One of Quentin Tarentino's favorite spaghetti westerns screens at the Digital Gym.
Brutal crime-buster movie, not just in the limited sense of the famous coffee-in-the-face scene and the subsequent Phantom of the Opera makeup job. It is brutal, beyond that, although to less effect, in the lack of all artifice and adornment with which it lays out its issues. It lays them …
An exciting and sometimes funny commercial for what will surely be a delightful action figure, available in three iterations: original plushie, Samurai battle mode, and full robot warrior. Collect them all! Two directors and seven writers (not counting the authors of the original comic book) labored to cobble together this …
Would-be big hoot. A loud, obnoxious, sophomoric action spoof cum black comedy about a Maalox-gulping hitman (Mark Wahlberg) who has a deep psychological need for everyone to like him. Lou Diamond Phillips, as his disloyal confederate, manages to work himself up into a rabid lather, but it's a waste of …
Two industrial-lubricant salesmen and a junior accountant in a hospitality suite in Wichita. In three acts. Kevin Spacey's automatic-pilot smugness and snideness underline the staginess of the piece. Danny DeVito minimizes, doesn't eliminate, the problem. And Peter Facinelli sounds as if he wants to be Tom Cruise, and certainly looks …
The most deglamorized portrait of Hollywood by Hollywood, not only for its vision of power, manipulation, enslavement, but for its stagy confinement to a single beach house. (Also for its casting of Jack Palance as a representative box-office idol.) Clifford Odets wrote the original play, so the fist falls heavily …
There are actually two Lebowskis, a big one and a little one, a multimillionaire philanthropist and a lazy, laid-back bowler, both christened Jeffrey; and when the latter — who prefers to be addressed as "the Dude" — is mistaken for the other by a pair of dim-bulb thugs, he is …
There are actually two Lebowskis, a big one and a little one, a multimillionaire philanthropist and a lazy, laid-back bowler, both christened Jeffrey; and when the latter — who prefers to be addressed as "the Dude" — is mistaken for the other by a pair of dim-bulb thugs, he is …
Aside from Drew Barrymore’s Greenpeace activist, there’s not an unselfish, trustworthy character to be found in this well-intentioned “save the whales” tale. It’s a kid pic, so the screenwriters wisely (unknowingly?) never allow personality and emotion to get in the way of the overriding message. A cast of familiar faces …
Although snugly at home in the burgeoning genre of the food film (Babette's Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, etc.), this is much more food for thought than food for tummy, an "issues" movie about the artist versus the businessman in the American marketplace. The metaphor for this takes the amusing …
The drive-by shooting that opened the picture felt out of place, particularly in light of the campy irreverence that quickly followed. Relax. It was just director Jun Lana’s successful attempt to throw the audience off guard before taking us on a wild ride through the life of Dharna (Christian Bables), …
Michael Moore's seat-of-the-pants travelogue on his forty-seven-city tour to promote his best-selling book (nonfiction), Downsize This! After Roger and Me and his small-screen series TV Nation, there is nothing really new to say for or against his journalistic methods. They remain as unfair and confrontational and cranky as ever. But …
“What a thing is patriotism! We go for years not knowing we have it. Suddenly...it becomes life’s greatest emotion.” The words ring as true today as when they did when they were written, over 90 years ago. Assigned to a title card, the sentiment opens King Vidor’s 1925 epic silent. …
Wealthy French lawyer Paul Exben (Romain Duris) wanted to be a photographer, but instead wound up an overworked, almost frenetic career man, pouring money into his family and telling himself that everything is okay. But of course, everything is not okay: his wife feels stifled in her role as suburban …