There’s good news and bad news about In the Cut (opens Friday, October 31), both on and off the screen. Good news: The swelling in Meg Ryan’s lips looks like it has subsided a bit in the film. Bad news: In real life, they’ve been re-inflated and are as big as monster truck tires. More […]
Movies
Posted inMovies
The blight of lost childhood
Even for Hollywood, which tends to specialize in the offbeat and bizarre, Clint Eastwood’s career has followed a rather unusual pattern. After several years playing minor film roles and a longish stint in a television Western series, he journeyed to Europe, where many American actors go to work after they die, but unlike many of […]
Posted inMovies
Women sticking to their guns
It doesn’t happen often — in fact, it’s downright uncommon — but once in a while, I’ll become so completely engrossed in a movie, I’ll forget I’m watching it in a theater full of people. It happened with Casa de los Babys (opens Friday, October 24, at the Little), the latest flick from eclectic American […]
Posted inMovies
An appetite for criminal justice
In contemporary popular fiction and cinema, John Grisham is to the dusty courtroom what Stephen King is to the dank basement. If one deals with ghosts and monsters, the unspeakable fears lurking in the depths of the soul, the other probes the more familiar and, in our litigious time, the more palpable anxieties of the […]
Posted inMovies
Fighting drug dealers, gainful employment
There were three high-profile biopics unveiled at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival, and two of them were about print journalists with very different work ethics. One was Shattered Glass, about New Republic writer Stephen “The Original Jayson Blair” Glass, while the other chose to focus on the exact same subject covered in 2000 festival […]
Posted inMovies
Racing against the clock
The new Denzel Washington film, Out of Time, suggests something about how far Hollywood and American popular culture have traveled in a generation. The writer and director may very well have intended simply to make a taut, exciting thriller celebrating the heritage of classic film noir. However, their movie, inadvertently or not, provides a curious […]
Posted inMovies
Quivering over Quentin’s queasy comeback
First, let’s put some of the rumors to bed: Quentin Tarantino always envisioned Kill Bill as a two-volume opus — he just didn’t spring the idea on Miramax until things were nearly finished. Volume 1 actually lends itself to episodes better than, say, The Matrix Reloaded or either of the first two Lord of the […]
Posted inMovies
Italy of the American imagination
While most authors dream of literary success followed by cinematic success, most film producers attempt to exploit the public awareness that a best seller creates along with its built-in audience. The right combination of a blockbuster book with a profitable counterpart in film represents a publicist’s dream, a marriage made perhaps not in heaven, but […]
Posted inMovies
Black and White and great all over
Leave it to edgy indie auteurs Richard Linklater (director of Waking Life) and Mike White (screenwriter-star of The Good Girl and Chuck & Buck) to take a genre that’s been completely rubbed into the ground and left for dead by hack after hack and make it into something fresh and exciting, not to mention really […]
Posted inMovies
Sex and punishment in Ireland
A scene occurring rather late in The Magdalene Sisters shows a group of female inmates of a peculiar Irish Catholic institution known as a Magdalene Asylum, along with the nuns who supervise them, gathered on Christmas Day to watch a movie effusively introduced by the mother superior. The movie of course is The Bells of […]
Posted inMovies
Lost in perfection, or Tokyo
There are several scenes in Lost in Translation (opens Friday, September 26, at the Little), Sofia Coppola’s brilliant follow-up to The Virgin Suicides, that were blindingly hysterical on the big screen. But somehow, as I sit down to write this review, they just don’t seem as funny on my little screen. I know what I […]
Posted inMovies
From burqas to bunnies: a second dose of Toronto
Here’s the dirt on the second half of the Toronto International Film Festival, which just ended Saturday (September 13) evening. The Good The Brown Bunny: Vincent Gallo’s notorious road-trip flick, which was booed out of Cannes this past May (it was an unfinished print that ran 30 minutes longer than the final version screened here), […]
