reviews

‘We only made one copy,’ Naomi Watts laments as people start dying again, six months after she made that only one copy. Obviously, Naomi Watts has never been on the New York City subway on any given Friday, when an army of little Chinese people roams the trains, offering for sale bootleg DVDs of every theatrical feature film that opened that very day.

It’s the most expensive animated film ever produced outside the United States, with a reported budget of $27 million… which will probably end up being mostly what it’s remembered for, since what those many millions bought is somewhat less notable. Oh, there’s some eye candy to be found in this Victorian-era science-fiction tale, from Akira … more…

Disney’s got the bland and calculatedly innocuous follow-your-dream sports movie down to a science now… just like Casey Carlyle (Michelle Trachtenberg: Eurotrip), the high-school heroine of its latest installment in the genre, who applies physics to figure skating to determine the precise equation for a can’t-miss triple axel. But wait — what’s this? The formerly … more…

Just Desert It’s rare enough, so when it happens, you have to cling to it and not let go: Some movies just fill you up so much with life and love and art and feeling and awe at the world and all the crazy, wonderful people in it that you simply have to burst into … more…

This is how stupid I am. I said to myself, waiting for *Robots* to start, that at least there won’t be any fart jokes. How can there be fart jokes? They’re robots. Robots don’t fart.

Not that there’s anything wrong with trying to inject some solemnity and sophistication into an action movie, but god help you if you don’t do it right, because then you end up with the likes of *Hostage,* which is like a petulant teenager who wants to be seen as all grownup and mature and demands to be treated as such but then goes and gets roaring drunk on cheap beer, vomits all over the yard, and crashes Dad’s car into a lamppost in the high school parking lot.

George W. Bush suggested that anyone who wants to see what’s up there in ANWR should go take a look — and he ‘suggested’ it in an offhand, scornful way that implies he doesn’t think there’s much there of interest. (The clip of him making this suggestion is included in the film, so you can judge for yourself.) Environmentalist filmmaker Leanna Allison and her husband, wildlife biologist Karsten Heuer, took Bush up on his dare…

Hooray! *Dear Frankie* is finally — finally! — getting released. I saw this film ages ago, last summer, when it was slated to open last October, and then disappeared… I suspect because Miramax was waiting to capitalize on the presumed insanity that would surround *The Phantom of the Opera,* in which *Frankie*’s Gerard Butler also stars. I don’t know how much *Phantom*’s critical and box-office flopping is affecting that supposed plan, but if you’ve seen *Phantom,* don’t let that stop you from checking out *Frankie* — Butler doesn’t sing in this one.

Can you stand another grim movie about how ignorant, bigoted, vicious, and small-minded people can be? Cuz this one is a doozy: it drags you across acres of despair, a harsh landscape of the angry, terrified side of human nature mirrored, a reverse reflection, in the desolate beauty of the Australian bush. The year is … more…