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In *Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,* a digitized ‘Laurence Olivier’ appears as the Man Behind the Curtain in what is a lousy, pointless remake of, among many other classic films, *The Wizard of Oz.*
In recent conversations about what’s great in the movies lately, I’ve been calling *Code 46* ‘*Brave New World* meets *Lost in Translation,*’ but those sorts of ‘X meets Y’ descriptions tend to demean a film, reduce it to a calculated, photocopied imitation, and *Code 46* is nothing of the kind. It is, while drawing on and inspired by classic films, utterly original, in a way that is particularly thrilling for fans of true science fiction movies.
That’s the kind of flick *Cellular* is: goofily obvious when it isn’t unexpectedly exciting. It’s one of those movies that succeeds partly by not being anywhere near as bad as you were expecting it to be — by being, really, not so bad at all, much to one’s shocked surprise. Seriously, I was anticipating two hours of that annoyingly pseudo-hip Elvis Costello-ish guy from the TV commercials who wanders around saying ‘Can you hear me now?’ into his cell phone — and why o why won’t someone kidnap *him*? — and instead the goofily obvious stuff is more than made up for by the suspense and the humor.
Yes, it’s the nudie Ewan McGregor film. Yes, another one. But the NC-17 rating is absurd — the nudity is casual and brief, the sex is consensual and mostly under cover of clothing or blankets; there’s nothing pornographic about this soft, sly little film based on Alexander Trocchi’s 1954 novel. Where it’s disturbing is in … more…
Jean-Jacques Annaud (Enemy at the Gates), creator of the beloved modern classic The Bear, is back with another stunning animal tale, a heartbreaking fable of friendship, family ties, and the human impact on the natural world. Guy Pearce (Till Human Voices Wake Us) portrays an early-twentieth-century big-game hunter in Cambodia who inadvertantly separates a pair … more…
To call this immeasurably terrible movie “stupid and nonsensical” would be an insult to stupid and nonsensical movies. So thoroughly wrongheaded that it demands a new redefinition of the word “bad,” it features perhaps the worst script I’ve ever come across, which appears to have been written by an extraterrestrial who not only does not … more…
A familiar modern Robin Hood story gets a vicious kick of authenticity in this true tale of a white cop in 1970s apatheid South Africa who goes rogue. Andre Stander (The Punisher‘s Thomas Jane, in the performance that may finally earn him the recognition he deserves) was the youngest captain on the Johannesburg police force … more…
The story of Australian cult figure Kelly — a 19th-century Robin Hood–esque outlaw, child of an underclass of Irish immigrants — is a tricky film, punctuated by bursts of staccato surrealism and bitter humor, hard to love unreservedly but easy to appreciate for its ambition. Heath Ledger (The Order) finds a wary, cautious groove as … more…
It’s End Times thrills for secularists in X-Files creator Chris Carter’s crime drama, which explores millennial paranoia from a decidedly worldly perspective while also managing to maintain an unrelenting, uncanny creepiness. It’s clear, throughout these 22 episodes from the series’s debut 1996-7 season, that retired FBI criminal profiler Frank Black has some paranormal simpatico with … more…
It’s hard to imagine that this idiotic sitcom was ever intended for adult consumption: its putative heroines come across, at best, as mentally retarded, and at worst, as whiny, shallow bimbos. But that’s hardly a surprise: producer Garry Marshall would go on to make a career of denigrating the female gender with films like The … more…
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