Year: 2002

If you’d ever hoped to hear Patrick Stewart snarl “Get off ma land!” in a Texas drawl, then here’s your chance. Yup, the go-to man for Dickens, for the Bard, for your 11th-grade English lit classics, sports a Kenny Rogers beard and drunkenly shoots off rifles in this made-for-TV production from TNT (which, along with … more…

Managed care bad. Not exactly a newsflash, but since Showtime has just about single-handedly saved the made-for-TV movie from obviousness and melodrama, you can expect that its take on the state of American health care will be worth watching. Sure, early on, there’s a tad much exposition along the lines of “As you know, Doctor … more…

I hate that something that is intended to be and should be plain, simple, silly fun has to be politicized, but there’s just no getting around it with Undercover Brother. Maybe I’m not allowed to talk about these things, since I’m just a clueless white girl. But I’m going blather on cluelessly anyway.

Lyne wants us to think Unfaithful is a ‘real’ story about infidelity, about how and why ‘real’ people cheat, and the ‘real’ consequences. It’s, you know, arthouse. And maybe the French will love it — Woody Allen seems to think the French will watch any old crap, for instance — because zhere iz no Hollywood bullsheet like mo-ti-va-SHON to mire zhe characterz in bougeoise ex-pec-ta-SHONS. It is, how you say, gen-you-un. Oui.

Is there such a thing as a bad IMAX movie? That enormous screen makes just about anything as exciting as hell, including things you’d otherwise have less than zero interest in… like, in my case, ESPN’s Summer 2001 X Games. But amidst all those exhilarating, exuberant, you-are-there shots of street lugers racing down Philadelphia hills … more…

The latest from DreamWorks’ animation arm is so close to being a great film that it can’t help but leave you with the bitter aftertaste of what might have been. It’s got that tremendously moving Lion King circle-of-life, fundamental-interconnectedness-of-all-things thing going for it, plus that poignant Dances with Wolves what-did-we-lose-when-we-won-the-West thing, plus stunningly gorgeous, downright … more…

Reality has little to do with Enough. Enough is about watching Jennifer Lopez kick the living shit out of Billy Campbell. Why? Because that’s what gets preview audiences on their feet, cheering. Why it’s acceptable to cheer while a woman beats the holy crap out of a man, but not the other way around, is one question the thinking moviegoer might ask, and yet it’s far from the only outstanding question.

It’s a sorry commentary on the state of contemporary film that the script for the best-written movie so far this year is more than a century old. It’s arrant nonsense, of course, but even this hundred-year-old nonsense is fresher, sillier, more vibrant, more delicious than anything of recent vintage. Combine that classic play with an … more…

The Fantasy Film Library contains flicks like MANT, Sand Pirates of the Sahara, Habeus Corpus, and the Tom Baxter adventure The Purple Rose of Cairo: movies that exist only within other movies, ideally movies you’re dying to see. Add a new one to the archive: Codename: Dragonfly, which looks like the best kind of glorious … more…