Year: 2005

Follow your dreams, we tell little kids. Dare to imagine! You are the master of your universe! Maybe we shouldn’t tell them that, because then they grow up thinking that cleverness and talent and, yup, imagination will take them places, when we all really know that the world does its level best to beat such things out of us before we get too uppity, start thinking, and stop buying stuff, all of which can only lead to heartbreak, neuroses, and prescriptions for Prozac. Or else they turn into Robert Rodriguez, and inflict upon the world the unmerciful products of an imagination run batshit crazy on the power — the mad, glorious power! — of cheap modern consumer electronics.

I wish I could say that the fact that Ralph Kramden’s M1 bus route, which should be taking him northbound up Madison Avenue, as the bus’s signage clearly indicates, is taking him southbound down Seventh Avenue, way the hell on the other side of Manhattan, was the biggest problem with this abysmal TV-to-movie adaptation. But actually, deciphering twisted bus routes was quite a pleasant distraction from the rest of the movie, which is torture.

Director Catherine Hardwicke is back in the teen milieu she covered to such devastating effect in her debut film, Thirteen, though here she’s gone historical, documenting how a gang of misfit kids in 1970s Venice Beach, California, pretty much invented the idea of extreme sports by becoming daredevil skateboarders, and getting famous for it. It’s … more…

Hungarian filmmaker Nimród Antal takes us into a literal underworld with his funny, frightening, fantastical debut feature… and it’s the kind of self-assured, totally enrapturing film that makes you realize how few directors achieve such a necessary confidence in their own hocus pocus. The serpentine tunnels and shadowy corners and deep-bore escalators of the Budapest … more…

They talk about fighters who have ‘heart,’ and here’s the real deal: Jim Braddock, the ‘bulldog of Bergen,’ the underdog-champion boxer who saved the nation’s soul — and his family from starvation and separation — during the miserable depths of the Great Depression. Man, that sounds corny, and it *is* corny. But there’s an undeniable power to *Cinderella Man,* and it’s down to the intense and gripping performances of Russell Crowe (as the boxer, of course), and Paul Giamatti (as his trainer and manager), both of whom, as far as I’m concerned, can do no wrong…

Well, *Shawshank* it ain’t. Chris Rock ain’t Morgan Freeman, Adam Sandler ain’t Tim Robbins, and bone-crunching revenge football ain’t heartfelt and poignant personal redemption. Although James Cromwell *is* here as the warden. And so is a big dumb sweet black guy, though he has no miraculous abilities. Oh, wait — that was *The Green Mile.*

The supremely underappreciated Barry Pepper (25th Hour) gets his Cast Away — or maybe it’s his Dances with Wolves — with this captivating Canadian film about a bush pilot and WWII veteran in the remote, arctic Northwest Territories in 1953 who crashes in the middle of cold, frozen nowhere. He’s not quite alone — his … more…