Year: 2004

Oh, the comparisons just come so easily: Like Coyote Ugly, only sillier. Like Crossroads, only sickening-sweeter. Like every other vehicle for a teenage pop queen, only exactly the same. Hilary Duff (Cheaper by the Dozen), as Hilary Duff(TM), heads to a summer program in Los Angeles at the way coolest music conservatory in the country, … more…

Some filmmakers spend tens of millions of dollars to create the kind of elegant minimalism first-time writer/director Shane Carruth achieves here on a budget of $7,000. The elegance is a partly a side effect of shooting fast and cheap in 16mm and blowing up to 35mm: a deliberate flatness and an industrial brightness that complements … more…

I don’t understand the purpose of this movie. I don’t understand the purpose of football, it’s true, but that’s not the same thing as not understanding the purpose of *Friday Night Lights.* A good sports movie should have something to say to those who aren’t fans of the particular sport in question. Maybe it’s that I don’t see anything noble or uplifting in the ritualized warfare of football and so the sport simply doesn’t work for me on the metaphoric level *Lights* is aiming for. Or maybe I *do* understand the purpose of the film but don’t want to acknowledge as much because it’s so very distasteful.

Okay, I think I’ve figured it out. *Taxi* was shot about ten years ago and has been sitting in the can, eagerly awaiting the moment when Jimmy Fallon finally broke out as the next big *SNL* thing, as the new Mike Myers or something, but the producers finally gave up on Fallon and figured they’d just dump the movie out into the autumn pre-Oscar-bait chasm and let it fall where it may.

In the bright light of day, I’m as cynical as the next guy about the deification that firefighters have been subject to since 9/11, and I fully expected *Ladder 49* to be a completely cornball, eye-rollingly awful embodiment of the new, inarguable status of these public servants as demigods. And maybe it is — I’m clearly the wrong person to make this kind of determination, because practically from the moment the lights went down and I entered that state of vulnerability moviegoers enter, when we’re willing to be swept away and are hoping against hope that this is the movie that will do it, I started bawling.

Why do fish need to use the elevator to get to the penthouse of an underwater apartment building? Can’t they just swim up? Why do fish need stairs to get from one level of a duplex to the next? Why would a fish live in a duplex underwater penthouse apartment, anyway?

Telly is from the future and her meddling with the timestream has erased the existence her great-great-great grandfather, Sam. Now, she must race against time to ensure her own eventual birth in the 25th century.

Screenwriter Daniel Handler, the evil genius behind the delightfully misanthropic children’s books by “Lemony Snicket,” here loosely adapts the opera Rigoletto — with film editor turned director Curtiss Clayton (Made) — and the result is malicious, ironic cruelty dealt with a deft and subtle hand. Verdi’s story of lust and revenge is transplanted to a … more…

All cop movies — at least all the really fun, pulpy ones — are about the thin line between cop and criminal. But this diabolically clever movie, the apotheosis of the Hong Kong police thriller, plays with that theme better than any film I’ve ever seen. There’s a cop (Tony Leung) who’s gone deep undercover … more…