The Boys Are Back (review)
It’s hard to believe we haven’t seen Clive Owen in a movie like this one before.
sports
Tyson (review)
James Toback’s talking-head documentary portrait of the man serves only to show us a reprehensible example of the worst of American manhood, and of American celebrity.
Fighting (review)
The first rule of *Fighting* is: You don’t talk about *Fighting.* So please just pretend you can hear me giggling derisively instead.
Rocky Balboa movie review: flying high now
Forget everything you know about the joke that Rocky Balboa has become in the three decades since he made his screen debut, and just think back to that first film, to its raw power and surprising sensitivity and hard beauty.
Invincible (review)
Is it just me, or is there something really sweet about Mark Wahlberg? Not to suggest he’s not all manly and muscly and footbally or anything…
Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (review)
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!
Million Dollar Baby (review)
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.
Seabiscuit (review)
The music swells over the moment of victory, tears run freely down my face, fade to black, movie over. And I want to sob even longer and harder. Usually the rolling credits and the lights coming up in this kind of situation means a letup in the girly crying, but not this time. There’s something else going on besides the usual Oscar-baiting, triumph-of-the-human-and-equine-spirit shrink-wrapped Gourmet Film.
Bend It Like Beckham movie review
It’s completely predictable and predictably feel-good, but so damn what? This is an utterly delightful flick, not for the least which reason is that it’s about complex, engaging, and realistically flawed young women devoting their lives to something more ambitious than chasing boys and buying cosmetics. London teenage Jesminder (Parminder K. Nagra) lives in a … more…
Raging Bull (review)
The other great movie about boxing, Martin Scorsese’s *Raging Bull* is as dismal as *Rocky* is triumphant, as hopeless as *Rocky* is hopeful.
