In its progress from a surprise hit made on a relatively modest budget back in the 1980s to its current status as yet another mammoth summer spectacular, The Terminator has undergone the familiar transformation from innovative and influential work with some genuine intellectual implications to yet another ho-hum blockbuster. It now seems to have ascended […]
Movie Reviews
Posted inMovies
The business of murder and swashbucklery
François Ozon was once considered the enfant terrible of French cinema. Then he made the critically praised and very adult Under the Sand and followed it up with last year’s musical murder-mystery 8 Women. In his latest, Swimming Pool (opens Friday, July 18, at the Little), Ozon has finally found a way to effectively blend […]
Posted inMovies
The strange, the kinky, and the Krispy
If the air outside is thick enough to cut with a knife, that means it’s time for the Rochester Jewish Film Festival. The festival opens this Sunday (July 13) and continues through the following Sunday (July 20), with all screenings taking place at either the Dryden Theatre or the Little Theatre. City has the inside […]
Posted inMovies
Birds of a feather
Appearing quietly amid the multiple explosions rattling the walls of the cineplexes, the new movie Winged Migration represents a phenomenon considerably more astonishing than Bruce Banner mutating into a raging green giant or Arnold Schwarzenegger remaining, well, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in all his granitic stolidity. The motion picture shows exactly what its title implies, the travels […]
Posted inMovies
An old-fashioned movie
The cinema exerts so powerful and personal an effect on the senses and the spirit that viewers often feel an intense emotional connection with particular movies, especially from their own pasts, far exceeding their reactions to other kinds of art and perhaps even to life itself. In part because of the sheer physical act of […]
Posted inMovies
A ‘Whale’ of a film
It has won audience awards at film fests from Rotterdam to Sundance, but no trophy is more impressive than the one Whale Rider earned at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. In the seven years I’ve been attending Toronto, the audience has only abused its power once, for 1997’s The Hanging Garden (it had the […]
Posted inMovies
Big and green and mad as hell
Now and then a motion picture comes along that actually deserves all those superlatives that clog the daily prose of most reviewers, that sends them digging through their thesauruses for bouquets of compliments, that inspires them to deploy all the artillery in their sadly depleted arsenals of praise. The Hulk, alas and alack, is undoubtedly […]
Posted inMovies
Knee deep in Euro pudding
L’Auberge Espagnole, which either means The Spanish Hotel or Euro Pudding (depending on who you listen to), is way closer to being a Real World movie than The Real Cancun was. Actually, if you were able to mate MTV’s groundbreaking reality show with Lukas Moodysson’s Swedish communal comedy Together, you’d end up with something a […]
Posted inMovies
The cop formula as before
Although probably best known for a series of gritty, authentic sports flicks often laced with considerable quantities of irony and humor — White Men Can’t Jump, Bull Durham, Tin Cup, Cobb, Play It to the Bone — Ron Shelton has also worked in some of the popular action genres. Most recently, in fact, he directed […]
Posted inMovies
Chasing a ‘Whale’ in Lake Placid
For some reason, Fate has seemed determined to keep me from the Lake Placid Film Forum. I didn’t even know about the first Forum, in 2000, until it ended. In 2001 I was all set to go but got run over by a truck instead. Last year, the Forum ran opposite the World Cup, and […]
Posted inMovies
The Finnish comedy
The actor-director Maximilian Schell once suggested that a country needs a population of at least 50 million to generate a genuine national film industry. Whatever the accuracy of Schell’s theory, history demonstrates that a comparatively limited number of citizens has not necessarily precluded the making of motion pictures in, say, Cuba, Sweden, or New Zealand. […]
Posted inMovies
Doc… doc… doc… goose!
The biggest edge-of-your-seat summer thrill ride isn’t The Matrix Reloaded, Charlie’s Angels 2: Full Throttle, or even the sex-change drama From Justin to Kelly. It’s a little documentary called Spellbound (opens Friday, June 13, at the Little) that follows eight children to the national finals of the Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee in Washington, DC. That’s […]
