reviews

Seriously, though, Blackout ’03 was surely the work of some desperate humanitarian who flipped a big red switch somewhere in the Northeast U.S. in a valiant attempt to keep as many good people as possible from having their hearts and minds and souls besmirched by *Uptown Girls.* Were you unable to see *Uptown Girls* because you were stuck in a small, stuffy elevator for 12 hours? Count yourself among the lucky.

Can it be a coincidence that as the ‘news’ gets more fictional and ‘reality’ TV can’t get any more fake, documentaries are experiencing something of a renaissance? Not that there haven’t always been nonfiction films well worth seeing — but the batch of worthy docs this summer seem to be doing terrific business and garnering terrific (and well-deserved) word of mouth, as if we’re all hungering for something real, and this is the only place we’re finding it.

It’s entirely possible that Claude Lelouch’s ludicrous *And Now… Ladies and Gentlemen…* was stitched together out of lost episodes of *Monty Python’s Flying Circus,* circa-1976 TV ads for cheap French perfume, and late-night infomercials for CD compilations of smooth jazz.

This spiffy and thoroughly charming update of the 1976 Disney classic brings the perennial battle between mothers and daughters into the modern world — complete with Blackberrys and belly-button piercings — and shows that though the details may have changed, the struggle itself remains eternal… and winnable on both sides. Jamie Lee Curtis, as a … more…

It’s not that *S.W.A.T.* is actively awful — it’s just sort of boring and completely predictable and a little bit laughable in its psychology. Mostly this is because everyone involved seems to be under the impression that this isn’t your typical idiotic action movie — despite the involvement of producer Neal Moritz, he of *XXX* and *The Fast and the Furious* fame — but that it is somehow a character drama that just happens to be about guys whose defining attribute is a deep and abiding love of powerful automatic weapons and enormous phallic tools that smash walls and cool cop uniforms where you tuck the pants into the boots.

Attention, all idiots who a few months ago were renaming fried potatoes ‘freedom fries’ and pouring perfectly lovely French wines down sewers: Avoid *Le Divorce.* It’s about the French. Worse, it’s about Americans who like the French and have sex with them and actually like living in France.

Spare and beautiful visually, lush and bracing aurally, this ardent celebration of flamenco dance and music is bursting with the most fiery of emotions: love and lust and murderous rage. In dusty Andalusia in Spain, rival gipsy clans are heading for a final showdown in their most recent of blood feuds, but until that happens, … more…

It’s a measure of how, like, totally influential this little film was 20 years ago that there seems to be nothing special about it today. A punk from Hollywood and a girl from the Valley hook up? It’s like soooo who cares? But director Martha Coolidge’s transference of Romeo and Juliet to Southern California introduced … more…

It’s been sitting on a shelf since 1997 and the director is the pseudonymous “Allen Smithee” — one of these signs alone would be enough to set off alarms, and together they should spell disaster. And yet here we have a finely attuned and deftly executed little film, unassuming and unpretentious, about hustlers in Hollywood … more…

She’s the pop diva against which all others are measured, and that extends to her adventures in movie-stardom, too. With her flair for madcap comedy and a compelling intensity in dramatic roles, Barbra Streisand puts the likes of J.Lo and Britney to shame, as this collection demonstrates beautifully. Two 1972 films — Peter Bogdanovich’s goofy … more…