Enchanted movie review: toon in, toon out
The sweet silliness of the collective Disney animated fairy-tale landscape meets the rough reality of Noo Yawk. Why didn’t someone think of this sooner and pull it off as perfectly as Enchanted does?
New York City
Michael Clayton (review)
You sell out and you sell out and you sell out until you can’t do it anymore. And that’s when things gets interesting.
Tribeca ’07: The Gates (review)
You will hear, Let them eat gates. I can’t imagine a better choice for the closing-night film of the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival: The Gates — a stunning, beautiful, deeply moving documentary about the art project by installation artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude — will have its world premiere on Saturday night with a gala screening. … more…
Tribeca ’07: Mulberry Street (review)
An ultralow-budget horror with a style and flavor all its own, driven by character and reveling in its utter lack of coin as, it seems, the freedom and permission it needed to be clever and original.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (review)
Sacha Baron Cohen is a genius. A crazy genius, maybe, a man who takes dedication to his art to a level courting criminal prosecution and bodily harm, but a genius nevertheless.
16 Blocks (review)
Harrison Ford should take some lessons from Bruce Wills: this is how you do “action” after, um, a certain age…
King Kong (2005) (review)
Words like ‘meditation’ and ‘contemplation’ may seem inappropriate, at first glance, because the standard hack-movie-critic phrases like ‘roller-coaster ride’ followed by multiple exclamation points don’t even come close to doing justice to the heart-revving adrenaline rush Jackson has crafted. Two words: dino stampede. I probably should have put my head down between my knees and taken a series of long, deep breaths to recover from that early Skull Island setpiece, except it would have meant taking my eyes from the screen, and there was no way in hell I could have done that.
King Kong (1933/1976) (review)
What with the new DVD release of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 *King Kong* and the anticipation over Peter Jackson’s about-to-be-released homage, the eternal question is renewed: Just why the hell did the natives on Skull Island build an anti-Kong wall… and then put a Kong-size door in it?
Madagascar (review)
‘Ahhhh! Nature! It’s all over me! Get it off!’ screams Melman the urban giraffe once he reaches the titular island in *Madagascar,* and New Yorkers will scream, too, with laughter, because we recognize ourselves in it, and everyone else will scream with laughter because they’ll think it’s making fun of our neuroses. But we like our neuroses just fine, thank you, and appreciate the tribute to them that *Madagascar* is.
Pieces of April and National Lampoon’s Thanksgiving Family Reunion movies review: family affairs
Family: It’s what Thanksgiving is all about, isn’t it? I mean, besides the waiting for the arrival of Santa to wrap up the Macy’s parade in the morning and the gorging in the afternoon and the massive cleanup in the evening.
