Year: 2003

It’s like if Bob Vila made a thriller: ‘Booga booga booga! Be careful which house you choose to renovate– Ooo, look at that beautiful original 19th-century molding!’ Some spoiled rotten yuppies decide they’re fed up with the big city and chuck it all to move to the country, which is never a good idea under the best of circumstances and goes especially horribly wrong here. Which is kinda metaphoric for the movie as a whole, too — movies about arrogant city slickers rubbing the countryfolk the wrong way are rarely a good idea, and here particularly so.

Prepare for major throat lumpage by the end of this buoyant coming-of-age tale, elevated to a glorious level by its extraordinary cast. Walter (Haley Joel Osment: A.I. Artificial Intelligence), 14 years old, neglected by his mother (Kyra Sedgwick), and adrift on the sea of directionless adolescence, is dumped for the summer with his crazy old … more…

So, I’m confused. When you become a vampire, do they issue you the gothy, lacey, leathery all-black wardrobe? Or are only people who already dress in gothy all-black leather-and-lacey stuff susceptible to vampirism?

You usually can’t go wrong with a flick in which warriors ride into battle on elephants, and yet this stolid and solemn slice of Thai history manages to make pachyderm cavalry — and bare-breasted amazons and multiple beheadings and bad omens and gruesome poisonings and invading legions and general palace intrigue — surprisingly dull. Filmmaker … more…

Poor Elijah Wood. Not only must he suffer the indignity of a direct-to-video release so soon after his Lord of the Rings triumph, but it’s at the hands of writer Charles Kephart, whose pallid teen comedy tries so hard to be cutesy and precious and adorably wacky, and director Jeffrey Porter, who took Kephart’s script … more…

Man oh man. Once again, it all comes down to Johnny Depp. I know, this is supposed to be all about Rodriguez wrapping up the El Mariachi trilogy, putting some finishing touches on the whole revenge story, crossing Ts and dotting Is and being done with it. And then outta left field comes Depp, stealing the film from Antonio Banderas’s piercing gaze and deliciously impenetrable accent and Salma Hayek’s petulant pout and bodacious bod and Rodriguez’s explosions and slo-mo gunfights, taking what’s basically a supporting role and making the film all about him.