Made
Actors Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn team up for the first time since the indie film Swingers (written by Favreau) turned them into stars. Both have gained an alarming amount of weight in the 5 years since Swingers, and now they play a couple of lunkheads who are hired by mob boss Peter Falk to participate in a marginally dangerous… read more!
The Man Who Wasn’t There
The Coen Brothers play it (comparatively) straight this time around, with a somber black and white noir about a nondescript barber named Ed (Billy Bob Thornton) living in a small California town in 1949, who decides to take a chance in life by investing in a get-rich-quick scheme involving the burgeoning dry cleaning industry. In order to raise the capital… read more!
Memento
Grim film noir with a fascinating premise: a man on the hunt for his wife's killer suffers from an extreme case of short-term memory loss – and a fascinating structure: the film begins at the end and works backwards through a series of scenes, like Harold Pinter's Betrayal but with more twists. Leonard (Guy Pearce) has been suffering from his… read more!
Monster’s Ball
A super-downer of a drama starring Billy Bob Thornton as a guard on Georgia's death row and Halle Berry as the widow of the prisoner (Sean "Puffy" Combs) most recently sent to Georgia's electric chair. You can tell even from the ads that Thornton and Berry are going to hook up eventually, so it's a little to the story's detriment… read more!
Monsters, Inc.
Pixar's computer animated films are always easy reviews for me, because all I have to do is tell you how great they are, and leave them at that. Employing some of the most talented animators and story people in the industry, they have yet to make a dud, and even if Monsters, Inc. - about the secret world of the… read more!
Moulin Rouge!
Here it is, folks: the love-it or hate-it motion picture event of the year. I'll come right out and align myself with those who love it – although I was skeptical at first. Moulin Rouge! is a dizzying ride, a ridiculously melodramatic love triangle set against the infamous Parisian nightclub at the turn of the 20th Century. Penniless writer Christian… read more!
Mulholland Drive
I won't spend much time defending David Lynch. By this point, most folks have already decided whether they love his work or hate it. Me, I admire him for his artist's eye and his tireless imagination, though I don't always find an emotional connection to his increasingly opaque dream dramas. Such was the case with Lost Highway and such is… read more!
The Others
Perhaps I was predisposed not to love this film. Its premise – a repressed woman (Nicole Kidman) watching after two spooky kids in an English mansion that she believes may be haunted – is awfully reminiscent of one of my all-time favorite films, 1961's The Innocents. A hard act to follow, to be sure. But the similarities end there. Set on Jersey… read more!
The Personals
Rene Liu plays Du, a pretty young ophthalmologist who suddenly quits her job and decides she wants a husband, so she places an ad in the local newspaper's personals section expressing her intentions. For the bulk of this quiet, low-budget film, Du meets an endless variety of Mr. Wrongs, all at the same teahouse that becomes a second home to… read more!
The Piano Teacher
The Piano Teacher is a gut-wrenching character study of its titular heroine (Isabelle Huppert, superb as usual), a sexually repressed woman who treats her piano students with the utmost contempt, has a hostile, unresolved relationship with her live-in mother (Annie Girardot), and, most notably, has a fondness for some seriously sketchy masochism. If you think that sounds like fun, try… read more!
Pootie Tang
[Note: I wrote this review while employed at Paramount Pictures.] Clocking in at just over 70 minutes, this movie has "studio favor" written all over it: My employer Paramount, so keen on making the sure-fire hit Down to Earth with Chris Rock, seems to have made a deal with him: if he agreed to star in their big comedy, they… read more!
Pulse
The latest creep-out by one of Japan's most intriguing directors, Kiyoshi Kurosawa (whose 1997 thriller Cure only recently was released in the US), Pulse doesn't have an American distributor yet, but for those of you surfing around for a review, here it is. Though my old roommate found it derivative of some Japanese comic book, I don't know from those… read more!
Rat Race
I actually got a headache from watching this movie. Which isn't to say that it's all that bad. Just very loud. And all the characters scream a lot. A lot. Actually, come to think of it, it's not that good. Rat Race is about a bunch of idiots (played by a sort-of all-star cast) who are picked at random by… read more!
The Road Home
All aesthetics and personality traits aside, I see Zhang Yimou in the same light as Woody Allen, in that the films he made with his former lover, Gong Li, all contained intense waves of tragedy, usually resulting from the selfish actions of Li's characters (Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, Shanghai Triad, et al). Similarly, Woody Allen's films with his… read more!
The Royal Tenenbaums
Wes Anderson's second feature Rushmore reminded me, in its tale of a wise-guy prep schooler frightened of his own loneliness, of J. D. Salinger's classic novel The Catcher in the Rye, only lighter and shallower. So when I heard that Anderson's next film involved a family of child prodigies who grow up to be unhappy adults, I figured this would… read more!
Save the Last Dance
2001's first sleeper hit, this movie's box office success surprised everybody - even its own producers. I must admit, when I saw it (at a free employee screening at Paramount), even I wondered if anybody would go to it. It is, after all, a black-themed story with a white girl at the center. And it's about dancing! By the guy… read more!
The Score
Tense nail-biter about a professional thief (Robert De Niro) who agrees to take on the proverbial "one last job", even though it breaks two of his cardinal rules: partnering up with a stranger (Edward Norton, impressive as usual) and working in his home town (Montreal, a refreshing locale, well-used). But the money – a cool $6 million – is too… read more!
Series 7
This film actually came out at the beginning of the year, and I avoided it, thinking it was just a cheap hipster bust on reality TV. Then last week it played at the local rep theatre, so I caught it - and I'm glad I did. For the record, it is a (not so) cheap hipster bust on reality TV,… read more!
Session 9
I was curious about this low-budget indie horror movie specifically because it was shot in Danvers, Massachusetts – the city where I was born. Thankfully, I wasn't born in the film's central location, the now derelict state mental institution, where five macho construction workers (led by talented Scottish actor Peter Mullan and the once-hot David Caruso) are hired to strip… read more!
Sexy Beast
Ray Winstone stars as Gary "Gal" Dove, a onetime London gangster who has retired to sunny Spain with his ex-porn star wife and their two friends. All is peaceful until an unwelcome face from his past comes to visit: Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), a psycho with a short fuse who has been sent by their former boss Teddy Bass (Ian… read more!