The combatants in Patrick Stettner’s compelling first feature, The Business of Strangers, are a middle-aged software executive (Stockard Channing) wearing a steel-blue suit and an air of professional hauteur; the executive’s mysterious new assistant (Julia Stiles), fresh out of Dartmouth and full of self-righteous aggression; and a cocky “headhunter” (Frederick…
Attended by a rather sexy air of intrigue, the hit French film Brotherhood of the Wolf (Le Pacte des Loups) arrives upon our shores; refreshingly, it’s left up to us to figure out just what the hell it is. Monster movie? Costume drama? Martial-arts extravaganza? To say the least, it’s…
In the Bedroom. First-time director Todd Field turns a dark tale by the late short-story master Andre Dubus into a precocious film masterpiece about murder, grief and repressed marital rage set in quiet Camden, Maine. Tom Wilkinson and likely Oscar nominee Sissy Spacek star as the highly civilized parents of…
Who would have guessed that 31 years after M*A*S*H, the film that made Robert Altman’s reputation, he would still be turning out movies as good as his latest release, Gosford Park? Full of the director’s usual energy, powered by the sense of controlled chaos that marks all of his ensemble…
The most daunting role for an actor is to portray a god, and when the god comes equipped with a tangle of myths and the quickest left jab in history, the actor’s job can soon veer into guesswork. To Will Smith’s credit, he has managed to get at least partway…
The tricked-up charms of James Mangold’s Kate & Leopold may be precisely what the moment demands — as long as you accept the existence of chivalry, the possibility of time travel and the stream of bubbles emanating from Meg Ryan. Skeptics need not apply. Having toured the psychiatric ward in…
Since the horrors of the dominant Hollywood culture — destruction, devastation, dumb-assness — do not appear to be receding of their own accord, there’s a great poignancy to the new cinematic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The film succeeds as massive,…
The air of danger that surrounds Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (À Ma Soeur) never lets up, which is unusual for a film that wasn’t meant to be a thriller. Rather, it’s a merciless look at adolescent insecurity, the mixed signals of emerging desire and the ruthlessness of carnal gamesmanship that,…
Beneath the hazy, mystifying layers of Vanilla Sky lies a remarkable Tom Cruise performance — one that, to a large extent, takes place beneath a makeup artist’s piled-on scars and a costumer’s blank “prosthetic” mask. As David Aames, hipster publisher of Maxim-like magazines, Cruise plays a lothario so vain he…
It took five men to concoct the hackneyed plot and conceive the brainless jokes that constitute Not Another Teen Movie, meaning there are five men in Los Angeles right now still trying to wash that stink off their soft, idle hands. Five men — the very thought boggles the mind…
The lights go down, and the puzzlement begins. Ensemble cast of superstars? Check. Loose remake of amusing curiosity? Check. Built-in, pre-fab sense of cool? Check. A little something for wistful fans of Dino and Sammy? Check. So…wait a minute: Is this The Cannonball Run Redux? With his ambitious but unnecessary…
The film Tape, a film by Richard Linklater, isn’t. It’s high time for some cinematic clarification: If a project is shot on celluloid, with light searing images onto emulsion, then it’s a film. If it’s recorded with magnetic frequencies or digital code (as is the case here), then it’s a…
This is the true story of seven people (Tommy! Annie! Ashley! Maria! Griffin! Carpo! And Benjamin!) picked to live in a city and have their lives changed. Find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start being real. It’s The Real World: Sidewalks of New York. If you…
Although Behind Enemy Lines, a film set in Bosnia, was originally due for release next year, it already feels antiquated. That country’s conflict is now a distant memory, a ghost lost in the shadow of the war on terrorism. The film tested so well that 20th Century Fox pushed up…
The new Martin Lawrence comedy, Black Knight, is yet another twist, albeit an uncredited one, on Mark Twain’s protean A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, one of the original fish-out-of-water comedy-fantasies. Was there an outcry for yet another redo? After all, Twain’s 1889 novel, about a New England mechanic…
It takes a nimble mind to mix light and dark, to wed humor with treachery. In Novocaine, newcomer David Atkins is not always up to the task. Neither is Steve Martin, who wants to be taken seriously while reserving the right to produce the occasional sick yuk. If you still…
If you believe in magic, you’ll love Harry Potter and the Sorcerer¹s Stone. And if you don’t, you will, and you will. True, the hype has been a bit much. And, yes, a mad, desperate world choked with reproduction and reprobation could hardly be expected to resist such a high-concept…
The heroine of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s bold and bracing new comedy, Amélie, is Amélie Poulain, a doe-eyed crusader with the face of a porcelain doll and a sleek helmet of jet-black hair. From her high perch in Montmartre, where she works as a cafe waitress, Amélie secretly resolves to emancipate all…
It is difficult to imagine a more timely film than Focus; its message about intolerance resonates in a post-September 11 world in ways the filmmakers never anticipated. Adapted from Arthur Miller’s little-known 1945 novel of the same title, Focus looks at what happens to a society when basically decent people…
Joel and Ethan Coen’s periodic genuflections to classic Hollywood are inevitably accompanied by a knowing wink from one brother and a wry smile from the other. These devoted movie buffs’ versions of vintage gangster pictures (Miller’s Crossing) or the populist comedies of Capra and Sturges (The Hudsucker Proxy) are not…
David Grisman and Jerry Garcia met as young folk/roots fans cum musicians attending a Bill Monroe concert in 1964. Garcia, as you may have heard, went on to form the Grateful Dead; when the Dead began to incorporate more country elements into their music, they used mandolin ace Grisman memorably…
Like the lovable baseball catcher in Bang the Drum Slowly, like John Wayne’s poignant gunfighter in The Shootist, like hundreds of doomed movie protagonists before him, the hero of Life as a House doesn’t have long to live. By the second reel, you may find yourself wishing his time on…
