If seeing a nude Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give tested your gag reflex, you might want to skip Calendar Girls (opens Friday, January 2, at the Little Theatre). Instead of one middle-aged woman in her birthday suit, you get 11 in Girls. Even though Girls is based on a true story, it still […]
Movie Reviews
Posted inMovies
Love among the ruins
Just two years ago, Innocence, an Australian film directed by Paul Cox, dramatized the unusual possibility (unusual for cinema anyway) of a sexual relationship between two elderly people, who renew the love of their vanished youth with a genuine and touching passion. In contrast to that quiet, bittersweet romance, conducted within the context of […]
Posted inMovies
One ring to end it all
It’s over. Finally. And I think I’m glad, too. Waiting a year between installments is bad enough, but enduring the three-hour roller-coaster rides that make up the Lord of the Rings series is almost too much to bear. They’re too good. They’re too emotional. They’re also too long. The Return of the King (opens […]
Posted inMovies
Even the nonconformists are familiar
Although it hardly constitutes a major genre, the academic picture, the movie about college students and professors, remains a moderately popular form for filmmakers and film audiences. When college flicks concentrate on students, they tend to move into anarchic comedy or slaughterhouse horror, both entirely suitable for the young demographic Hollywood loves so dearly. When […]
Posted inMovies
Put some soul in your stocking
Amores Perros, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s stunning debut, was as groundbreaking, devastating, auspicious, and from as far out of left field as Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. His equally impressive follow-up, 21 Grams (opens Friday, December 26, at the Little Theatre), is nearly as accomplished as Pulp Fiction, and it should see just about as much action during […]
Posted inMovies
Magic and healing on the Western frontier
Although a single swallow, as Aristotle reminds us, doesn’t make a summer, some viewers may be forgiven for hoping that three Westerns can constitute a trend. The release of Open Range, The Last Samurai (despite its setting in Japan, very much an example of the form), and now, The Missing within the span of a […]
Posted inMovies
Ending the Cycle prematurely
I tried — mostly on a dare — to watch Matthew Barney’s entire six-hour-and-thirty-seven-minute Cremaster Cycle (also previewed by Alex Miokovic and Heidi Nickisher on page 18) over the course of one evening after being told it was a virtually impossible task. For starters, there’s the whole time commitment issue, and there’s some question over […]
Posted inMovies
East and West, past and future
Whatever else it may accomplish, the new Tom Cruise movie, The Last Samurai, demonstrates that Hollywood continues to conjugate that popular verb, “meet.” Whatever the claims from the industry and the dutiful hype from the faithful Fidos of the media, the picture positively shouts its origins in some communal cogitation that no doubt concluded with […]
Posted inMovies
Ditching Marilyn to fight a mummy
Anyone remember those old What If comics Marvel used to make that wondered how things might have turned out if certain scenarios had played out differently? I only have two that survived my childhood (“What if Elektra hadn’t died?” and “What if the Thing and the Beast continued to mutate?”), but the idea still seems […]
Posted inMovies
East and West, past and future
Whatever else it may accomplish, the new Tom Cruise movie, The Last Samurai, demonstrates that Hollywood continues to conjugate that popular verb, “meet.” Whatever the claims from the industry and the dutiful hype from the faithful Fidos of the media, the picture positively shouts its origins in some communal cogitation that no doubt concluded with […]
Posted inMovies
Pop psychiatry with an ax
Beginning with its title, the new horror flick Gothika employs a number of possibly insoluble puzzles to establish its position within its genre and, presumably, to create some additional appeal to audiences. That title, to begin with, is apparently intended as a reference to a long, bloody, and often marvelous history of literature and […]
Posted inMovies
Slick Nick, you devil, you
People who write letters to newspapers complaining about nudity, cursing, and anti-Christmas content in Love Actually (Lobsters in the manger scene?Those heathens!)will die if they see Bad Santa (opens Wednesday, November 26). It will literally kill them. Their heads will explode like popcorn kernels, so be careful who you sit near in the theater. They […]
