, the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival went to L¹Enfant (The Child), a Belgian drama about a twenty-year-old hustler who sells his infant son like a bag of weed. The makers of this provocative movie,…
