reviews

Corny? Sure. Melodramatic? You bet. And yet it still retains the ability to make you huddle a little tighter under the blankets as you curl up on the couch. The fear the best horror movies inspire springs from the power of suggestion and your own imagination, not from what you see on the screen. And so the key to getting some good, fun chills out of a silly old movie like The Wolf Man is atmosphere: Watch after midnight. Turn off the lights. Light a few candles. Don’t let your feet dangle off the edge of the couch or bed, lest a monster grab your ankle.

Raiders of the Lost Ark started here. The English Patient and Lawrence of Arabia nod almost imperceptibly in this direction. Stargate owes a huge debt. Okay, we could have done without Stargate, but my point is this: 1932’s The Mummy was the spark that ignited moviegoers’ love of shifting desert sands, adventurous archeology, and the mysteries of the past, a love that inspired some of the greatest films of all time and way too many movies not worth remembering.

Though he seems to try his damnedest to be one of those annoyingly frisky and ingratiating child actors, I just can’t help but love Jonathan Lipnicki. The lispy little guy who informed us how much the human head weighs in Jerry Maguire is still a self-conscious performer rather than a natural actor, but he takes … more…

Self-taught artist Elmer Wayne Henley claims that the act of appreciating nature “calms the soul” — “it proves to me that there’s a God,” he says, and so his rather naive paintings depict flowers and landscapes. Henley is serving six life sentences for the sexual torture and murder of dozens of young men, and whether … more…

Bahman Ghobadi is an Iranian Kurdish filmmaker — the only Kurdish filmmaker — whose short films have been set among his people, a disenfranchised ethnic minority in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. Horses, his first feature film, is fictional, but the characters and events are based in fact. Ghobadi hopes to promote awareness of his cultural heritage and the lives of his people, and he succeeds stunningly — this is a haunting film, performed by an extraordinary nonprofessional cast, about hardscrabble life at the outermost fringes of civilization.

Filmed with no sets, no controlled environments, no professional actors, and little more than ambient light and sound, this is practically a Dogme 95 film, a triumph of style over very little substance, so self-conscious and affected that it is willing to sublimate story and character to Art. In a storytelling medium like film, that’s unforgivable.

Is this a film that will be lauded a century from now? Will we even be talking about it next month? Of course not. But in the wake of the mean-spirited Meet the Parents, it’s refreshing to find a comedy so frothy, sweet-tempered, and ultimately optimistic as Bedazzled.

I’ll lay it out for you right here with something you can quote back at me in your complaints: Pay It Forward is a cheaply manipulative film of constructed sentimentality that left me feeling angry at how it tried to jerk my emotions around. Feel free to rant about how heartless and unfeeling I am.

Put on your magnetic bracelet, gaze into your crystal, and align your chakras. Now you’re ready to journey into the world of “alternative” medicine and pseudoscience devotees director Eli Kabillio explores in these short documentaries. Hippies looking to expand their minds take the concept a tad too literally in A Hole in the Head, engaging … more…

On Independence Day weekend in 1997, UFO enthusiasts descended upon Roswell, New Mexico, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of what they say was the crash of a spaceship from another world. And the documentarians who brought you Trekkies were there, looking at the faithful with the same half-withering, half-respectful eye. But this time, in a … more…