reviews

Take this spring’s Where the Money Is, give it a dose of weary reality, and you’ll come up with this compact and understated treasure of a film. First-time writer/director Myles Connell takes us deep into the lives of hard-luck, working-class guys who turn small-time crooks more out of sheer, stupid desperation than anything else. Queens … more…

Just ask Johnny Depp, Book Detective. Depp plays Dean Corso, an unscrupulous New York City rare-book dealer — and by ‘unscrupulous’ I mean ‘double-dealing money-grubbing bastard,’ to quote The Ninth Gate, the most ominously silly movie since Eyes Wide Shut.

Instead of an edgy and cool Christina Ricci movie, *Bless the Child* is more like a USA Networks adorable-moppet-in-peril flick, the kind with titles like *Oh Please No Dear God in Heaven Not My Baby.* With some of *The Sixth Sense* mixed in. In fact, this script was probably dragged out from under a slush pile at Paramount after everyone started raving about that Osment kid and shhh! not telling Bruce Willis’s big secret.

Ever find yourself in a movie so insidiously stupid that, if your foot were stuck to the floor by golden topping or gum or something even more disgusting, you’d chew your own leg off to get out of the theater? That’s what ‘coyote ugly’ means. And *Coyote Ugly* is coyote ugly.

Or The Zen of Guyness. The toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Jenniphr Goodman’s romantic comedy is the latest in what’s becoming a mini-genre: the renunciation of GenX relationship slackerdom, in which thirtysomethings learn to make a romantic commitment, settle down, and — *gulp* — even like it (see High Fidelity). Kindergarten teacher Dex … more…

Call this Oldmageddon. Space Cowboys is Armageddon for your dad, the testosterone-drenched misogyny replaced with amiable, old-coot crankiness. The film shuffles along for the first hour and twenty minutes, as Frank, the waistband of his pants edging up toward his armpits, marshals Team Daedelus: Tank Sullivan (James Garner), now a preacher; Jerry O’Nell (Donald Sutherland), now a roller-coaster engineer with frightening teeth, a ponytail, and a taste for younger women; and Hawk Hawkins (Tommy Lee Jones), still a daredevil in his biplane-for-hire business. Hell yes! They’ll go to space with Frank!

Rarely has such an epic film — in length, at more than three hours, and in scope, spanning decades — been handled so remarkably sparely. Without flourishes such as dramatic camerawork or an emotionally manipulative score, The Right Stuff puts us right in the middle of some of the most historic moments of the 20th century, among people who knew exactly how momentous those moments were, and simply lets us experience them.

You could remove *Hollow Man* from the multiplex — just quietly sneak the print out the back door — and replace it with one of the other innumerable *Alien* knockoffs of the last twenty years, and who would know the difference? Lock a bunch of cardboard characters in an inaccessible place and set a monster loose — those left standing in the end will invariably be the cast members with the highest billing. Damn you, Ridley Scott, for making such an original and terrifying movie that every hack screenwriter and director has found himself inspired by it.