Pinot Road Trip
College roommates take a wine-soaked, pre-wedding romp in
Sideways is a smart and delightful romantic comedy, yet in the course of creating his new charmer, Alexander Payne has sheared off some of the rambunctious edges that made his previous films, About Schmidt, Election, ...
Musical Icon
Ray Charles lives on through Jamie Foxx’s rockin’ performance in
The music of Ray Charles is a national treasure, as is the artist’s legacy. The same can’t be said for Ray, the movie of his life, although the transcendent performance of Jamie Foxx as Ray ...
Life Mirrors Film
Tarnation, a shocking and delightful autobiography, evolves from pain to hope.
Sometimes people grow up sane despite the best efforts of society to drive them mad. This is the case for filmmaker Jonathan Caouette, whose Tarnation tells the jarring story of his young life, a life ...
Political Gold Dust
Rich vein in Silver City falls short of the big nugget.
With Silver City, John Sayles becomes the latest filmmaker to contribute his cinematic two cents to this election year’s plethora of politically minded movies. Sayles’ contributions, however, have much greater value than the metaphorical two ...
Dark Mystery
Mike Hodges’ film noir may lose its audience in murky, tangled storylines.
Lacking the sly mordancy of the Warren Zevon song for which it’s titled (screenwriter Trevor Preston “borrowed” Zevon’s lyrics for the title of his dark tale of cinema mayhem), I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is ...
Politics of the Times
Jonathan Demme’s Manchurian Candidate remake revitalizes political thriller genre.
The movie blasts into its starting place on a shrapnel-storm of music. The sound is the first thing you notice about The Manchurian Candidate. We shouldn’t be surprised: This is a Jonathan Demme film, after ...
An Affair Continued
Thoughtful and charming sequel gives depth to ‘one night stand.’
The all-in-one-night love story that unfolded in Before Sunrise really turned out to be an affair to remember. In that 1995 Richard Linklater movie, two strangers on a train meet, talk, disembark to spend the ...
Spinners of News
Arab news vs. US news creates a wide gap of truth and misinformation.
When we listen to Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration mouthpieces, we are led to believe that America has no greater ideological enemy than the Arab news network al Jazeera. The independent Qatar-based news station, ...
Humanity’s Pain
Dogville may make audiences think, and squirm.
The Danish director Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves , Dancer in the Dark) has made the most masterful film of his storied career. Yet what he has achieved in technical audacity and precision of ...
This French-Canadian film received the award for Best Foreign Film at the recent Oscars ceremony.
Denys Arcand, the director of 1986’s comedy The Decline of the American Empire, has made a reunion movie of sorts. He gathered all the characters from Decline and the actors who played them for this ...
Life-threatening mountain climb re-enacted and narrated by the British survivors.
Touching the Void might have been the ultimate example of a cliffhanger narrative were it not for the fact that we already know at the outset how the movie is going to turn out, since ...
Cinematic Art
Girl With a Pearl Earring is beautifully shot but has a slow plot.
Lord knows, Girl with a Pearl Earring is a bona fide art movie. It has the finest of pedigrees, being inspired by the famous Vermeer painting of the same title, which in turn inspired by ...
Stephen Frears' understated thriller shows illegal London workers discovering dirty little secrets while trying to stay one step ahead of immigration officials.
Photo: Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tautou play London illegal immigrants who do the dirty work for the upper class in Dirty Pretty Things. With Dirty Pretty Things, the estimable filmmaker Stephen Frears >(The Grifters, High ...
Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall ride again in the admirable Open Range.
Photo: On the Range: Charley (Kevin Costner), Boss (Robert Duvall) and Button (Diego Luna) try to escape their pasts in the Old West. Kevin Costner''s Open Range is the best new Western to come out ...
Atmosphere plays a big role in Northfork.
Photo: High Water: Walter O'Brien (James Woods) conspires to save the townfolk from floods in Northfork, Montana.Northfork, Mont.: 1955. This sleepy hamlet in Big Sky Country is about to be flooded over to become a ...
Adam Sandler returns to comedy and misses the mark with this feeble, strangely dissatisfying attempt at humor.
Photo: Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson get snarky in Anger Management. It''s probably a good thing that Jack Nicholson didn''t get the Oscar last month for his performance in About Schmidt, because right about now ...
Phone Booth is a suspenseful and original (if lightweight) film.
Phone Booth boasts a nifty gimmick: shoot almost an entire film (albeit a brief film at 81 minutes) in the confined location of a New York City telephone booth. The plot mechanics devised to keep ...
Performances by talented comedic actors manage to keep this film afloat.
Photo: Tell It Sister: Queen Latifah lets Steve Martin and Eugene Levy know what''s what in Bringing Down The House. Some fine comedy performances bolster this thinly plotted film (the script is by first-timer Jason ...
Michael Caine's jaded Vietnam-era journalist puts The Quiet American into serious Oscar running.
Delayed from national distribution last year in the midst of the country''s post-9/11 mood of circumspection, The Quiet American is now finally going into wider release this week, just in time for Oscar voters to ...
The Recruit is a fun, if flawed, film starring two great leading men.
Photo: Company Men: Al Pacino and Colin Farrel play a couple of hot CIAguys in The Recruit. The pleasure of watching two alpha males--Al Pacino and Colin Farrell--circling each other mano a mano substantially beefs ...
It's raising hackles in Mexico, but this tale of a sexually active priest loses its punch up North.
Photo: Sweet Sixteen: The young Father Amaro (Gael Garcia Bernal) is momentarily entranced by Amelia (Ana Claudia Talancon), but his loyalty to the Church-or is it his pride?-proves stronger. The latest Mexican movie to win ...
Jack Nicholson finally acts his age, and it works out well for everyone.
Hitting The Highway: The word is that Jack Nicholson may garner a 12th Oscar nomination for About Schmidt. At the age of 66, Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) is a man unprepared to face life''s ambiguities. ...
Gangs of New York is a movie worth watching, if you've got the time.
Photo: Kiss Me, I''m Irish: Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz are a lukewarm item in Martin Scorsese''s otherwise excellent Gangs of New York, which also stars Daniel Day-Lewis as a bad-ass in a black hat. ...
The classic tale of prep-school rebellion has been done one too many times.
Class Struggle: New prep-school student Emile Hirsch, and teacher Kevin Kline are locked in a battle for power in The Emperor''s Club. This boys boarding-school story buries an interesting storyline about morality and the choices ...
Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven masterfully recounts the unravelling of a 1950s society woman.
Photo: Opposites Attract: Julianne Moore plays a Stepford wife who shocks the neighbors when she seeks out the company of Dennis Haysbert in Far From Heaven. Far From Heaven begins just like Douglas Sirk''s 1952 ...
The director of Roger&Me doesn't hit the mark quite as well as he used to with this new documentary about gun violence.
Photo: We''re Slashing Prices: Michael Moore buys a few rounds of ammo at a friendly Canadian Wal-Mart. With his new documentary Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore proves once again that he is one of our ...
The Good Girl follows a woman's effort to leave her life behind.
Photo: Every Bad Boy Deserves Rachel-Jake Gyllenhaal and Jennifer Aniston play co-workers who mix it up in Miguel Arteta''s The Good Girl. At first the flat vowels and empty yearning of the voiceover sound something ...
Blood Work is no The Unforgiven, but it still has babes, good characters and Clint Eastwood.
Photo: Call It Good-Clint Eastwood stars as a retired detective drawn back to the job in Blood Work. Clint Eastwood is back directing and starring in a new suspense thriller that is scripted by Brian ...
The director of Memento shows a deft hand with the psychological thriller in Insomnia.
Photo: Up All Night-Al Pacino, propped up by Hilary Swank, plays a murderer-tracking LA detective who can''t adjust to Alaska''s midnight sun in Christopher Nolan''s well-wrought Insomnia. The question of how maverick filmmaker Christopher Nolan ...
Todd Solondz' Storytelling messes with movieland ideas about reality.
If it seemed as though filmmaker Todd Solondz wanted nothing more in his last two films, Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness, than to toss unseemly provocations at his apprehensive audience, then his newest feature ...
Home-movie documentary chronicles relationship between Jerry Garcia and David Grisman.
Maybe the best way to describe Grateful Dawg is "Captain Trips Unplugged," a collection of home-movie footage cobbled together into an 80-minute documentary tracing the friendship and musical collaboration between Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia ...
Despite solid performances, Riding in Cars with Boys' uneven script makes for rough driving.
This rendering of Beverly Donofrio''s autobiographical book about a woman who believes in her literary abilities, and has faith that she can overcome the unplanned detours life has dealt her, is a scattershot affair. Filled ...
Maria Ripoll's heartwarming Tortilla Soup is a movie about food--and much, much more.
His Three Daughters: Tortilla Soup celebrates the trials and tribulations of family and food."This is a movie about communication: how we use food to communicate, how food brings us together and pulls us apart, how ...
Jerry Zucker's Rat Race scatters such a broad pattern of jokes that at least a few are destined to hit their target.
They''re Off: An all-star cast chases after some not-so-easy money in Rat Race.Why some production executives at Paramount Pictures thought that now was a good time to revive the big-ensemble chase comedy formula is anyone''s ...
Director Ken Loach turns his camera on the invisible Latino workforce in Los Angeles but barely brings them into focus.
Over the course of his 30-year career, British film director Ken Loach has carved out a unique and brutally consistent style of socially committed filmmaking and his most recent film, Bread and Roses, is no ...
One Night at McCool's needs more than one more for the road.
Genial and amusing, Harald Zwart''s One Night at McCool''s aims for something like the dark, silly humor of There''s Something About Mary, but unlike that film, it never fully rises to the occasion, maintaining a ...
Action movie maestro Robert Rodriguez whips up a tasty adventure for young and old filmgoers.
It''s going to come as a surprise to many people that Robert Rodriguez--the filmmaker they associate with blazing action show-stoppers like El Mariachi, Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn and The Faculty--has not only gone out ...
All the Pretty Horses is just a pretty-good movie.
reviewThis much-storied and long-in-the-making film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy''s widely cherished Western novel is neither the sacrilege that McCarthy''s true believers feared nor the epiphany for which fans of the Western film genre had hoped. ...
It's easy to see why Girlfight has risen to the top of the heap.
Nicely executed and extremely likable, Girlfight is a rousing, girl-positive, indie success story whose dynamic rhythms deliver a connecting punch. The movie has an integrity of feeling and spirit that carries it through its often ...
Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous is a tribute to rock 'n' roll and the '70s.
This sweet, amiable, accurate, and knowing coming-of-age tale is Cameron Crowe''s semi-autobiographical boyz-to-men story about how he grew into the role of a rock ''n'' roll journalist in 1973. Of course, the movie is about ...
The Eyes of Tammy Faye documents the real life story of a (heavily) made-up survivor.
After the holocaust, three things will remain, says Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner''s most recent TV co-host, gay comedian Jim J. Bullock: roaches, Cher and Tammy Faye. The well-documented public life of this Christian televangelist is the ...
John Waters' Cecil B. Demented is a radical manifesto aimed at overturning mediocrity in moviemaking.
You say you want a cinema revolution? Well, recruitment centers are likely to be found anywhere that''s showing John Waters'' latest opus, Cecil B. DeMented. The movie throws a comic stink bomb into the gaping ...
Chuck & Buck is a strangely likable movie about unlikely friends, played by unlikely actors, shot in an unlikely style.
Chuck & Buck is the kind of movie that gets under your skin and takes root. It''s a discomfiting sensation, much like the experience of watching the film. At the same time, Chuck & Buck ...
Alison Maclean's Jesus' Son follows an addict's trek to find the healing qualities of pain.
In the world of junkies, a land of molten time and single-minded purpose, what kind of utter screwup must a person be in order to have earned the sobriquet "Fuckhead" from one''s peers? That''s the ...
Peter Greenaway's 8 1/2 Women is another weird journey into the mind of an iconoclast.
Review Athough I can recount for you the details of Peter Greenaway''s 8 1/2 Women, I can''t make it all add up. Ever the artful iconoclast, Greenaway''s new film is a meditation on men and ...
Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks is a fluff-ball return to the director's earlier style.
Review Woody Allen returns to slapstick comedy in this new movie that''s a throwback to the days of his early film features. With its story about an inept bank robber, Small Time Crooks readily calls ...
James Toback's Black and White plays fast and loose with reality while exploring New York culture.
Ever since his 1978 debut film, Fingers, James Toback (Two Girls and a Guy, The Pick-up Artist) has been playing fast and loose with the rules. His new film, Black and White, is a fascinating, ...
The Third Miracle's overwhelming quietness leaves one yearning for something a little splashier.
Ever since The Exorcist, we''ve come to expect movies about the spirit world to be filled with lots of special effects, flashing lights and green-pea soup. The currently popular conception of contact between human beings ...
Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys, his follow-up to L.A. Confidential, marks a 180-degree turn.
Review Wonder Boys is a shaggy-dog story about middle-age makeovers and youthful beginnings, estranged wives and pregnant lovers, unfinished novels and anxious editors, murdered dogs and lost vehicles, and pot-induced hazes and the art of ...
The Ape Man swings in Disney's best-looking animated feature in years.
Edgar Rice Burroughs'' Ape Man has inspired nearly 50 movies over the years, testament enough to the enduring attachment we have to the story''s intrinsic conflict between civilization and nature, man and beast. However, this ...
