Year: 2004

Who decided Josh Hartnett could act? Where do they come from, these bland, boring, untalented pretty boys? Is there a factory somewhere in South America that extrudes them in flesh-colored silicone? How can we stop this?

Now, I’m the first film fan to profess a disdain for foreign films revisited by American filmmakers — there’s usually little point in doing so rather than giving those foreign films a wider domestic release, beyond the sad fact that most mainstream American moviegoers simply don’t want to read subtitles. But damn if *Criminal* doesn’t actually improve upon *The Nine Queens,* the Argentine film upon which it is very closely based.

I knew the sketchiest outline of what *Open Water* was about before I went into it: A young couple goes scuba diving in the middle of the ocean and get left behind when the boat heads back to shore. And the whole movie is just them stranded out there. How scary could it be, anyway, a movie about people floating around in water? Sure, there’ll be sharks, and that’ll be good for about ten minutes of boo!s… and then what? Yeah, the movie’s only 79 minutes, but still… This can’t possibly work, can it?

You wouldn’t think there’d be much left to say about cinematic serial killers and the cops they love to taunt, so it’s bonus points to *Suspect Zero* for even attempting to find something new in this, pardon the pun, done-to-death genre.

I call bullshit on this movie. Bullshit for being a geeky tease. Bullshit for being bad in that way that’s super boring, for not even having the common decency to be bad in that way that’s super cheesy. You can’t even have fun making fun of this movie, it’s so not even trying. It barely even bothers to show up.

This is why I keep doing this criticism thing, I guess, why I’ll sit through a hundred movies I expect to hate and, yup, end up hating. Because then there’s the hundred and first, a movie that surprises me even though I think I’ve seen everything and nothing will ever surprise me again. Every once in a rare while, there’s a *Garden State,* which even though you’ve sorta kinda seen it before in the grand sense is all new and exciting and delightful in the details, goes over well-covered ground with a fresh perspective and actually points out things no one else has noticed before.

The title means “King of Games,” and beyond the clear aim of getting kids to separate their parents from cold hard cash in exchange for the real-life Yu-Gi-Oh game cards for which this is a blatant advertisement, the film is thoroughly incomprehensible. On the plus side, it is the funniest film of the year, full … more…

Royalty ain’t what it used to be. “I hope they have string cheese,” intones one aristo at a formal ball at the palace of Genovia, the very same party at which all but one of the “eligible bachelors” of the tiny fictional European monarchy prove they can’t dance worth a damn. It’d be refreshing, this … more…