Year: 2002

What a cast: Gabriel Byrne, Julianna Margulies, Ron Eldard, Isaiah Washington! What a waste! What are they doing in a movie so moronic that it doesn’t even deserve to go straight to video without its supper? I know, I know: They’re paying the bills. Perhaps the better question is: Why are talented actors forced into … more…

Now, there’s not really any overlap between Grant’s niche and Wahlberg’s niche, and in any right-thinking universe, no one would attempt to shoehorn Wahlberg into a Cary Grant role. Unfortunately, as hardly anyone needs to be told and which is amply demonstrated by *The Truth About Charlie,* we do not live in a right-thinking universe.

Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, in his directorial debut, demonstrates how poor execution can doom a pretty good script… his own pretty good script. His suspense drama of an overburdened, emotionally fragile college senior, her missing boyfriend, and the anguished cop who’s trying to find him probably sounded a lot more shrewd and perhaps even profound … more…

If my mom and I could rewind 25 years, we’d probably be sneaking out to see *Tuck Everlasting.* No, it’s not about a scrappy girl wise beyond her tender years — or wiseacre beyond her tender years. Kids are nicer now, and *Tuck*’s Winnie Foster is just the kind of very nice, respectable, well-behaved girl we all (supposedly) want our daughters to be.

Great: now I’ve got something else to worry about when the cat’s acting weird. Like maybe it passed through a stygian portal into some infernal realm and has been transformed into a hellbeast bent on rending the flesh from human bones. Danish filmmaker Martin Schmidt’s quietly ooky thriller explores just such a possibility, and don’t … more…

There aren’t even very many scares along the lines of ‘This is the part where the whatever jumps out’ in fact, either. No, it’s much creepier, much smarter stuff than that. Anyone can go ‘Boo!’ and make you leap from your seat for a moment. It’s making stuff haunt you even after the movie’s over that’s harder, so not too many movies even attempt it.

I erred on the side of giving a guy a second chance (though I still dread the prospect of *Cajun Man: The Motion Picture*), and on the side of not wanting to miss a Paul Thomas Anderson flick, so it’s a little disconcerting to have discovered that Sandler is really quite good here, touchingly so even, and that Anderson may not be.

Vin Diesel just keeps making me madder and madder. Despite his hulking hugeness and the fact that he once worked as a bouncer (or so we’re told — maybe that’s just a good story to tell on Leno), he’s clearly not the thug he’s been playing onscreen for the last few years. He’s written, produced, and directed films — *Multi-Facial* and *Strays* — that have played in competition at Sundance and screened at Cannes. How can someone like that possibly be satisfied playing the grunting, amoral Neanderthal, the one who communicates primarily with his fists?

I suppose it’s meant to be taken as satire that adolescent mash notes written in flowery language, in silver ink on purple notepaper, crammed with sparkly things and left by a secret admirer — real eighth-grade homeroom stuff — are juxtaposed here with the random, anonymous, drug-fueled, fun-free sexcapades of the overprivileged students of Camden … more…