An unseen stalker threatens a family in the French thriller Caché
By Luke Y. Thompson The best thing about Michael Haneke's Caché (Hidden) is the way it draws on contemporary fears without ever mentioning them. The War on Terror era has given us new things to be afraid of — being prey for terrorists, the government's response — and they all make people feel insecure in their own homes. Will we get anthrax in the mail? Is there a wiretap on all of our communications? We don't know, but it's possible. If it seems like a stretch to project American phobias onto a French film, keep in mind they get much of our media and have had analogous situations of their own. ... full story»
A Good Woman would benefit from a good actor or two
By Robert Wilonsky Good Woman, Mike Barker's adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play Lady Windermere's Fan, has been gathering dust for some time. It played the Toronto Film Festival in the fall of 2004 before opening in 2005 in every country in the world except this one. Such dawdling doesn't bode well for its contents, which bear the musty, dusty scent of passed-over product; if this thing were at all good, surely it would have played Miami before Malaysia. And perhaps it would not have opened at all were it not for the appearance of Scarlett Johansson; surely her unfathomable high marks for Match Point warrant ... full story»
The World's Fastest Indian
By Bill Gallo Anthony Hopkins lends style points to any movie in which he appears. Roger Donaldson's real-life tale about an eccentric fellow New Zealander, who fulfilled a lifelong dream in 1963 by racing his ancient Indian motorcycle across Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, is a case in point. Donaldson (Thirteen Days, Dante's Peak) bathes his aging, decrepit hero, Burt Munro, in a kind of fairy-tale light, but once Hopkins hits the road from Los Angeles to Utah, the director turns this quirky, single-minded idealist into something special, a wholly likable striver whose dignity and dream we want to embrace ... full story»
2006-01-26
Ambition pays off as film festival sprawls
By OCTAVIO ROCA The diversity is breathtaking. This year's Miami Jewish Film Festival sprawls with four venues featuring a batch of motion pictures that seem to cover everything Jewish under the sun. Hitler and Stalin, the Holocaust and Heaven, klezmer and ska, ambitious masterpieces, family dramas, slapstick comedies, and earnest documentaries add up to a movie feast you don't have to be Jewish to enjoy. Even in a field crowded with promise, however, one picture stands out.
It is called Fateless (2005, directed by Lajos Koltai, in Hungarian with English subtitles), and it is immensely moving, a work of ... full story»
The New World boldly reclaims the Pocahontas tale from Disney
By Luke Y. Thompson America — and by extension Hollywood — has an obsession with innocence and the loss thereof. Every generation has that Moment When Everything Changed, from Pearl Harbor to JFK's assassination to 9/11. The impact takes awhile to settle in, then people forget again, and future generations are similarly traumatized. But if you really want to talk about clashes of civilizations and culture shocks, why not go back all the way, to the founding of the country as we know it?
Though Indians and white men had encountered one another prior to the Pocahontas tale that's retold in The New ... full story»
Match Point
By Robert Wilonsky The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen's finest film since Bullets over Broadway. It is not difficult to understand the accolades and affection: It resembles one of his very best movies, 1989's Crimes and Misdemeanors, down to the plot point in which Martin Landau's affair with Anjelica Huston leads an unlikely suspect to do very bad things in order to keep his secret. Consider Match Point — bereft of those hoary old jazz standards on the soundtrack and a single intentional laugh — Allen's straight-faced do-over, his veddy English attempt at making right a movie done ... full story»
2006-01-19
Tristan & Isolde's clumsy romance may make you crave Shakespeare
By Bill Gallo Over the centuries, the legend of Tristram and Iseult has fueled the derring-do of King Arthur, aroused Richard Wagner's operatic thunder, driven poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Edwin Arlington Robinson to the heights of passion, and helped stock the back streets of Manhattan with companies of leaping Jets and Sharks. It is actually a complex cycle of tales, from largely Celtic sources, that has inspired at least two dozen previous movies, beginning in 1920. Now the secret lovers of old are back on the big screen — in a sword-clanging, skull-bashing war epic that will ... full story»
White Countess writes an inglorious final chapter for a dynamic filmmaking duo
By Bill Gallo With the release of The White Countess, the much-honored Merchant Ivory canon is complete. Bombay-born producer Ismail Merchant died in May 2005 at age 68, and whatever direction his long-time collaborator and life-companion, director James Ivory, now chooses, the working partnership that gave us a dozen elegantly furnished period pieces over a quarter-century is history. For Merchant Ivory's detractors, who dismiss the films as pompous, outdated pseudo-lit, that is no great loss. But even staunch loyalists who relish their high style and good taste are likely to judge Countess a thing of ... full story»
The Libertine
By Melissa Levine This artful and brooding period piece follows John Wilmot (Johnny Depp), a scandalously debauched earl of the English Restoration who apparently was not in contact with feelings of compassion or sympathy. The film opens with an attack — "I am John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, and I do not want you to like me," the earl snarls — and doesn't soften, despite Wilmot's infatuation with actress Lizzie Barry (Samantha Morton). By the time the alcoholism and syphilis have peeled the skin from Wilmot's face and the muscle from his bones, it's difficult not to feel at least a little ... full story»
2006-01-12
Glory Road relives the season college hoops smashed the color barrier
By Bill Gallo Over the years, moviegoers who double as sports fans have had ample opportunity to pick and choose their favorite miracle — Shoeless Joe Jackson emerging from the tall corn, Rudy suiting up for Notre Dame, Rocky going the distance with Apollo Creed, the U.S. hockey team taking down the Russkies.
As if all of that were not supernatural enough, now comes Glory Road, the story (more or less) of the 1965-66 Texas Western basketball team — underdogs who went 28-1 and won the NCAA championship with a shocking victory over top-ranked Kentucky. As upsets go, neither the small-town ... full story»
Mrs. Henderson Presents
By Bill Gallo The studied British theatricality and sharp wit of Stephen Frears's comedy are likely to make it a favorite among nostalgists, theater buffs, and the tea-and-crumpets set. Sailing along on the strength of another showy performance by Judi Dench (Shakespeare in Love), this is the real-life story of an imperious widow who, after burying her husband in 1936, forgoes prolonged grief in favor of sinking his leftover millions into a decrepit London theater, where she mounts the city's first nudie revue. As a celebration of theater-world eccentricity and English pluck in wartime, the film hits all ... full story»
2006-01-05
Ledger plays it straight as Casanova's lustful lead
By Melissa Levine For your Heath Ledger holiday-movie options, you have (a) a cowboy in love with another man, and (b) history's most infamous womanizer. Since the name Casanova is synonymous with an unquenchable thirst for straight sex with women (or at least boasting about it), the role might seem to be a strategic selection for a guy concerned about being perceived as gay. But whether or not you find cause for suspicion in the fact Casanova is landing in theaters within mere days of Brokeback Mountain's release, it might still be worth your time. It's a sweet, silly, and not unintelligent romantic comedy: ... full story»
Sarah Silverman speaks the unspeakable. And funny? Oh hell, yes
By Robert Wilonsky Hands down the funniest bit from the summer's raunch smorgasbord The Aristocrats was hearing Sarah Silverman tell the infamously profane family-act joke at the center of Paul Provenza's documentary. Where Robin Williams, Drew Carey, George Carlin, and a hundred other funny folks were serving up naughty variations in various shades of blue, Silverman was bringing it all back home. No longer was it a third-person joke about a family auditioning for a talent agent by performing myriad acts of bestiality, incest, and violence — the basis for most comedy, mind you; it became instead a ... full story»
Fun with Dick and Jane
By Bill Gallo The Jerry Lewis chromosome is running amok again inside Jim Carrey, and in this remake of the 1977 George Segal-Jane Fonda farce, he revels in his usual quota of rubber-faced, talking-in-tongues set pieces. Otherwise, this sometimes pointed, sometimes pointless comedy is pure post-Enron — the tale of a prosperous suburban couple (Carrey and Téa Leoni) driven to a crime spree by sudden poverty and lingering revenge against a giant malfeasant corporation (Alec Baldwin plays the Ken Lay stand-in) that has left its employees in the lurch. Carrey's hilarious job search — stuffy ... full story»
2005-12-29
An adopted transvestite searches for Mom but runs into everything else
By Bill Gallo The gifted Irish novelist and filmmaker Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Michael Collins) says that his overriding concern is "how individuals work with what they've been given." Case in point: Jordan's new feature, Breakfast on Pluto. This bittersweet, gender-bending drama takes a page from Candide — its beleaguered hero, too, happily perseveres in the face of disastrous misadventure and blood-curdling violence — but in the end it's pure Jordan, which is to say a dramatic combination of explosive Irish politics and deeply personal crises that never forgets what a screeching farce ... full story»
The Producers
By Melissa Levine In 1968 it was a movie. In 2001 it became a musical. Now it's a movie again? Yes, and there's actually good reason to return The Producers to the screen. The original film, though intermittently inspired, was slow and often boring, and its homophobic, misogynistic humor no longer plays well, if it ever did. The musical, on the other hand, breathes with life and joy. It takes the same outsized characters and, rather than allowing their manic energy to stall, catapults them into large-scale Broadway production numbers, including showgirls, old ladies dancing with their walkers, and a passel of ... full story»
2005-12-22
Wolf Creek rings in Christmas with a band of butchered tourists
By Luke Y. Thompson The notion that Wolf Creek is opening nationwide Christmas Day brings to mind the scene from Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, in which a young boy opens up his holiday gift and finds a severed head. The movie is about as diametrically opposed to the concept of "goodwill toward men" as movies get, made by a disciple of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre school of horrors. It plays like Alexandre Aja's High Tension without the lame twist that ruined that film. And if any of this news means anything to you, you know Wolf Creek is a must-see.
For everyone else, a strong caution is ... full story»
Spielberg's Munich rehashes a tale we've heard before
By Robert Wilonsky Those who will sit around wondering whether Munich is the work of an anti-Israeli or just a self-hating Jew — which is to say, Steven Spielberg, who has been branded both by Israeli officials and newspaper columnists in recent weeks — give the movie and its maker far too much credit. The story of how the Israeli government retaliated for the murder of eleven Israeli athletes — among them an American expatriate and other foreign-born athletes who moved to the promised land — at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games is less a treatise about the history of Middle East violence than ... full story»
2005-12-15
Peter Jackson spares no expense for a Kong that's just too long
By Robert Wilonsky For whatever reason, the modernized, comic redo of King Kong released exactly 29 years ago has become less the "pop classic" that Pauline Kael insisted it was at the time than a dimly remembered punch line. It barely registers with modern-day moviegoers, who remember it as a campy, eco-aware update starring a shaggy Jeff Bridges, a screaming Jessica Lange, and a smirking Charles Grodin as the petrochemical putz who goes to Skull Island to steal oil and winds up swiping the giant ape instead. Perhaps the movie never earned a better reputation because of its intentionally dopey dialogue; ... full story»
C.S. Lewis's world comes to life in The Chronicles of Narnia
By Luke Y. Thompson If you're a fan of C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, all you need to know is this: Disney has done right by The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It's impossible to imagine it done much better, in fact. If you're not a fan, perhaps you're among those who know of the book mainly thanks to the bleating of certain evangelicals, who claim that Lewis's tales — unlike those featuring that satanic Harry Potter — bring viewers to Christ. ("Go spend money on Narnia stuff to show you love the Lord!")
It's true there are elements of biblical allegory here; it's also true ... full story»
