reviews

Somewhere in the very progressive Netherlands, three catty sisters get a bombshell dropped on them by their gay brother: He’s getting married. To a girl. As their own mother calls the sisters “selfish bitches,” and they clearly are, it’s no surprise that it’s not their brother’s well-being that concerns them… it’s the fact that he … more…

Topless female boxing. There you go. This bizarre, would-be literary exploration of incestuous father-daughter attraction, anger management, and women beating the crap out of each other while their particulars flap in the wind is actually nowhere near as salacious as it sounds but nowhere near as interesting as it could have been, either. Troubled teen … more…

Joni Mitchell is “a true poet,” says New York Times music critic Stephen Holden, and this lovely documentary is a beautifully poetic exploration of her unconventional life and uncommon career. Narrated by Mitchell friends and fellow musicians including David Crosby and Graham Nash, her former agent David Geffen, and Mitchell herself, this evocative montage of … more…

It’s Ms. Woods Goes to Washington as the superchipper Barbie-with-a-brain and her pink wardrobe head to the nation’s capital for some fun with law and politics. It can’t hope to match the original for sheer surprise — who’d have thunk fashion and the judicial system could play so nicely together? — but it tries harder … more…

You know what? I’m not even going to complain that this kind of stuff is inappropriate for kids and what is it doing in what is basically a children’s film, cuz honestly, it’s all gonna go right over their head, except for the naked butt cheek, of course, but kids think that’s pretty funny particularly if a dog was involved in that teeth-to-the-butt-rips-the-pants kind of way, as is the case here.

You know it’s true: A film like *T3* you anticipate with a kind of dread tempered with only a little bit of hope. I mean, come on: It’s Arnie doing the same tired thing yet again and Cameron’s not involved and fer Kyle Reese’s sake, the title needs the tagline built right into it so we know where to orient ourselves in the story.

The most galling thing about *Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle* — and this is an exercise all about the escalation of gall in Hollywood — is that it has the audacity to present itself as ‘A Film by McG.’ Like he’s Orson Welles or something, like some Grand Vision or Theory of Film informs his work, like this is a production that even approaches being worthy of being called an actual, you know, *film,* like it even attempts to pretend to being anything other than what it is, which is a series of incoherent, cheap-looking, badly written, and poorly directed television commercials for itself.