reviews

I discovered a straight-outta-the-50s juvenile-delinquent B movie recently, one I’d seen and loved as a teenager when it was new in 1984. Like that coelacanth discovered in the 1930s, Footloose is a living fossil, a holdover from a time when kids were cool and adults square, and the drive-in burger joint was the place to be seen after school.

You could call this overwhelmingly wonderful movie Boydance, the diametric opposite of the recent Girlfight: Boy unexpectedly discovers himself on the dance floor. But what he learns about himself are not the kinds of things that mesh well with the expectations of those around him. If you liked My Dog Skip and October Sky, if stories about being different in a conformist small town and being sensitive and expressive in a place in which people don’t know how to deal with that speak to you, I promise you that you will love Billy Elliot.

Life is horrible, and there’s no escape except the ultimate one — that about sums up writer/director Lynne Ramsay’s feature debut, Ratcatcher. A young boy drowns in the cruddy, sickly canal that wends its way through rundown council flats in mid 1970s Glasgow; 12-year-old James (William Eadie) secretly witnessed it, and now he’s haunted by … more…

It’s been a while since I watched Tim Robbins’s sublime Bob Roberts, and I forgot how hilarious and pointed it is. Only eight years old, this razor-sharp mockumentary about a neo-fascist yuppie running for the U.S. senate from Pennsylvania is barely satire anymore. Who but a comedy writer could come up with the concept of ‘compassionate conservatism,’ which as far as I can tell, translates as ‘We don’t help the poor and needy, but we feel really bad about that’? Who but a modern day Jonathan Swift could invent a Democratic ticket that blatantly courts Hollywood money out of one side of its mouth and then condemns the very products that rake in some of those millions?

Feminist cliches aside, that is precisely what The Contender does: Put feminist cliches aside to tell an honest and straightforward story about lies and corruption, a sharp and cutting tale that often verges on satire about what a woman — or a man — needs to make it to the very summit of American power: the White House.

Based on Evelina Fernández’s hit stage play, Luminarias is most notable for the characters playing out its sometimes sitcomish plot: professional Latina women. Sick of being cast as a maid or mother of a gangbanger, Fernández, along with director Jose Luis Valenzuela (her husband) and actor/producer Sal Lopez, raised the $1 million budget from California’s … more…

Never before have dreams died in so nightmarish a manner. Crumbling Coney Island has spawned heroin junkie Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto: American Psycho), whose mother, Sara (Ellen Burstyn), stumbles through her own unendurable life with the help of her addictions: chocolate, TV, coffee. As Harry, his girlfriend, Marion (Jennifer Connelly: Waking the Dead), and his … more…

He used to be an intelligent comic actor with a talent for sublime, deadpan satire — see Zero Effect. But he was too smart for his own good — his self-titled comedy series, The Ben Stiller Show, couldn’t last more than a handful of episodes on the wasteland of network television. So these days, he has transformed himself into a punching-bag straight man with the apparent goal of seeing how far the human body can be abused and the human spirit humiliated on film. He has, sadly, been a huge success with audiences in this effort, and his new movie is sure to further this sorry reputation even further.