Comfortable smelly old shoe. A disillusioned investigative reporter and first-person narrator ("There's nothing worse than a writer who doesn't have anything to say. Well, that's me"), a couple of hot dames (one underage: the authoritative Chloe Sevigny), a phoney kidnap scheme, a double-cross, a couple of surprise twists. The serious-minded …
Title notwithstanding, the scope is broadly biographical, not narrowly judicial, with the protagonist's character set in concrete as a moonshine-peddling urchin in rural Kentucky ("You can't be so ornery. People'll think you're crazy!" "Naw, I'm just trying to make an honest buck"). Jump forward to the Hustler Go-Go Club in …
Best buddies Woody Harrelson and Antonio Banderas are has-been boxers matched against one another as last-minute replacements on the undercard of a Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas. A nice idea, thrown away on the lowbrow. (Didn't the management of Mandalay Bay read the script before granting permission to film? …
Its title and its emcee have been taken from Garrison (a/k/a Garrulous) Keillor's weekly public-radio show. But there is no mention of the imaginary world of Lake Woebegone, MN. The sole setting is the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, named after native son F. Scott, and ticketed for the wrecking …
Writer-director Jane Anderson's adaptation of the memoir by Terry Ryan (the book's subtitle: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less), a valentine to a dutiful, long-suffering Fifties-era Catholic housewife who supplemented the family's meager income through the practice of "contesting," writing ad slogans and jingles for …
Built like a bullet, yet with his mind a cage of wormy lust, greed, and bigotry, cop Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) is far below the LAPD’s finest. Oren Moverman directed as if fiercely merging Colors and Bad Lieutenant, while chief writer James Ellroy overplays his slumming zeal for lowlife crud. …
Druggie paranoia in the near future, when the drug du jour is Substance D (for Death) and the only cure is the torturous New-Path rehab center. Richard Linklater's adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel avails itself of the rotoscope animation technique of his Waking Life, live-action photography covered over …
Not half-funny. Will Ferrell joins his interest in the Seventies (Anchorman) to his interest in sports (Talladega Nights, Blades of Glory, Kicking and Screaming) in a relentlessly hard-sell comedy on the final season of the American Basketball Association before its merger with the NBA. The name of the focal franchise, …
Will Smith, in his more sensitive, tormented, teary, and Oscar-hungry persona, takes his crinkled brow in tight closeups on a cryptic personal mission (“We have a plan. Do what you promised me”), flashing an IRS identity card to gain access to total strangers so as to judge whether or not …
Think Adaptation meets Pulp Fiction — with a heart! Or at least, with a beloved dog. Martin McDonagh, the writer-director behind the cleverly chatty crime comedy In Bruges, here casts Colin Farrell in the role of Marty(!), an alcoholic screenwriter who's having trouble coming up with a cast to fill …
From Spike Lee, two movies in one, the first concerned with a whistle-blower who exposes insider trading, among other malpractices, at a major pharmaceutical company (experimenting on an anti-AIDS pill, for added combustibility), and the second concerned with an interactive sperm donor for a virtual Rainbow Coalition of maternalistic lesbians …
Rob Reiner blasts apart W's claim that Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction." For director Reiner, a camera is a weapon of narrative destruction. Woody Harrelson and James Marsden star.
There was, of course, no need for this story to be told. Some might even argue that there was a need for it not to be told, so that some shred of mystery could be preserved in a franchise that devoted three films to unveiling a Dark Father as a …
Terrence Malick's adaptation of James Jones's WWII novel also marks his return to the director's chair after a vacation of twenty years: too heavy a weight for any movie, or moviemaker, to carry. One of the problems with Malick's earlier works -- the crutch of voice-over narration -- is here …
Writer-director-producer Martin McDonagh (Seven Psychopaths) presents the story of a heartbroken but otherwise rarin’ to go woman (Frances McDormand, billy-club blunt) who plasters the titular roadside ads with a direct question to the local police chief: why haven’t you caught the guy who raped and killed my daughter? She’s gotta …