Year: 2004

Okay, I admit it: I had a big ol’ lump in my throat by the end of the *A Love Song for Bobby Long.* In the hands of lesser talents, this would have been a CBS Sunday Night Movie, unendurably sappy-sweet and starring refugees from sitcoms trying to ‘get serious.’ But writer/director Shainee Gabel (adapting Ronald Everett Capps’s novel *Off East Magazine Street*) has instead given us the perfect little Christmas gift we didn’t know we wanted, genuinely poignant and full of a celebratory spirit of family.

The Bard’s powerful tale of love and revenge, injustice and mercy gets a lush new mounting from writer/director Michael Radford, and its vibrant period setting serves as a stirring contrast to how relevant its motifs of seething hate, hypocrisy, and intolerance remain today. Sixteenth-century Venice is here vital and lively, thanks in large part to … more…

To describe its plot makes it sound, rightly, like classic literature; to praise its smart, underplayed performances puts it in the company, appropriately, of great filmic drama; to find it niggling at your subconscious like a half-remembered nightmare days after you’ve seen it makes you realize what a grown-up thriller looks like. On the surface … more…

In 1974, a man named Sam Bicke hatched a plot to hijack an airplane and crash it into the White House, the occupant of which he saw as the cause of all his many failures as a man, and he actually got as far as killing the pilot of a plane on the tarmac in … more…

There’s bad, and then there’s movies like *Fat Albert* and *Darkness,* movies that alternately make you curl up into a fetal position and whimper or throw things at the screen and yell ‘Dear God in heaven, someone make it stop!’ But they don’t stop: they go on and on and on in their clueless awfulness, days and days and days of your life sucked away while tiny evil incorporeal mice chew away on your soul the whole time, and then it turns out the damn movie was only 80 minutes long and only banging your head against a rock until you’re insensate can make the pain go away.

But it will not be possible to ignore *Hotel Rwanda,* a mostly true tale of survival and courage– nay, of basic human decency amidst the carnage so terrible as to be inconceivable. That sounds like a stale cliche, ‘the inspiring story of a man who blah blah blah while the world blah blah blah.’ But there’s no soppy melodrama in this gut-wrenching film, no attempt to excuse or mollify the human tendency — however normal, however much a sanity-retaining mechanism it may be — to see a million deaths as merely a statistic.

As you might expect, a movie ostentatiously labeled “Andrew Lloyd Webber’s” anything isn’t going to stray too far from its theatrical source. And so, unsurprisingly, if you love the Broadway extravaganza with the crashing chandelier and the flaming gaslamps and the overpriced souvenir T-shirts and the snowglobes with the Phantom’s white mask sitting on fake black velvet, you’ll love *Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera.* For it is indeed a cheesy snowglobe of a movie, pretty and tinkly, with tinny windup music. This is a movie that raccoons will steal to weave into their nests, it’s that ooh-ahh sparkly-shiny.