girls/women

Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (review)

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All over the country, little girls with equine fixations will be blinking their dreamy pony-filled eyes at their daddies and pleading please please please prettyplease can we see the horse movie? And oddly enough, *Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story* is the cinematic equivalent of the deployment of such adorable nascent feminine wiles: Please don’t shoot the horse with the broken leg, Daddy, Dakota Fanning with her enormous eyes brimming with tears and her quivering lip doesn’t exactly say, but she might as well have. Please nurse the horse back to health at tremendous personal expense and sacrifice so you can later give it to me as a prezzie and I can train her and we can enter the massively prestigious Breeder’s Cup race with her! Pul-eeeeeeze!

Rize (review)

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You’ve heard of the great war between the Los Angeles gangs the Crips and the Bloods, right? But have you heard of the longstanding rivalry between the Clowns and the Krumpers? Neither had I, and I felt a bit like slinking down in my seat in embarrassment while watching *Rize,* the powerfully moving new documentary about this Southern California dance craze.

High Tension (aka Switchblade Romance) (review)

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How do you solve a problem like Marie? We haven’t seen a horror-movie heroine like her since perhaps *Alien*’s Ripley, ardently independent and fiercely determined not to be a victim… but with a twist to her psyche that will, I suspect, be a greater source of fascinated, can’t-look-away terror to male audiences than the nonstop gore. For there is an aggressively sexual element to Marie’s intensity that ends up being the most vivid thing about *High Tension* — sublimated female rage and passion are given full, furious expression here, and… wow, does it make for a shocking, provocative, unforgettable movie about how women are too often overlooked, ignored, underestimated, and misunderstood.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (review)

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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…

Unleashed and Crash (review)

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With its clear and obvious choices — think Eddie Izzard’s ‘cake? or death?’ bit — *Unleashed* really is a fairy tale next to *Crash,* where half the time when you think you’ve got a grasp on what’s the ‘right’ thing to do and the ‘right’ way to live, you turn out to be wrong, even if the other guy is wrong, too.

Diary of a Mad Black Woman (review)

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It’s kindness, at first, that leads you to suspect that someone is pulling our collective leg with *Diary of a Mad Black Woman,* because surely anything this jaw-droppingly awful must be a joke. Surely this is not being proffered with any genuine intention of it being seen as, well, an actual *movie,* with a plot and characters and scenes that connect in some reasonably logical sense. This *must* be a *MAD TV* sketch that went horribly wrong and escaped into the wild where it turned feral. Right?

Million Dollar Baby (review)

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Oh, but this is a sucker punch of a movie, harsh and sere and so thoroughly unsentimental that it seems to have active contempt for lesser movies that pander to the audience’s desire to walk out of the theater feeling good and happy and that all is right in the world. This is like winning the lottery and getting hit by a train on your way to cash in your ticket. This is not for anyone who feels the need to escape real life at the multiplex. This *is* real life, as real as film gets. You are warned.

Near Dark, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Once Bitten, Blacula, Love at First Bite, and Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter (review)

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Of course, most respected anthropologists and biologists recognize that the New World Vampire, or *vampirus americanus*, differs greatly from the European species, or *vampirus continentalus*, but few films have recognized that the wide-open spaces of the U.S. produce a vastly altered creature than Europe’s dense urban spaces or intimate, if remote, medieval villages. But years before John Carpenter and the team of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez documented the vampires that dwell in the lonely stretches of the Americas, the criminally underappreciated ethnographer Kathryn Bigelow did it — spookily, grimly, hilariously, gloriously — with 1987’s *Near Dark,* in which a coven of nasty bloodsuckers roam the deserted American Southwest.