Year: 2001

They’re like TV advertisements for financial service companies with names you say in hushed, reverent whisper, movies like K-pax and Life as a House.

It works well except for the fact that the screenwriters and director Rod Lurie simplistically answer for us all the questions they raise — sure, even convicted killers can be good, honorable people, deep down, they tell us, even that one crazy guy who took a mallet to his CO’s skull.

The Hughes Brothers — adapting a graphic novel by Alan Moore — have gone to great lengths to re-personalize the Ripper’s victims for us, more than a century after the murders took place, to make the story as immediate as possible for us, to engender our sympathy. I can’t in all honesty say they’ve succeeded in doing that, and it just may be the nature of Jack’s story that makes such a mission nearly impossible.

It’s the kind of story that low-budget indie filmmakers often tell: a semi-autobiographical one about the desperateness of peering through the windows of the house of shiny, happy Hollywood, and badly — badly — wanting in. Good for Nothing, the tale of struggling Los Angeles actor Danny, is based on the real-life fight of struggling … more…

Sure, it’s in Chinese, subtitled in English, and lots of moviegoers don’t want to read movies, but this movie kicks ass in exactly the way that 15-year-old boys love. This is a kung-fu flick, with amazing bits of fighting, of course, but it also kicks ass in that figurative sense: it’s fast and funny and elegant; it has a mythic sweep and a breezy, sophisticated graphic-novel sensibility.

Fortunately, Bandits is not about the suspense of forgetting about that gun and being surprised by its reappearance later. It’s about watching Billy Bob and Bruce Willis fight over Cate Blanchett — hey, who wouldn’t? — with all the clever panache of a 1930s screwball comedy.

Mulholland Drive is more than just welcome — it’s a refreshing change of pace for moviegoers who prefer a mind warp over another car chase or meet cute, even if it isn’t everything we might have hoped for from Lynch’s latest.

Ever felt menaced by 18-wheelers on dark highways? Hoo boy, then here’s the flick for you. Lewis Thomas (Paul Walker: Pleasantville) and his brother, Fuller (Steve Zahn: Saving Silverman), break up the dull hours driving across the desolate American West by playing a little CB prank on a trucker calling himself Rusty Nail. Big mistake: … more…