reviews

If my mom and I could rewind 25 years, we’d probably be sneaking out to see *Tuck Everlasting.* No, it’s not about a scrappy girl wise beyond her tender years — or wiseacre beyond her tender years. Kids are nicer now, and *Tuck*’s Winnie Foster is just the kind of very nice, respectable, well-behaved girl we all (supposedly) want our daughters to be.

Great: now I’ve got something else to worry about when the cat’s acting weird. Like maybe it passed through a stygian portal into some infernal realm and has been transformed into a hellbeast bent on rending the flesh from human bones. Danish filmmaker Martin Schmidt’s quietly ooky thriller explores just such a possibility, and don’t … more…

There aren’t even very many scares along the lines of ‘This is the part where the whatever jumps out’ in fact, either. No, it’s much creepier, much smarter stuff than that. Anyone can go ‘Boo!’ and make you leap from your seat for a moment. It’s making stuff haunt you even after the movie’s over that’s harder, so not too many movies even attempt it.

I erred on the side of giving a guy a second chance (though I still dread the prospect of *Cajun Man: The Motion Picture*), and on the side of not wanting to miss a Paul Thomas Anderson flick, so it’s a little disconcerting to have discovered that Sandler is really quite good here, touchingly so even, and that Anderson may not be.

Vin Diesel just keeps making me madder and madder. Despite his hulking hugeness and the fact that he once worked as a bouncer (or so we’re told — maybe that’s just a good story to tell on Leno), he’s clearly not the thug he’s been playing onscreen for the last few years. He’s written, produced, and directed films — *Multi-Facial* and *Strays* — that have played in competition at Sundance and screened at Cannes. How can someone like that possibly be satisfied playing the grunting, amoral Neanderthal, the one who communicates primarily with his fists?

I suppose it’s meant to be taken as satire that adolescent mash notes written in flowery language, in silver ink on purple notepaper, crammed with sparkly things and left by a secret admirer — real eighth-grade homeroom stuff — are juxtaposed here with the random, anonymous, drug-fueled, fun-free sexcapades of the overprivileged students of Camden … more…

Documentarian Arthur Dong avoids demonizing the conservative Christians at the center of Family Fundamentals, his heartbreaking look at the religious right and their gay children. But those who disagree with their views on human sexuality won’t be able to help but scoff when one of them asserts that there are no gays, just “heterosexuals with … more…

That’s cool. Cuz like these Russo guys, Anthony and Joe — who I bet get called Antny and Joey — lookin’ for their Mamet instead found their Sturges or their Capra (before he went all gooey), like a real doozy of an old-fashioned crime caper thingie. So knowin’ a ton of stuff about life only from old movies maybe ain’t such a bad thing.

There have been several previous screen adaptations of *The Lost World,* one as early as 1925, but now the cycle of inspiration has come full circle, as A&E and the BBC bring us a new TV miniseries (soon to be released on DVD and VHS) with special effects from the BBC computer nerds who gave us the amazingly realistic documentary *Walking with Dinosaurs,* who were of course inspired by *Jurassic Park,* which was perhaps inspired by Conan Doyle’s novel itself.