Preachy computer cartoon, holding up the communal spirit of an ant colony against the every-man-for-himself ethos of humankind. As in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (but by another method: the potion-in-the-ear method of Hamlet), a human being gets to see the world from an ant's-eye view. Notwithstanding some clever touches, …
Ambitious yet sloppy, amateurish, home-movie-ish documentary wherein two young women with two video cameras set off cross-country to collect comments from common men and celebrities alike on the present shape of the American Dream. (Commentators include John Waters, Studs Terkel, Hunter Thompson, Tom Robbins, Robert Redford, Willie Nelson, Michael Stipe …
Art-house schlock from Danish director Lars von Trier, sort of Ingmar Bergman meets Rob Zombie, or in other words scab-picker gone full-bore mutilator. It tells of a grieving couple who repair to a lonely cabin in the Northwest woods — a spot Biblically, ironically, caustically called Eden — to work …
Computer nerd's wet dream. In it, he's a pint-sized pretty boy (Ryan Phillippe) with golden curls, a permanent pout, a beautiful blond girlfriend and a beautiful brunette colleague -- take your pick. He has been recruited right out of college by Portland's counterpart to Bill Gates ("Bill who?"), a mop-haired, …
Two old but opposite friends -- tony Toni and plain Jane -- see each other just once a year for dinner, but see the same therapist all year round. The presence of the latter allows the narrative to skip around freely and easily, and some of the girl-talk drolleries are …
Documentary sketch of Antonia Brico, who won acclaim first in the Twenties as an orchestral conductor -- in Berlin, London, New York -- and for a while was able to ride on the novelty of breaking through the sex barrier in the conducting profession; once the novelty began wearing thin, …
On the day she determines to be her last, the aged heroine, with much help from a third-person narrator (her great-granddaughter, it turns out), looks back on several decades of life in a quaint Dutch village, peopled almost exclusively by extraordinary, strong, self-sufficient women and ordinary, subnormal, and brutish, beastly, …
An almost (not quite) totally nonverbal tour of the works of the great Catalan architect, the works of some of his contemporaries and predecessors, and his general cultural surroundings: it's the sort of pictorial essay which the experimentalists, avant-gardists, montage theorists of the 1920s would have wisely kept to under …
Written by the selfsame Antwone Fisher, in recollection of the time in his life when he was (by this account) a bottled-up, cork-blowing sailor who, through the solicitude of a nice girl and a Navy psychiatrist ("I love you, son"), confronted and conquered his inner turmoil over his abandonment by …
The second fully computer-animated feature, and a significant advance. The illusion of three-dimensionality, with finely sculpted and shaded bodies in cavernous and engulfing space, is quite remarkable. And the nuanced facial expressions, to say nothing of the perfect synchronization of mouth movement and spoken word, suggest an evolutionary leap that …
Sacha Gervasi’s wily documentary on an obscure Canadian metal band, still sticking together and struggling for acceptance twenty years past their stumpy peak. It would no doubt have brought to mind Rob Reiner’s rock mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap, even had the drummer in Anvil not been named Robb Reiner, …
Oliver Stone's blitz of professional football. Long (almost three hours long, almost JFK and Nixon long), loud, hyperbolic, frenetic, chaotic, trite, cynical, sentimental, sanctimonious. And ill-informed. Stone seems to believe that a touchdown counts seven points; that playoff stats are added on to regular-season totals; that both sides in a …
Custom-made platform for the ingratiating Isabel Rose (who co-wrote the screenplay with director Robert Cary), as a small-time, starry-eyed cabaret singer who styles herself after the Golden Age goddesses of the silver screen: Rita Hayworth, Audrey Hepburn, whoever suits her mood. She comes in for plenty of sympathy, some of …
Although centered around Jason Biggs, this is still, inimitably, a Woody Allen film. Billie Holiday on the soundtrack. Diana Krall right up there on screen (flatteringly shot against a backdrop of molten red). Allusions to Camus, Sartre, Dostoevski, Auden, Fitzgerald, etc. Usages of "polymath," "paucity," "porcine," "homunculus" (in reference here …
One long string of banalities about the mortification of being a studious quiet high-school girl with a flighty brassy pushy mom. (Natalie Portman, Susan Sarandon, respectively.) The slums-of-Beverly-Hills milieu was better captured in The Slums of Beverly Hills, as was, for that matter, the feeling of adolescent mortification. The periodic …