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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, hooray for a movie about girls doing their own thing. Too bad it’s more like a training-bra of a flick designed to indoctrinate tweens with the estrogen-drenched sappiness of “women’s pop culture” — you know, like Oprah magazine and Lifetime Original movies and Celine Dion ballads — than a story that deals with the … more…
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.*
‘Ahhhh! Nature! It’s all over me! Get it off!’ screams Melman the urban giraffe once he reaches the titular island in *Madagascar,* and New Yorkers will scream, too, with laughter, because we recognize ourselves in it, and everyone else will scream with laughter because they’ll think it’s making fun of our neuroses. But we like our neuroses just fine, thank you, and appreciate the tribute to them that *Madagascar* is.
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…
Not another doctor show? Oh, but when Scrubs debuted in 2001, it was instantly the perfect antidote for the increasingly soapy melodrama of ER — and here are the DVDs to prove it. The first season, 24 brilliant episodes, veers from the profoundly silly to the achingly poignant, often in the same scene, as it … more…
Imagine if Christopher Guest had all sense of compassion excised and saw fit to remove his frontal lobe — you know, the area of the brain that prevents us from doing and saying every damn outrageous thing that crosses our minds. Then he might make a film like Hacks, a refreshingly aggressive and offensive mockumentary … more…
It’s very easy to puncture the self-importance of Hollywood types, and this HBO original series never fails to take that easy route, though it cloaks itself in a veneer of intelligence and insight. Vince Chase is the hottest thing to hit the movies since Johnny Depp, but Adrian Grenier (Hart’s War) fails to make us … more…
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