my week at the movies: ‘The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,’ ‘Trucker,’ ‘Couples Retreat,’ ‘Motherhood,’ ‘Red Cliff,’ ‘Capitalism: A Love Story’

I’m stoked for my very early screening this week of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (opens in the U.K. on October 16, and in the U.S. on December 25), Terry Gilliam’s new movie and Heath Ledger’s last. I’m avoiding reading the reviews from Cannes, but I am intrigued to see how Gilliam manages to work … more…

Mission: Impossible 2 and Shanghai Noon (review)

Can it be a coincidence that both of the big new flicks this Memorial Day weekend — the kickoff for Hollywood’s first summer movie season of the twenty-first century — are basically Hong Kong action movies? The people who think about these kinds of things — current-events journalists, mainly — have already predicted that if the 1900s were the American century, the 2000s may well be the Asian century… but they were speaking economically and politically. I guess it’s probably inevitable that Asia would start to hold some cultural sway in the West, too.