reviews

*Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights* is but a misdemeanor, though, when held up next to *Twisted,* which is criminally bad from its opening moments.

Peter Nyarol Dut and Santino Majok Chuor came to the United States in 2001, and their lives afterward were nothing like they expected. Orphaned as children by horrendous civil war in their home country of Sudan, they lived for years in a refugee camp in Kenya awaiting the opportunity to emigrate, and when permission came, … more…

In the early 1950s, Sweden’s Home Research Institute, having scientifically assessed the movements of Scandinavian housewives in the kitchen, decided to study the household habits of bachelor men. Actually, no: the HRI doesn’t really exist, except in Bent Hamer’s winsome and touching film. Winner of Norway’s highest award for feature films, this is a delightfully … more…

I wondered, back when I decided to give this flick-filosophizing thing a shot, how long I could keep it up. How many movies could I cover and still find interesting stuff to say beyond ‘this is good’ and ‘that is bad’? Turns out, I mostly needn’t have worried — six and a half years and close to one thousand reviews later, it’s the rare film in which I can’t find something to spout off about (though whether that spouting is actually interesting isn’t for me to say).

The geeky love, the wonderfully geeky love of bad B movies has now come full circle, from the unappreciated decades of the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, to their ascendancy to objects of derision and perverse fannish worship on the Satellite of Love, to today, with *The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra,* which affectionately apes the ‘genre’ in all its awful, hilarious glory.

In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where the lives of girls and women are rigidly controlled and confined, a desperate widow cuts her 12-year-old daughter’s hair, dresses her in boy’s clothes, and sends her out into the city so she can work to support her mother and grandmother. Filmmaker Siddiq Barmak, a resident of Kabul who spent the … more…

It’s almost identical, in terms of plot and character, to the delightful Danish film it’s a remake of, so why does it fall flat and leave a slightly greasy aftertaste? Maybe it’s because going Hollywood lends this silly tale of kids pulling off a heist a kind of stamp of approval for its felonious youngsters. … more…

It’s disappointing but hardly a shock to find that this sequel, probably only the first of many, feels rushed and frantic — it’s been a mere 17 months, after all, since the charming sleeper original hit the screens. Screenwriter Don D. Scott doesn’t come with an impressive resume — though he cowrote the first film, … more…

It’s *Seabiscuit* on ice as the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team gets immortalized on film with warm, fuzzy, ain’t-America-grand, flag-waving apple-piety. Times were tough and things were bad and the world looked like it was going to hell, and gosh darn but didn’t the country need this little pick-me-up in the form of twenty redblooded American kids beating and skating the crap out of the Russians and taking home the gold.

Hide the children! Bring in the dog! Lock the doors! No, it’s not Janet Jackson’s nipple, it’s penises. More than one of them. And breasts and pubic hair. And teenagers having sex. And masturbating. And smoking! And drinking. And engaging in acts of civil disobedience.