Shallow Hal
I never thought I would be a fan of the Farrelly Brothers back in the days of Dumb and Dumber, but they have grown on me. Though best known for their gross-out gags (of which Shallow Hal is mostly bereft), what I find remarkable is the brothers' sense of humanity. They do more for the acceptance of people's differences than… read more!
Simon Magus
Not to be confused with the other recent art film Simon Magus, an English-language fantasy starring Noah Taylor and Ian Holm, this is yet another intriguing – and kooky – feature from one of Europe's most interesting filmmakers, Ildikó Enyedi, who made the better-known My Twentieth Century and the hard-to-find Magic Hunter, one of my favorite films of recent years.… read more!
Snide and Prejudice
My heart goes out to Philippe Mora. Snide and Prejudice was obviously shot a long time ago: we see Brion James in a small role, and Brion James died in August 1999. Only in November 2001 has the film finally seen the light of day – in a single dingy Hollywood theatre, no less. In a Los Angeles mental hospital,… read more!
The Son’s Room
Nanni Moretti is one of those European "treasures" who make a dozen films before anybody in America ever hears about them. Known for his low-budget, politically-tinged, semi-autobiographical comedies, Moretti does a turnaround – and thus wins American distribution – with this tender tearjerker about a middle-class Italian family torn apart by the sudden death of their teenage son. Writer/director Moretti… read more!
Startup.com
Lively, timely documentary about the rise and fall of your average Internet start-up, in this case a New York company called govworks.com, which offered people the ability to pay their parking tickets online instead of going through the Herculean tasks of, you know, buying a stamp and mailing in a check. Rather than wasting our time detailing the obvious (the… read more!
Time and Tide
Tsui Hark was, during the late '80s/early '90s, one of the best, and certainly the kookiest, of Hong Kong's talented crop of action directors. As the HK film industry peaked, with American interest in the colony's cinema combining with the impending Chinese takeover, many of the biggest names fled to Hollywood to establish new careers, Tsui among them. Tsui's first… read more!
Together
The young director of the Swedish sleeper hit Show Me Love returns with an even better followup, a charming slice-of-life portrait of a 1975 leftist commune and the various well-meaning kooks that populate it. You know there's some justice in the world (or at least in Sweden) when something like this can outgross The Grinch in its home country six… read more!
Training Day
Training Day lets Denzel Washington finally play a creep, and the actor is clearly enjoying the experience, for he gives us one of his most energetic performances since Glory. Washington plays Los Angeles Police Detective Alonzo Harris, a corrupt, foul-mouthed cop showing his new partner Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke, playing it squeaky clean as written) how to survive the mean… read more!
Vanilla Sky
I had low expectations walking into this film, as I think Tom Cruise is a bad actor and Cameron Crowe is a bad writer. Everything they do is so obvious, so forced, and so unnatural. For their first post-Jerry Maguire collaboration, they chose to adapt Alejandro Amenábar's labored twist-ending Spanish movie Open Your Eyes. Crowe pads Amenábar's original story with… read more!
The Vertical Ray of the Sun
From the maker of The Scent of Green Papaya comes another lush slice-of-Vietnamese-life. In contemporary Hanoi, four grown siblings go through their days running their cafe, lying exhausted in the summer heat, eating, drinking, and yearning for love outside their stifled lives. The two oldest sisters are having issues with their husbands' (and their own) infidelity. The youngest sister (Tran… read more!
Waking Life
This film's been getting a lot of praise for its interesting style of animation – taking the age-old technique of rotoscoping (in which live action film is traced over, frame by frame; Ralph Bakshi made much use of this in the 1970s) and using computers to both update and accelerate the process so that a small group of people can… read more!
Zoolander
[Note: I wrote this review while employed at Paramount Pictures.] Lately security has been very tight at my place of employment, so it almost seemed like they were not going to provide their routine free screening of Paramount films for employees. But 10 days after Zoolander's release, they decided to slip one in for those interested. I figured it was… read more!