Movie Reviews
He was ninety-one-and-a-half. It had been a long and gradual decline. Yet how quickly I could switch over from “I can’t believe he’s still here” to “I can’t believe he’s gone.” The passing of Manny …
Human pretension is generally good for a laugh. Two new comedies to do with the Creative Process, unequal in size, equally uneven in quality, equally unsteady in mood, deliver the laugh over and around constant …
You can’t claim that Woody Allen’s rapid rate of production doesn’t show. Even the title of his latest handiwork sounds more like brainstorming for a title than like a final decision, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Three …
It may be an advantage not to be an X-File-o-phile. If, like me, you have seen no more than a handful of episodes from the nine-season TV series, and you have only the vaguest recollection …
When the smoke clears, The Dark Knight should emerge as just another comic-book movie, the fourth of the summer (Hancock wasn’t based on a comic book too, was it?), avowedly “darker” than the others, certainly …
If Tell No One does not give us what we expect and want from a French thriller, part of the reason must lie in its source, an American mystery novel by Harlan Coben. I read …
Two ideas has Hancock. The first may be summed up in the term “anti-superhero,” or if you prefer it, “super-antihero.” The hero, that is to say, possesses the full complement of comic-book superpowers. Even though …
The advent of a Dario Argento film is an undoubted occasion, whether or not one to celebrate. Not since 1991, by my records, has one of his films circulated in American theaters, and only then …
The Gaslamp 15 still bears keeping an eye on. Hopefully this won’t turn into a deathwatch, though I note that the hours of operation have been scaled back on weekdays to a late-afternoon start, a …
The men behind You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, who would include director Dennis Dugan and producer-writer-star Adam Sandler, must be holding their collective breath in hopes that, before or during its opening weekend, no …
The question fomented by the new Indiana Jones film was whether or not, nineteen years after the last one, Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg still “have it.” Which of course begs the question of whether …
As we ease into the lazy summer pace of one blockbuster per week, we also settle into the provincial screening schedule of forever lagging a week behind. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal …
To say the least, Speed Racer is colorful. Color-overflowing, to say a little more. Color-engulfed. The live-action version of the late-Sixties made-in-Japan TV cartoon (which I never saw) is of course, in our day and …
Call me an ingrate, but I cannot suppress the comment that Landmark Theatres have finally found a slot for Hou Hsiao-hsien only after the Taiwanese filmmaker made a film in France and in French, and …
At the close of the Latino film festival last month, I used one festival film in particular (representative of several) as a club to beat up American filmmakers for their incapacity to treat serious, intimate, …
Under the imprimatur of Judd Apatow comes Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a comedy of heartbreak and heartmend. Apatow personally has directed only The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, but as a producer his name apparently has …