reviews

This is why I keep doing this criticism thing, I guess, why I’ll sit through a hundred movies I expect to hate and, yup, end up hating. Because then there’s the hundred and first, a movie that surprises me even though I think I’ve seen everything and nothing will ever surprise me again. Every once in a rare while, there’s a *Garden State,* which even though you’ve sorta kinda seen it before in the grand sense is all new and exciting and delightful in the details, goes over well-covered ground with a fresh perspective and actually points out things no one else has noticed before.

The title means “King of Games,” and beyond the clear aim of getting kids to separate their parents from cold hard cash in exchange for the real-life Yu-Gi-Oh game cards for which this is a blatant advertisement, the film is thoroughly incomprehensible. On the plus side, it is the funniest film of the year, full … more…

Royalty ain’t what it used to be. “I hope they have string cheese,” intones one aristo at a formal ball at the palace of Genovia, the very same party at which all but one of the “eligible bachelors” of the tiny fictional European monarchy prove they can’t dance worth a damn. It’d be refreshing, this … more…

Freed from the artifices and tricks of filmmaking, the Danish directors following the Dogme doctrine — whose rules, among other things, require the use of only natural lighting and sound and forbid the importation of props to shoots, which must be done on location — have created a new kind of spare, theatrical, intensely fervent … more…

With its beautifully illustrative animation, reminiscent of a children’s book, and its bittersweet, reassuring story, this is a film kids will take to heart… and one parents can feel comfortable about letting them do so. With her overworked, mostly absent parents on the verge of divorce and her 23-year-old tutor — the one she has … more…

Based on James Baldwin’s powerful novel, this 1985 movie from PBS’s American Playhouse is a heart-wrenching tale of tragedy, hypocrisy, and a hard-heartedness born of hard times. Following the journeys — physical, spiritual, and emotional — of three generations of one African-American family, from the post-Civil War rural South to Harlem in the 1930s, this … more…

There’s something a little bit scary about this cascade of daytime soaps at their most outrageously soapy. Maybe it’s the bombardment of ridiculous wedding dresses and bizarre veils. Maybe it’s the actors talking about their characters as if they’re real people. Maybe it’s the hosts of the General Hospital segment, Jackie Zeman and Brad Maule, … more…

The decadent 18th-century French novel gets yet another mounting, this time around with the seduction and the betrayal and the general mean-spiritedness time-traveling to the 1960s. Better it had remained in the past. The cast is undeniably attractive — Catherine Deneuve as the spiteful Madame de Merteuil, Rupert Everett as the Don Juan-ish Valmont, and … more…

It’s mired in the dirt and the grime of 17th-century France, but there’s a kind of soaring beauty to this expansively passionate film, 1990’s Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign Film, perhaps the grandest adaptation yet of Edmond Rostand’s verse about the swordsman, adventurer, poet, and would-be lover whose heart is held in check by … more…