Movies reviewed this week: Machuca, Robots, and Steamboy

Ninety-nine out of a hundred other Hollywood directors would have done the same thing.

Movies reviewed this week: Inside Deep Throat and Nobody Knows

Movies reviewed this week: Born into Brothels, The Sea Inside, and Travellers and Magicians

Movies reviewed this week: Bride and Prejudice, Hitch, Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior, and The Wedding Date

Kudos have come raining down on Clint Eastwood in monsoon proportions. If these are perceived to be a little excessive for his latest directorial venture, Million Dollar Baby, it would be hard to begrudge him. …

New Year's resolution: resist the hype. Ignore it. Pay it no heed. Don't get sucked in. As we buckle up for another annum of stunning masterpieces and electrifying thrill rides, it could do no harm …

Retracing my steps, I have stumbled upon a subjective new measurement for an unexciting year of movies. There was exactly one new release in 2004 -- I am almost shocked at the realization -- that …

Movies reviewed this week: Beyond the Sea, Flight of the Phoenix, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Meet the Fockers, The Phantom of the Opera, and Spanglish

The recognizable face of Tom Hanks is something of a distraction.

It had to happen sometime. The Man Who Wasn't There is the first Coen brothers movie to disappoint me. That’s not to say that it’s not good, certainly not to say that it’s not even …

Don’t expect am sustained and coherent thought from me any time soon. Like, say, before Judgment Day. But if shorts and the soaps can return to television, I suppose I am obligated to tear myself …

Esmo’s phone manner was so hugger-mugger that I could be sitting four feet away and could not make out a single word. For all I could tell, he might have been laying fifty on a pony.

Two earlier endings.… The drawback to asking Steve Esmedina to write a movie review in my stead, ostensibly to give me a break, was that it would then fall to me to edit it. A …

To commemorate Father's Day, this issue contains a collection of reflections from Reader writers about their fathers: The Last Tag Sale — Jeanne Schinto An Air of Exoticism — Duncan Shepherd Kinder Than I Would …

My father was older than other kids’ fathers. The disappearing and already disappeared hair on the top of his head offered testimony to that. The mustache that linked him to an earlier generation of Hollywood …

Among people who know me just well enough to speak to, and not well enough to care whether we ever speak again, the most frequently and I suspect ghoulishly asked question over the years has …

It’s silly of me, I know. It has got nothing to do with what’s on the screen. But one of my earliest reactions to Fargo — my feeling about it before I even saw it …

Let me see if I can’t sort out my current feelings about videos, after only recently having come through one of my irregular stretches of watching some. Upside: Cost. I start out with this point, …

Mr. Van Winkle asked the Student Council Reps, to indicate to the classes that if they can convince him through sound logical arguments that they should ride skateboards to school that he will reconsider his position.

Stretching east of 30th Street, the Mid-City mesa has for decades been a Gasoline Alley wasteland of car washes, card parlors, dinky pink bungalows: low-rent neighborhoods whose obscurity is secured by distance from freeway off-ramps.

There are those authors who mean a lot to me because of how much they mean. I mean, how much they represent, signify, stand for, as separate from what they wrote. And they go on …

Sandy and a girlfriend had gone into a liquor store, robbed the clerk, They locked the clerk in a walk-in cooler. Sandy started feeling bad about the guy. She went back and let him out.

Let's be clear; it matters little to me whether E.T. lives or dies (except that in the second eventuality I could have gone home sooner); it matters even less to art.

Movie critic’s marginalia, 1981. 1. The Sixth Annual Willa Cather Citation for the classiest title of the movie year goes to The Watcher in the Woods, which meets the originality requirement for this award by …

Some weeks ago, with no new movie in town worth writing about, and pretty much stumped for a way to wheedle another paycheck out of my publisher, I decided it might not be too troublesome …

Duncan Shepherd The Fifth Annual Willa Cather Citation for the classiest title of the movie year goes to Hide in Plain Sight, not a very Catherian title, certainly, but perfectly suitable for something on the …

1) What's in a name? a. The Fourth Annual Willa Cather Citation for the classiest title of the movie year is conferred on Yanks, with much the same reluctance as when Carl Yastrzemski was crowned …

The media rampage on the Kennedy twins is not something that originated in the family. The publicity came out of the fact that the PR department of the hospital leaked the word to the press.

Of the many and varied reasons for the peculiar disrepute of movie critics in the public mind (peculiar in that the movie critic's vocation, unlike that of such other low-rated types as the embalmer and …

Film festivals over the past several years have come to be recognized, like hospitals per capita or major league sports franchises, as one of the most visible status symbols available to a modern metropolis, or …

One of the inexpungeable articles of faith in contemporary film criticism maintains that any sequel is cursed by fate, genetics, the law of diminishing returns, and the fickleness of film critics to fall short of …

The Fine Arts theater is backsliding once more, returning next week to a pornography policy, a fate almost worse than death, after a year and a fraction as a repertory house. Its swan song is …

In the early Sixties, at the height of enthusiasm for movies as the most universal art form (probably the highest high of enthusiasm since before movies abandoned silence and split into separate tongues), there was …

There has been nothing near a boom in movie house construction in recent times, so when talk turns to the latest fashions in movie theaters it becomes necessary to stretch back several years. The latest …

“I’d like to see you hire a new film reviewer! I’m really sick of Shepherd! He is too down on everything!” (Betty Jo Bums) “The doom and negativism of his reviews are . . . …

One of the puzzles of the movie scene, here and everywhere, is the enduring prosperity and, more, the proliferation of the "hard,” “strong,” "triple-X" movies that are never mentioned by name in the S.D. Union-Tribune …

What kind of people covet the role of critic??? And having posed that question, we have posed, hand in hand, the question .... What is it that differentiates — divides — separates — cuts off — the critics from the audience?

"The New Hollywood,” which is the insurmountable subject of the latest issue of Film Comment and is the inevitable subject of major articles in every magazine from Esquire to Ms., was no less the subject …

One of the certain vulnerabilities in writing weekly about movies is pointed up by the number of my conversations that are initiated by someone, coming from my blind-side, declaring I am insane, wrong, or mentally …

Wednesday, a week ago, Vincente Minnelli was in San Diego to take his place in the series of "Conversations" put on by the Center for Photographic Arts and The Fine Arts Gallery. The director of …

Out of all the feedback to this run-down column — some of it reaching me by way of letters-to-the-editor, point-blank, and some of it by way of grapevine, snaking from the blindside — has crystallized …

During the marathon COMBO auction, on television last week, the only movie-related item to come up for grabs was a one-year pass for two to any of the Spreckels, Broadway, and Tower theatres. It went …

Roberto Rossellini whisked in and out on Francis Ford Coppola’s private yellow-and-black jet, spent a quick day, Sunday last, in San Diego. Fruit salad for lunch at the Marine Room, a guided tour of the …

On the last weekend of September the UCSD Fall Films series kicked off and, small surprise, stubbed its toe. According to my informants, who had shown up to see, as promised, Godard's Weekend and Penn’s …

The most obvious damage done to a movie that has been trimmed, cropped, to fit the TV space, is to the composition of the images. It is like a museum trying to fit a painting of tight squeeze space by knocking off three or four disciples from each end of the picture.

Penetrating vision of life, complexity of plot, depth of characterization — or whatever it is that the movie critics who get quoted in newspaper ads demand for a movie to reach the statue of fiction …

The grand. gray-stone mansion, isolated in lush English countryside — no greener green anywhere-appears from a postcard-distance to be the sort of setting for fantasies of elegant weekend junkets, given to marking time and making …

Snapshot of a weekend in Ischia: From beneath the airliner's silver belly, the landing gear retracts. stiffly like chickens' legs; and the plane's shadow, on the runway below. shrinks rapidly as the distance to the …

Like before any game, ground rules ought to be laid out, plainly, fastidiously, before ticking off the selection of the year past's stand-out movies, The only real requirement is to clarify the criterion for eligibility …