Deep Blue Sea (review)
Deep Blue Sea is not Jurassic Park. Of course it isn’t. This one is about sharks, not dinosaurs. Any idiot could see the difference.
Shaft (review)
Shaft smells like a franchise from the moment the lights go down, with a credits sequence ready-made for recycling and a theme song you can already sing along with. Cool vibes undulate off the screen, and you think: This is it. This is the new Bond. We are going to drown in cool every other summer for the next decade. Sam Jackson rocks!
Jesus’ Son (review)
Fuckhead (Billy Crudup: Waking the Dead) more than shows he deserves this disparaging nickname in Alison Maclean’s joyless and empty Jesus’ Son. An unemployed drifter moping around Iowa City in the early 1970s, FH keeps company with friends he hates and a new girlfriend, Michelle (Samantha Morton), who gets a kick out of living in … more…
Butterfly (review)
Music, sex, nature, romance! Oh, the sweet mysteries of life young Moncho (Manuel Lozano) will find himself awakening to in the summer of 1936. A sweet-faced little boy with a shy smile, so delicate and sensitive his mother calls him her “sparrow,” Moncho is taken under the wing of his gentle and wise schoolteacher, Don … more…
Gone in 60 Seconds (review)
In the cinematic ranking of cool criminals, those who boost classic, collectible cars come in somewhere between jewel thieves and gentleman cat burglars — pretty high up, in other words. The lure of the outlaw, the glamour and sex appeal of nonviolent criminals… does GONE IN 60 SECONDS exude any of this? Nope. Not an ounce. And I thought Mission: Impossible 2 was boring.
Repo Man (review)
Kinda cheap-looking and with a quasi-indie, ‘who gives a shit if we ever make any money’ attitude that Miramax and The Blair Witch Project have all but wiped from the face of studio filmmaking, 1984’s Repo Man reminds us that once, not so long ago, weird-ass movies were not verboten in Hollywood. Deadpan humor, throwaway visual jokes, and oblique political and social satire may have doomed this way-cool flick to the neverland of sci-fi cultdom, but it has good company there, like its similarly themed contemporaries The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and the TV series Max Headroom.
Love’s Labour’s Lost (review)
But I should have known to trust Branagh, for whom Shakespeare’s works have always been alive and real and relevant: his recent Hamlet is the best filmed version of that oft-produced play, and I’ve rarely seen a movie of any stripe as joyous as his Much Ado About Nothing. And now, I could just kiss him for giving us the exuberant, inspired Love’s Labour’s Lost. This is a wonderful film, an absolute delight.
Sunshine (review)
All politics is local, someone once said, which means that the political, essentially, is personal. Sunshine — a sweeping, semi-autobiographical film from Academy Award-winning director Istvan Szabo — strives to capture the tumultuous political upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century within the story of three generations of a single Budapest family. Does it succeed in this ambitious attempt? Yes… and no.
American Beauty (again) (review)
Was American Beauty the single best film of 1999? I can’t decide. The second time I watched the film, on a widescreen video screener after it won the Oscar for Best Picture, I thought with horror: I named this sitcom one of my best films of the year? On a third viewing, also on the small screen, I saw once again all the brilliance that I saw the first time around, and more.
Groove (review)
The generous spirit of a generation too often disparaged is on full view in writer/director Greg Harrison’s stylish and fun Groove, the story of one night in San Francisco’s underground rave scene. There’s Ernie (Steve Van Wormer), embodying typical GenX entrepreneurial gung-ho in risking arrest by organizing, with almost frightening efficiency and for no pay, … more…
