Accursed fantasy (bad acting, writing, directing, lighting, taste, everything) about a charmed career girl who exchanges fortunes, when she exchanges saliva, with a luckless stranger on the dance floor at a masquerade ball. With Lindsay Lohan, Chris Pine, Faizon Love, Missi Pyle, Samaire Armstrong, and Bree Turner (she's not bad, …
Bar mitzvah mania, all for laughs and all for naught. Not so much as a snicker. Not so much as a snort. With Daryl Sabara, Jeremy Piven, Jami Gertz, Garry Marshall, Daryl Hannah, Doris Roberts, Cheryl Hines, and Richard Benjamin; directed by Scott Marshall.
Painless gender-bender comedy about a staid old British shoemaking firm ("since 1895"), which, to survive in the brazen new world, seeks out a "niche market," namely women's shoes for men, under the counsel of a cabaret drag queen: "Look to the heel.... The sex is in the heel." (Quality craftsmanship …
In-his-own-words documentary on the late lead singer of Nirvana, directed by A.J. Schnack.
From the Not-Saying-Much Department: this probably ranks as the best of the several screen versions of D.H. Lawrence's classic bad novel. (And the first to be based explicitly on an alternate draft entitled John Thomas and Lady Jane, after the lovers' pet names for their private parts.) Directed with a …
The big surprise of M. Night Shyamalan's followup to The Village is that there is no big surprise at the end of it. It is instead a ritualistic playing-out of a prophecy -- a whole-cloth mythology -- and the only trick to it is to figure out who among the …
Irrationally romantic remake of a South Korean film with the Italian name of Il Mare, set in a Lifetime Channel fantasyland where every romantic hero is an architect (the artistic businessman), every romantic heroine is a doctor (the nurturing career woman), and every dream house is on the water (the …
The old, old -- fifty-six-year-old, to be exact -- Alec Guinness vehicle retailored to the expansive personality and physique of Queen Latifah. As a mousy cookware clerk at a department store in New Orleans, given three weeks to live and determined to blow her bank account on a dream vacation …
The self-conferred title of Ugandan strongman, and madman, Idi Amin Dada, a facile role for Forest Whitaker, who pitches into it with gusto. The true central character, however, is a fictitious young Scottish doctor (James McAvoy), the President's personal physician, "closest advisor," illicit lover of Wife Number Three, and all-around …
Americanization, and if it doesn't go without saying, vulgarization, of the Italian film of the same name, a fear-of-adulthood seriocomedy centered around a tight-knit group of pushing-thirties. The young cast has some glaring weak spots -- Zach Braff looks as if he'd prefer to turn it into a lighter comedy, …
Part concert film, part interview film. The titular singer-songwriter takes no part in the tributary concert, called "Came So Far for Beauty" and staged at the Sydney Opera House in January of 2005, but he dominates the interviews, along with Bono and The Edge of the rock group U2, who …
The second part of Clint Eastwood's Second World War diptych, the Japanese-language, Japanese-perspective counterpart to Flags of Our Fathers, an exercise in empathy whereby the filmmaker re-examines the same subject, the costly Battle of Iwo Jima, from the opposite side of the firing line. For an American production to attempt …
Todd Field's sophomore directing effort, following up his quietly sensationalized In the Bedroom, is less quietly sensationalized, in other words more blaringly sensationalized, and truly more sophomoric. The adaptation of a Tom Perrotta novel, complete with a snooty third-person-omniscient (i.e., know-it-all) narrator, undoubtedly tells us less about the malaise of …
The feature debut of music-video veterans Jonathan Dayton and his wife Valerie Faris was put together on the "quirky" assembly line, a product of the thriving "quirky" industry. Dad (Greg Kinnear) is a would-be self-help guru, "would-be," that is, if anyone were buying his Nine-Step Refuse-to-Lose System. Sample pearl, in …