reviews

Nicky Arnstein, Nicky Arnstein… If dreamy Omar Sharif isn’t enough to send you running to the multiplex for the revival of William Wyler’s (Ben-Hur) 1968 musical Funny Girl, then know that some chick named Babs appears in it, too. Legendary diva Streisand won an Oscar for her performance as legendary Ziegfeld girl Fanny Brice, who … more…

Maybe Brooks’s 1987 spoof of Star Wars came too long after the mania that inspired it to be truly effective, because I remember sitting in the theater as a teenager, laughing intermittently but mostly thinking, What is this shit? Star Wars is so over.

The year is 1975, but the 60s haven’t ended yet. The Stockholm collective that calls itself “Tillsammans” (Swedish for “together”) is managing quite nicely, thank you, without television or meat, without requiring underwear in the kitchen, and without any of that romantic possessiveness inherent in exclusive relationships. But then into this little counterculture comes suburban … more…

You can always spot time travelers — they’re the ones who dress a little weird and can’t make change. Or are those folks just oddballs from the here and now? This is the dilemma facing New Yorker Ruby Weaver (Marisa Tomei: Someone Like You). Her new boyfriend, Sam Deed (Vincent D’Onofrio: The Cell) is a … more…

I’ve been trying to come up with some clever twist on that infamous New York Post headline — ‘Headless Body in Topless Bar’ — and the best I can do is ‘Headless Bodies on Witless Mars.

The summer of 2001 may well go down in the annals of Hollywood as the worst ever, and Bubble Boy is the capper, the finale, the rancid icing on a rotten cake. If this summer’s flicks seemed to consist almost entirely of scum scraped off the bottom of the cinematic barrel, then Bubble Boy proves that that barrel actually has no bottom and is merely a doorway into a hellish void, an abyss of Bad Movies that is eternal and infinite.

All writers — all artists — pour themselves into their work. They have to, if it’s going to be any good. Whether very personal projects — the ones that an artist really opens a vein for — resonate with audiences depends, sometimes, on whether we feel any kind of simpatico with the artist and what he’s revealing, or whether the work demonstrates any indication of self-reflection on the artist’s part. There has to be a point in baring one soul’s, one’s secret fantasies, to the world, after all.

The last 10 minutes of the film are deliciously, preposterously pulpy, as if everyone finally figured out that you just can’t take this kind of thing seriously and at last was having some fun with it. If only the whole movie had been so devil-may-care.

God, this is an excruciating movie. Perhaps the problem is that I didn’t see it back when I was 19 and still thought Kiefer Sutherland was cute. No, wait, I never thought Kiefer Sutherland was cute.

Not too many movies touch me so much that I need to retreat to somewhere private and sob my eyes out — this was one of them. Enormously poignant, this intimate tale of one family’s immigration from Hungary to the United States accents how the yearning for freedom can cause the deepest pain, and how … more…