As heroes go, the two just-released mental patients struggling to make a new life in Peter Naess’s touching social comedy, Elling, are notably short on glamour. When we meet him, the shy, middle-aged title character, portrayed by an exquisitely subtle actor named Per Christian Ellefsen, is a quivering bundle of…
Between the onset of Greta Garbo’s tuberculosis and the victory over Russell Crowe’s schizophrenia, moviegoers have endured a relentless barrage of disease — and they have relished almost every tearjerking, Kleenex-wringing minute of it. Who but a soulless curmudgeon could resist the emotion (no matter how manufactured) of Ali McGraw’s…
Citizen-soldiers eager to renew hostilities in the American culture wars can shoot a couple of spitballs at each other this week over Little Secrets, a teen-anxiety movie that leaves no doubt where it stands on “family values” and moral absolutes. It approves. The shock troops of the Cinema Without Limits…
Sometimes when a director shoots at a barn, the satisfaction comes in simply watching him hit it dead center. So it is with The Good Girl, wherein Miguel Arteta (Star Maps) targets middle-American ennui with wit, compassion and no shortage of ornery malaise. Like Arteta’s second feature, Chuck&Buck, this one’s…
Robert Evans wrote his autobiography in 1994 out of desperation as much as hubris. It cried, “Damn it, look at me…please?” He’d produced one film during the previous ten years, The Cotton Club, which was such a colossal failure that it rendered Evans a moot point in Hollywood. It was…
Blood Work, Clint Eastwood’s 23rd film as a director, is another crime thriller in the mode of True Crime (1998) and Absolute Power (1996) — although it’s better. More than these, however, it resembles In the Line of Fire (1993), the Eastwood vehicle directed by Wolfgang Petersen, arguably the best…
The past is a foreign country — they do things differently there.” So goes the immortal line from The Go-Between. And in the brilliant new documentary The Cockettes, that “foreignness” comes through stronger than ever, even for those who lived though the fabled and reviled 1960s. The film, by David…
Like George Clooney says in Ocean’s Eleven, “Do the math”: four Canon XL1 digital cameras, one dual 800 MHz Power Mac G4, a copy of editing software Final Cut Pro 3, eighteen shooting days, a two-million-buck budget, one Oscar-winning Best Director and nine high-profile actors (among them Julia Roberts, Brad…
This time around, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan puts the surprise at the beginning of his film, and it’s a subtle, shimmering clue — one easily missed and, frankly, one that might not even be there at all. Such are the temptations offered by the maker of The Sixth Sense and…
If nothing else, give French actor Yvan Attal credit for his faith in domestic bliss. At a time when matrimony has a shorter life span than mayonnaise, Attal has sought to mingle the joys and traumas of his own marriage (to actress Charlotte Gainsbourg) with his piquant views on the…
Not much has changed in the ten years since Mike Myers used the Wayne’s World movies as a personal launch pad, and then tipped his James Bond-spoofing Austin Powers hand when he became popular enough to reap the rewards. Now those spy-movie sendups — with the major characters played by…
There are a few dubious claims regarding popular perceptions of the life and death of Napoleon Bonaparte. Despite the legend, he wasn’t — at five-foot-six — particularly short. He was also more than just the sturdy product of military training in Brienne and Paris, considering that his Corsican mother adamantly…
Of all the A-list men playing dedicated authority figures, Star Wars alums Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson remain among the most amusing and pleasing, which is why K-19: The Widowmaker glides along engagingly rather than sinking. In many ways, it’s just another cramped, dank submarine movie — bells, whistles, leaks,…
If you don’t object to the occasional metaphor coming from the barrel of a gun, you’ll probably find Sam Mendes’s quirky period gangster movie Road to Perdition intellectually stimulating, emotionally complex and gorgeous to look at. This is the gifted British stage director’s first film since his startling and provocative…
It’s daunting to hear that John Sayles’s new film, Sunshine State, is almost two and a half hours long and mostly consists of calm conversations. But don’t be deterred, or you’ll miss out on a study of character, class and changing times that puts Robert Altman’s stodgy Gosford Park to…
Most summer movies about the pain of growing up emerge from the same primordial ooze — lots of teenage anxiety mixed with two or three unruly hormones in the stickum of comic discontent. What a relief, then, to find a coming-of-age film that avoids the cartoonish cliches and sneering humor…
Like a jawbreaker that changes color every few seconds, MIIB: Men in Black II delivers a quick buzz, lots of stuff to look at and a totally non-nutritious joy that can only be attained with the aid of artificial flavoring and yellow dye #5. In a nutshell, it’s the perfect…
It has been eighty years since the adventurous son of a Michigan iron miner trained a silent-movie camera on the everyday life of an “Eskimo” family in the Canadian Arctic and virtually invented documentary filmmaking. Through the decades, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North has attracted its share of criticism…
Naked emotion is a tricky thing to sell in motion pictures, especially in semi-autobiographical ones about confused mama’s boys gradually learning that life exists beyond the control of their lens. Back in 1988, Giuseppe Tornatore challenged himself thus with Cinema Paradiso and upped the ante, adding his unabashed sentimentality to…
Steven Spielberg just might turn into a great director — if only he’d stop sabotaging his movies. For the second time in as many films, he demolishes his product with a third act that renders all that’s come before it void. It’s as though Minority Report, set in a near…
If it’s possible for a film to be simultaneously ambitious and banal, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys does it. There’s little here we haven’t seen repeatedly in some form or another — growing up Catholic is popular fodder for filmmakers, as is growing up in the American South, usually…
The “one thing” at the heart of Jill Sprecher’s 13 Conversations About One Thing may not have one name. But as you wend your way through this intricate meditation on urban solitude and the nature of fate, you’ll likely discover for yourself whether it’s called happiness, hope, domestic tranquility or…
