Lewis’s Nutty Professor mostly just bored me, but the 1996 update actively annoyed me. Geeks are cool now, so Professor Sherman Klump (Eddie Murphy: bowfing, mulan) isn’t a dorky scientist — he’s a fat scientist. It’s still acceptable to make fun of fat people, and hack director Tom Shadyac (patch) will do so with gleeful abandon. And he’ll throw in lots and lots of fart jokes, too. Boy o boy, farts sure are funny, ain’t they?

If there’s a lit candle onscreen in What Lies Beneath, you can bet you’re gonna see its flame extinguish… all by itself! If someone walks backward down a flight of stairs, you can bet that someone is gonna bump into something nasty. If someone’s on the left edge of the frame looking toward the right, you can bet Zemeckis is gonna pan left to reveal a boogeyman approaching from behind. Every single moment meant to be frightening is telegraphed from ten miles out, leaving you plenty of time to relax and try to pick out all the psychological thrillers that were ransacked to produce this incessantly dull film: Ah, there’s Rear Window! And here’s Psycho! Oh, it’s The Sixth Sense!

A doctor, losing his hearing, who eavesdrops on his neighbors while he still can. A masseuse who longs to be on the receiving end of the touch of another human being. A cake decorator whose beautiful creations look great but don’t taste very good. A professional house cleaner who makes dates to smell his old … more…

All the Bible-thumpers who think the cures for America’s woes lie in posting the Ten Commandments everywhere would do well to remember this: Those same decrees were on display in the Nuremberg courtroom in which Nazi law was handed down, laws responsible for the persecution of entire races of people and, ultimately, for the deaths of tens of millions. If those commandments had any effect on those they looked down on, it certainly cannot have been for the better.

If 1960’s Village of the Damned didn’t have a direct influence on the creation of Doctor Who, which debuted on TV only a few years later, I’ll eat my Powerbook.

Boy, is this the summer of angst-ridden Australian tough guys, or what? First there was Russell Crowe as a vengeance-powered gladiator, then there was Mel Gibson as a vengeance-powered revolutionary. And now we have Hugh Jackman as a vengeance-powered mutant in X-Men… though a lot of the revenge is being stored for the inevitable — and, I’ll confess, immediately highly anticipated — sequel.

Its title sounds suspiciously like that of a porno film, but Shower is actually a Chinese drama that swept through recent film festivals worldwide to great acclaim. Thematically similar in some ways to last winter’s Danish film Mifune, this is a bittersweet exploration of the inexorable slide from past to future traditional cultures face as … more…

When Joel and Ethan Coen were approached about doing a DVD release of their debut feature flick, they figured, why not spiff it up a bit? The mono sound had to be redone anyway, and, well, you can’t just make one clean spot without the rest looking even worse by comparison, so Blood Simple ended … more…