reviews

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.

Diana Guzman greets us with a hard stare up from under her eyelashes as Girlfight opens, and right away we know that this will be no ordinary, wimpy chick flick… and that newcomer Michelle Rodriguez will rivet us with a charismatic, star-making performance. First-time writer/director Karyn Kusama has created in Diana a strong, dynamic, complex … more…

Hypochondriac hubby Robert (Paul Hipp: Waking the Dead) and domineering wife Hallie (Bitty Schram) return from a month-long vacation to find that they can’t get rid of their housesitters, obnoxious Zack (Boyd Kestner: The General’s Daughter) and his sleazily seductive girlfriend Sophie (Radha Mitchell: Pitch Black). Gracious guests Zack and Sophie are not — Zack … more…

They’re fun and they’re funny, these five Canadian non-nude guys, and they have a talent for creating songs that, depending on your predilection for edgy whimsy, will either delight you or drive you insane. But do they deserve a documentary? Barenaked in America doesn’t quite convince me they do.

Nutty aristocrat Karen Knightly (Helena Bonham Carter: Fight Club) takes revenge very seriously. Rescued from a suicide attempt gone awry by depressed businessman Henry Bell (Sam Neill: The Horse Whisperer) — both were in the process of jumping off London’s Tower Bridge — she quickly finagles him into a plot to retaliate against those who … more…

Icelandic pop star Bjork is Selma, a Czech immigrant to Washington State in 1964, and how you feel about Bjork will dictate how you feel about *Dancer in the Dark,* for this is entirely her film. It’s easy to understand why her friends were worried for her while she was shooting this — she attacks Selma with an intensity that most trained actors never achieve, embodying the almost pathologically fragile and reactive character to such a degree that you can nearly forget how illogically written a character she is.

Two young girls have been found strangled within a matter of days in the sweltering city of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Henry Hearst (Gene Hackman: Enemy of the State), “a pillar of the legal community,” found one of the bodies… or did he put her there? A 10-minute chat with police captain Victor Benezet … more…

Director Michael Ritchie’s The Fantasticks has been on the shelf for five years, and now we know why. A screen adaptation of the long-running Off-Broadway musical, this simultaneously flat and cartoonish film is, at a spare 86 minutes, still overly long and padded out with endless, insipid song-and-dance numbers. Joe McIntyre (ex New Kids of … more…