 Older Films (2005-2009)
The first act is one of the strongest, creepiest "you're about to enter a haunted space" setups I've ever seen. Too bad the rest of the movie is one blunder after another that makes no sense and is still somehow predictable. What a waste of potential. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:26am EST
Great disaster film... plot eh... too much repetition in film –Scott Horowitz • November 30 2009, 3:31pm EST
premise: A woman has been a bridesmaid 27 times and has romantic misadventures of her own. Starring Katherine Heigl, James Marsden, and Edward Burns. Katherine Heigl is ready for primetime, a charming actress who can play everywoman, or an ordinary person as we like to see ourselves onscreen – that is to say, a struggling administrative assistant able to afford a large Manhattan apartment and look like she visits a beauty spa every weekend, but still has crippling self-confidence issues. Heigl's personal magnetism carries a lot of weight in 27 Dresses, a by-the-numbers romantic comedy whose plot leans heavily on "Fred Flintstone moments," those contrived misunderstandings that wouldn't happen if the characters would just give each other a moment to explain themselves. You'll wind up liking Heigl and her movie in spite of itself. –Scott Hardie • March 29 2008, 10:58am EST
Apparenlty anyone can take a Frank Miller graphic novel, a modest CGI budget, and a bluescreen and create a visceral thriller that achieves rare heights of spectacular violence. What made Sin City a great film was literate dialogue; this film's script couldn't be more clunky if it tried. ("Only the hard and the strong deserve to be called Spartans. Only the hard. Only the strong.") With enough gore to make you question what a movie has to do to get an NC-17 for violence – it would seem that having multiple slow-motion close-up decapitations isn't enough – 300 is firmly positioned as an adrenaline rush for the young male demographic, and it recouped its budget in the first two days of release, so here's looking forward to next summer's 301. The film is exceptionally good at being what it is, a stylish action picture removed from the laws of physics. You don't have to own a PS3 to love seeing bare-chested men shouting curse words at the cartoonish eight-foot warriors baring down on them, but it sure helps. –Scott Hardie • March 18 2007, 10:39pm EST
It takes a certain love of words to get the most out of this picture. It takes a belief that wit is a redemptive virtue, that artful language can cast a magic spell on even the dullest scene. That's not to suggest that the rest of this film is lacking or that the script doesn't have its blemishes, but just to emphasize the best thing about this film, the pleasure it takes with its words, both original and quoted. Combine that with the quirky, half-cocked charm of backwater Nawlins and you have a film that could be called "Wonder Boys" meets "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," except that both of those films were low-key comedies, and this is a mournful drama. Whatever you want to call it, it's one of the best and most pleasing films to have slipped by unnoticed during the Oscar season. I have grown so weary of critics for whom sincerity is a cause for snickering. However calculated its plotline may be, this film attempts to evoke authentic emotion and authentic Southern flavor, and should be judged on the success or failure of these attempts, not derided for aspiring to them. How boring the movies would be if the best ones were incapable of touching us for lack of trying. Here's a real old-fashioned Movie, made for viewers who don't let suspicions of artifice spoil the fun of a good yarn, who enjoy the precision exposure of a key plot twist instead of patting themselves on the back for guessing it in advance. This film is not made for, and should probably be skipped by, viewers who would rather a film be hip than be honest. To the rest, I cannot recommend this enough. If Scarlett Johansson is beginning to repeat the same "tics" from other films, she's still capable of virtuosity in her big dramatic scenes. John Travolta, tired of having zero street cred after whoring out his talent for so many paychecks, is eager to get back into a real character, and seems to relish every well-turned line. Elliot Davis's photography seems to make the New Orleans of our imaginings come to life, and his collages of colorful neighborhoods are well used as bookends for the film. Best of all is Grayson Capps's arrangement of music for the film, contributing half of it himself; his choices raise the film's spirits and strengthen its sense of place. This is a rare treat, a film in possession of full body, mind, and soul. –Scott Hardie
This unusual thriller isn't really about what you'd expect, its Philip K. Dick plot or its rotoscoped visuals or its war-on-drugs theme. It's really just about these peculiar characters and the ramifications of their moral choices. It's fascinating. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:32am EST
We all had crappy summer jobs in college (my movie would be called Taco Bell), but Greg Mottola weaves enough fiction and period realism into his tale to make it a treasure. It's funny, and sweet, and sexy, but it should have skipped the epilogue. –Scott Hardie • November 14 2009, 2:06pm EST
premise: Jim Cameron documents bizarre life forms discovered deep undersea and theories about aquatic life on Europa. Cameron and his brother built the underwater camera for Titanic and used it again for Ghosts of the Abyss, so they may as well take it for another spin. This time, nature provides all of the special effects that Cameron needs, but otherwise this is as engaging and thought-provoking as his best work, full of amazing sights and delights for the mind. Perhaps most interesting is his explanation of how a craft might be send to Europa's ice-covered oceans to look for the exact kind of recently-discovered aquatic life that has adapted to extreme conditions in our own depths. More filmmakers with a gift for narrative storytelling and awesome visions should try their hand at documentaries. –Scott Hardie • February 1 2009, 11:43am EST
[Spoilers ahead.] To paraphrase "Ghost World," this movie is so bad, it's beyond good and back to bad again. It's the kind of film for which the utter destruction of humankind at the end, including the tearing-to-pieces of the two protagonists, counts as a redeeming virtue. To say that this movie is designed to appeal to the intellectually bankrupt would mean that it's meant for human consumption at all, which may be the scariest thing about it. It might possibly hold some entertainment value for people just coming out of a five-year coma, but then again, it might hit too close to home, because it feels like a five-year coma. For me, the most depressing thing about it was that I rented it in hopes of discovering the worst film of 2005, but it still wasn't bad enough. (Who honestly rents a movie like this expecting it to be good? Never mind; I don't want to know.) These days, when most directors slip into slow-motion action sequences, it's because they want to show off their cool photography or bring you into the action, but in this case the film has neither anything interesting to look at nor any sense of blocking or direction to the action. It's like the film has the faintest glimmer of an understanding of how to be entertaining, but not why. Whole sequences go on aimlessly for minutes at a time: At a moment when nameless extras were wandering around silently in the dark with nothing happening, I dozed off for five minutes, but when I awoke, nameless extras were still wandering around silently in the dark with nothing happening. Is the premise of the entertainment value that a vaguely-defined, unknown human might theoretically be attacked by some kind of monster, and the endless meandering around is hypothetically intended to mount tension of some sort? I won't call the film boring, but I will call it an invitation to clip your toenails and maybe start a load of laundry. I will give the film credit for the most perfect casting since "Mystic River": Christian Slater plays a man who's been shut out of a profession he was never very good at but who keeps hanging around hoping for a break, Tara Reid plays a ridiculously unqualified pretty face way too young for her job, and Stephen Dorff plays someone we don't like well enough to want to learn anything about. –Scott Hardie
premise: A stalker (Colin Hanks) worms his way into the life of an ordinary stranger (Ana Claudia Talancón) by filming her surreptiously. The entire film was recorded with hidden cameras. In the land of cinematic gimmicks, recording an entire feature on hidden cameras sounds dangerous: Actors disappearing off camera or out of focus, poor film quality, boring camerawork. But Alone with Her succeeds very well in spite of its limitations: By sticking to four distinct camera looks (including a pretty cool simulated nightvision), cheating by filming in high definition, and placing the many individual cameras very carefully, the film never gets boring visually. For a second you wonder why it even credits Nathan Wilson as director of photography, before you realize just how damn good of a job he did. The film also earns unexpected points for being so expressly opposed to stalking, which it pretty much has to be if it wants to avoid the "torture porn" niche for which it seems tailor-made. The DVD offers safety information for potential victims, and in his commentary, the director keeps returning to the invasiveness and repulsiveness of the crime and how it strikes unwitting victims. Of course, the movie itself isn't really about stalking, per se – it's about taking us across a range of emotions as we're forced to watch such an act. There's guilt at the voyeurism, then disgust at the criminal, then sympathy for the victim, then indignation when she spurns him, then excitement when he gets the upper hand, then horror at what he does with it, and more. Depending on your disposition in life, you might be unable to identify with one character or the other, but the film does its best to invoke a variety of feelings. The film stars a pair of lead actors who deserve to build good careers. Talancón maintains her naturalism in spite of so many unusual filming situations, and creates a simple woman who is as fascinating just to watch as she should be. Hanks doesn't look much like his famous father, but he does have the same ordinariness and easy charm that makes him believeable as the nice (if slightly weird) guy next door. The film risks breaking its naturalism in a few places, where the lines sound too scripted or the moment too plotted, but those are minor blemishes. This is a stirring, very well-made thriller that keeps making the right choices. –Scott Hardie • October 25 2007, 1:29am EST • 1 reply
[excerpted from Ten Best Films feature] Our nation's culture is a long way down the road of underachievement by now, so it's inevitable someone would see symmetry in the popularity of a president who defiantly avoids newspapers and the popularity of a tv talent contest that celebrates amateurs not good enough for real careers. Fortunately the someone who noticed is Paul Weitz, who previously used his stars Hugh Grant and Dennis Quaid to sharp effect, and here carves a wicked, timely satire. I wish it was sharper, but it still has plenty of laughs. –Scott Hardie • March 18 2007, 9:48pm EST
It's not remotely plausible, and its plot makes no sense after you think about it, but this adventure has wit and class that the National Treasure movies don't even realize they're missing. What gorgeous locations, and what intriguing mysteries. –Scott Hardie • July 31 2009, 11:17pm EST
Apt comparisons to This is Spinal Tap! can be made of this documentary about a hard-luck Canadian metal band. But by the end, it becomes something unexpected: A moving portrait of two lifelong friends who need each other, and of artists staying true to their principles, however tacky their music may be. –Scott Hardie • November 27 2011, 3:58pm EST
Let's be honest, here. If you are a fan of the series Aqua Teen Hunger Force (which appears in happy 15 minute bites on Adult Swim on Cartoon Network), in which case, you'll most likely know what to expect, and will find enjoyment in this movie. If you are not a fan, and do not understand the inside jokes and oblique references to what has come before, this movie will be a LONG boring movie, and you will be confused at the end. There is no way to explain this phenomenon, and I can only in good conscience make this recommendation. If you have cable, watch the 15 minute show on Adult Swim (they move the time and showing around, so you might have to look for it) a few times to see if you will enjoy this. If you don't have cable, find someone with cable. The series is hit or miss in its humor, and I would never tell anyone to spend money on this to see if they like it. If you like the series, go see the movie. It has a quasi-explanation of where the ATHF come from. Plus, it's got Bruce Campbell in a cameo role as one of the characters! See if you can find him!! –Aaron Shurtleff • June 7 2007, 4:17pm EST • 1 reply
James Cameron has invented an exciting, dazzling new world, both on screen and in filmmaking in general. His riffs on American myths (and foreign policy) give meaning to what is otherwise an incredible visual experience and breathtaking thrill ride. –Scott Hardie • February 6 2010, 8:54pm EST
I wanted to LOVE this film. I honestly did. Parts of it took my breath away - from the intensity of the action to the emotions of the actors. Brilliant performances throughout this one - and the cinematography took some recent directors to school. But I felt the film tried to do too much - it's almost as if the separate story lines in the film would have been better served as short films instead of one big clump of tenuously connected events. I didn't see much value in connecting the stories that were connected. Absolute best story involved the deaf Japanese girls. Worth at least one viewing, although I'm still mulling over the movie's objective. (Maybe my problem was watching it the first time without subtitles - oh, and my irritation at seeing full frontal female nudity yet again with no male nudity to be had). –Anna Gregoline • April 23 2007, 12:25pm EST • 1 reply
In a summer of unnecessary remakes, it's no small distinction being the most unnecessary of all. "South Park," Larry Park and others have taken the shock out of seeing kids swearing and drinking, and today's audiences are too cynical to swallow either a winning ending or a sportsmanlike ending for these scheming underdogs, so what's the point? This film update has a number of hilarious lines delivered in deadpan monotone by Billy Bob Thornton (an acquired taste of a movie star if there ever was one), and the kid actors are surprisingly good, probably due to Richard Linklater's influence. But its tone waffles so much between serious and slacking that it winds up limping to a finish that barely registers. When the studios ponder why film attendance was so low this summer, they should place some blame on dull, unwanted wastes of time like this one. –Scott Hardie
The "slobs vs. snobs" comedies of the eighties became the "just slobs" movies of today, and this is a mildly funny one, with Seann William Scott as a wild-eyed slacker dimwit. The first fart joke happens 7 seconds in, and that pretty much sets the tone. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:21am EST
For Batman fans, finally all is right with the universe. Joel Schumacher's widely hated film adaptations have been replaced by a film that is dark, intelligent, detail-obsessed, and sophisticated. If it has a few corny one-liners, their number is far fewer than in the average summer blockbuster, let alone one featuring this most misconceived of superheroes. For years, fans (and critics) have argued that a serious approach would best suit this character, and despite my skepticism the fans have been proven correct: This film is intense but not incoherent, gloomy but not remotely depressing, and easily the best approach to the character yet attempted. I don't know if its sequels can remain this serious, since Batman's other nemeses are intrinsically cartoony, but I very much look forward to finding out. More, please. –Scott Hardie
If the cinema is an emotional medium in which directors try to make you feel a certain way about their subject, then it must be true some directors want to hurt you just to make their point. Battle in Heaven is hostile to its audience, so I don't recommend it despite its high rating. It frequently goes for minutes at a time without dialogue or action, and it puts its sympathic hero through more excrutiating humiliations than any Ben Stiller comedy could muster. But, if you're patient and willing to interpret the film's turns for yourself, it sings a quiet, sad song about a man's quest to redeem himself in the eyes of his god and his country, and I'm glad to have heard it. I won't lie; I was first attracted to the film by its frequent graphic sex scenes, without which I suppose no one would be attracted to it, but I was lucky to have enjoyed it despite itself and I don't think many others will be so lucky. In other words: Actual results may vary. [Major spoilers ahead.] My interpretation depends on an ethnic stereotype about Roman Catholic Mexicans, but it's not like the film doesn't depend on them either, including such shots as a family of eleven slowly pouring out of a single car like they're performing in a Ringling show. The hero, Marcos, believes in the sanctity of life, even for a prostitute, even for a baby that his wife bullied him into kidnapping from her best friend. He stares with almost pedophilic focus on happy, singing children and seems stirred. I believe he wonders, if all of these people are sanctified, why not me too? His life heaps one humiliation upon another, and no one tells him they love him; his wife can barely mumble the words in an attempt to win his favor after smacking him so hard he loses his glasses. Marcos hears a footballer remark about going back to his loving family and declares it a fantasy. He is a proud, patriotic Mexican, so much so that when he passes through the film's symbolic version of Heaven and arrives on a mountaintop and sees a glorious vision of the countryside beneath him, he is moved to tears. This convinces him to try for redemption with the prostitute he loves, but she reacts to his vow to do the right thing with a good-bye kiss and indifference. After he turns on her with silent rage, he takes the only redemptive path he knows, and earns his way into Heaven in the final seconds of the film. He is not a Christ figure because his sacrifice would save no one but himself, and whether he's worthy of blessing after the things he has done is questionable, but I for one found his journey moving and thought-provoking. In its own nearly-unwatchable way, it's one of the best films of the year. –Scott Hardie
I had never seen the original "Get Shorty," so I arranged to watch it and this sequel on consecutive nights. This probably improved my opinion of "Be Cool," because I caught the many, many references to the original film, from repeated lines to matching camera angles to repeated plot points. (One of these, the ominous sound of the downstairs television in the middle of the night, really wears out its welcome after the seventh time, believe me.) This isn't just a film that plays its hero with a totally different tone and makes obligatory fun of cash-in sequels; it really does know the first film inside-out and makes an admirable attempt to hit the same notes. Sadly, it's a failed attempt. If the first film took none of its characters seriously, this one veers too far in the other direction, providing Chili Palmer with a young music protegé so innocent and wholesome that she creates a sort of comedy vacuum whenever she appears in a scene; it would be like giggling in the presence of Mother Teresa. As a film about the music business, it is forced to stop several times for song performances; while well-photographed (especially the rock concert), these scenes tend to kill the film's comedic momentum. Not that the film has much momentum; Elmore Leonard hasn't been this dull or this slack in years. Whole scenes do nothing but advance the plot. Was any consideration given to actual jokes? This movie got all dressed up for nothing. It's not a total wash. The music is actually pretty good, until the tidal wave of pop super-production takes over in the final act. On the whole, the actors are terrific; Vince Vaughn and Andre Benjamin sink completely into their obnoxious villains, and Robert Pastorelli gives a delectible final performance. Harvey Keitel seems to think he's auditioning for another Scorsese movie because he brings a distinct ferociousness to his disposable character, and he acts circles around his fellow cast in the process. One scene, where the Rock ambushes the heroes at home and proceeds to audition a poorly-chosen "monologue" for them, is uproariously funny. It's just that the film overall is so jokeless, as if it hired all the actors and provided all the plot and then forgot to do anything funny with them, mechanically going through the motions of a feature film. That scene with the Rock works so well because it has precisely the comic intensity that the rest of the film lacks. If "Get Shorty" failed because it didn't seem to believe in its own jokes, at least it had jokes, and was intermittently funny. This is an earnest failure. –Scott Hardie
premise: When an accident erases all of the videotapes at their struggling rental store, Mos Def and Jack Black resort to re-filming classic movies themselves with a camcorder, with silly results. Written and directed by Michel Gondry. It's pretty hard to hate a movie this lighthearted and silly, but it is possible to get sick of it. Michel Gondry is more than capable of tapping into his childhood imagination for whimsical ideas, but his characters are all just children in big bodies, and his films seem to have little connection to reality that would make us care. He's got a wonderful point to make here about the value of creativity and making your own art and being active instead of passive in your recreation, but getting his point is not the same thing as enjoying his movie. It gave me a few laughs and a lot of smiles, but it's not better than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or even his surreal music videos, and feels like a golden concept that could have gone further with a stronger script. After the movie, go online for all of his "Sweded" films, included Gondry Sweding his own trailer. –Scott Hardie • December 9 2008, 8:15pm EST
premise: Adam Sandler discovers that the bedtime stories he tells at night turn true the next day. For what it's worth, this review is based on the 2/3 of the movie I actually saw. I've walked out on movies in the past but this is one I arrived to late. I probably would have enjoyed what I saw more if I had seen the premise unfold instead of being thrust into the middle of it. As it was, I enjoyed it a lot. This film requires serious suspension of belief, aside from bedtime stories coming true. A handyman is given the opportunity to determine the theme and then manage a new luxury hotel. But only if the gazillionaire entrepeneur likes his idea better than his regular flunky. Sandler determines to use the bedtime stories to make his real life dream come true by manipulating the children to say a story that will give him an edge in the competition. See, it's the children's contributions to the stories that are the parts that actually happen. Lots of funny Sandler moments without too much of his high-pitched voice inanity. Sight gags aplenty and only minimal potty humor. My biggest concern was that this was a film targeted toward small children made by Adam Sandler. 'Nuff said. I went to the theater expecting to see a different film but the hosts changed their minds at the last minute. Fine. It turned into a positive experience not because of the high quality of the film but because it didn't offend me like I thought it might. My daughter enjoyed it immensely and I'm considering letting her write her own movie reviews. Guy Pearce and Lucy Lawless make for an unusual pair for comedic foils and don't really do a credible job of it. Try again, you two. Courtney Cox makes an unremarkable show of being the Mom of the two children and Russell Brand as the inexplicably British accented room sevice buddy is only mildly amusing but Keri Russell shines as the unexpected love interest. Add to this an unending supply of jokes centered on a bug-eyed guinea pig (many times actually funny), and it made for a pretty entertaining movie. If only I had seen the first third of the film... –Steve West • January 3 2009, 2:31pm EST • 1 reply
The first Futurama movie suffers from a plot that turns at right angles seemingly out of nowhere, but the parts come together coherently in the end, and besides, it delivers what counts: Lots of big laughs, and lots of fan-service. –Scott Hardie • February 21 2010, 9:58pm EST
The third Futurama movie is the most cohesive, spending lots of its running time on an extended riff on Lord of the Rings. It's familiar but very funny, the kind of movie where you wait to laugh because the jokes are coming so fast. –Scott Hardie • May 9 2010, 7:48pm EST
I think there is an inherent risk of misinterpreting a film from a foreign culture. This film is bizarrely hilarious, except the ending, which is just bizarre! Maybe you had to be there?! A mockumentary about a third rate superhero's trials. See it! –Aaron Shurtleff • November 19 2009, 3:26pm EST
Improv can be a blessing or a curse. At best, it grounds the comedy in the characters and unlocks material that can't be dreamt up at a keyboard. But at worst, as in this low-budget mockumentary, it can result in a jokelessness, a movie that's amusing but rarely funny. And that's not even considering the meandering plot, which forgets characters, conflicts, and even the central arc of the main character. Blackballed is well-acted by its improv experts, who often get intense with their weirdo personalities, but it could have benefitted from a few more sharp zingers being written in advance for when scenes have trouble getting off the ground, and it would help if the main character was a stronger presence instead of merely playing witness to the oddballs around him. Paintball fans might enjoy the film because of its subject matter, although the three scenes of actual combat are difficult to follow in terms of who shot who and who's still on the battlefield. Blackballed comes off fairly slick for its budget and manages to be consistently amusing, but it's a dysfunctional underachiever that fails to score any big laughs. –Scott Hardie • September 17 2006, 9:42am EST • 1 reply
premise: In 2004, a liberal blogger makes good on his promise to move to Canada if Bush is reelected. Starring Breckin Meyer and Anna Paquin. Blue State isn't for conservatives, but viewers on the political left will find a movie that cares about their ideals. This setup (man makes good on a promise to move to Canada if Bush is reelected in 2004) could have merely been used to launch a generic romantic comedy: Establish why he moves to Canada, and promptly forget about politics for the rest of the movie. Instead, it features a number of interesting discussions about politics and current events from beginning to end, with characters who would be fun to meet and debate with in real life. The misadventures that the characters get into up north stretch not just plausibility but audience patience, and the screenplay has some damn sloppy structure, but at the movie's heart are characters who love America and want to do the right thing about it, a message that will resonate four years later with Obama supporters. –Scott Hardie • March 23 2008, 4:18pm EST
Back to the Columbia Mall again, this time to see Bolt. FLK1 and FLK2 are absent this time but these once a month Saturday showings appear to be gaining popularity in the autism community. There must have been fifty families represented today. Some children I haven't seen before and this is our sixth outing. There is an incredible display of affection among this crowd with more hugging and kissing of children than I normally see at public gatherings. Just an indication of how much these parents love their special children. The adventure began before the movie started. One young man sitting about seven rows behind us was hilariously announcing that he needed to be quiet now. Hilarious because he was nearly shouting this. This child also acted as a human TiVo throughout the film, loudly repeating the last few words of each spoken line and a few of the sound effects as well. It was like watching the movie twice, the second time on a two second delay. There were kids crying, biting themselves, parents cooing and comforting, and in the middle of this cacophonous symphony - a movie was playing. The first five minutes of the film were awesome, a representative clip of the TV show in which Bolt starred. The last five minutes were equally entertaining as Penny (Bolt's human) and Bolt are reunited after a long separation and he helps save her from an enormous fire without benefit of superpowers. Superlative. Then there was everything in between... I'm starting to dislike the use of celebrity voices in an attempt to drive the popularity of a film as opposed to using talented voice actors to display their talents. Using Patton Oswalt in Ratatouille was inspired. John Travolta was okay in this one but didn't really lend anything to the role with his voice alone. Susie Essman did her best in her role as Mittens, the former house turned alley cat. Using gimmicky choices for some of the voices was hit and miss. Malcolm McDowell was fine as the villain (typical) but I didn't know it was him until afterward but James Lipton was a superb choice as the director. I didn't know it was him but as I watched the movie and heard his pretentious prattling, I was thinking how much that character reminds me of James Lipton. I found out after the film and was surprised to see he was doing a parody of himself. A few lines were very memorable. A gushing hamster says to his hero, Bolt, "Every minute in your presence becomes the newest greatest moment in my life." And one half of an overtly gay pigeon couple wants to throw a TV plot idea at Bolt but defers to his partner with the line, "Tom's better at pitching." Oh, and the entire recue from the animal shelter scene was very funny. I'd say go and watch it for the beginning and final scenes. And there's just enough in the middle to get you through it. But just barely. –Steve West • December 6 2008, 2:43pm EST • 1 reply
[excerpted from Ten Best Films feature] Jason Mewes: "De Niro who?" Paris Hilton: "I think I'm going to cry." Jason Mewes: "I have that effect on women." Bad-movie junkies found a dream come true in this romantic comedy pairing the hotel-chain princess with the guy who plays Jay of Jay & Silent Bob. It's a perfect-storm of cinematic badness, full of homophobia and shit jokes, starring two people whose main facial expression is visible strain at trying to remember their Dick-and-Jane lines. Kevin Smith appears long enough for a loud fart joke, and it's his nepotism that has led to godawful productions like this and 2002's worst film Vulgar, since he leverages his success into starring vehicles for his talentless stoner buddies. Edited without breaks between scenes and featuring the "actors" wearing what looks like their own clothes, this is precisely the nuclear-grade disaster it seems. –Scott Hardie • March 18 2007, 9:45pm EST
[excerpted from Ten Best Films feature] California high schools have been the setting for everything from time-traveling stoner comedies to alien-invader horror flicks, so why not a hard-boiled detective noir? Brick takes the concept and sprints with it, delivering line after line of brilliantly punchy, rapid-patter dialogue that springs from pulp gumshoe novels of the 1930s. It's a ticklish joy for viewers who enjoy sharp wit and actors who can keep up with the pace, and almost qualifies the movie as a comedy despite the dark neo-noir at the core of its complex plot. There's a smooth, efficient style to the film's look as well, with a harrowing foot-chase that ends with an unexpected abruptness, and a sparseness of detail in the environments that suggests they're unrealistic archetypes as much as the characters are. A premise this challenging and prone to self-serious camp can only succeed with total commitment from the cast and writer-director Rian Johnson, and it's a qualified and highly entertaining success. –Scott Hardie • March 18 2007, 9:49pm EST
[excerpted from Ten Best Films feature] After Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I didn't think Ang Lee would be robbed of the Best Picture Oscar yet again, but there you have it: The best film of the year settled for trophies for Lee and his writers. Maybe that's due to a red-state backlash by people who won't even see the movie, because those who do see it know that it's not really about two cowboys in love: It's about how any two people denied their feelings by society will see their lives decay, the same potent message conveyed by Lee's other films. Here is his purest and most heartbreaking distillation of the theme to date, as two men discover feelings they didn't know were possible and learn how to appreciate life to its fullest, and then have to pretend they don't know how to feel that good. There's little intellectual argument here and no agenda save the one we project onto it; the film succeeds solely by striking at the heart with powerful force. It's a majestic and profoundly moving epic for anyone who knows how good it feels to love. –Scott Hardie • March 18 2007, 9:46pm EST
[excerpted from Ten Best Films feature] Steven Soderbergh's explicit experiments with Bubble were whether a film released simultaneously in theaters, on cable tv, and on DVD could be successful (it was), and whether a film shot on real locations using only non-actors and no scripts could work (it did). However, his implicit experiment was even more interesting: Could a story told with the scarcest of details still manage to entertain? Yes, in the form of a pleasant hypnotic trance induced by watching these ordinary people go about their mundane lives with just enough dots connected for it to mean something. It's the unfulfilled promise of reality tv, the opportunity to watch the quiet milieu of everyday life, and you can't turn away from it. There is a plot, and some creepy imagery courtesy of the baby dolls in various stages of completion at the factory where the characters work, but the focus here is on the timbre of ordinary life and how it feels when something happens to you that's only supposed to happen in the movies. –Scott Hardie • March 18 2007, 9:43pm EST
I get the impression that Kevin Willmott is a glass-half-empty kind of guy. He has written and directed this clever fake documentary about how American history would have gone differently had the South won the Civil War, presenting a society where all non-whites are slaves and oppression dominates pop culture and America sees itself as superior to the rest of the world. According to the supplemental interviews on the DVD, his goal is to point out that this is the way America really is today, that we only pretend we've left behind the atrocities of the Confederacy but they persist in our culture. Me, I'm a glass-half-full person: Sure there are vestiges of slave culture in a few name brands today and we should continue eradicating them, but we've made tremendous progress and this alternate history demonstrates to me just how different we have become. For one thing, a black man like Willmott couldn't have dreamed of making a political statement like this without a sea change in social and physical freedoms. As for the film, it's one inspired invention after another, with political parody like Americans demanding that the Canadian government pays them "slavery reparations" for all the escaped slaves who gained amnesty there after the war, or cultural parody like a fake commercial for Runaways, a gritty COPS-like tv series that profiles law enforcement that violently captures fleeing slaves. Some of it makes you laugh at the audacity of the jokes, and some of it is disquieting enough to inspire moody reflection, but there's almost nothing boring about it. It's an important and funny film that I recommend to every American, whether they're inclined to see our nation's social progess as half-finished or half-unfinished. –Scott Hardie • August 20 2006, 1:39pm EST • 1 reply
Has it come to this? When I rent a straight-to-DVD flick in which Heather Graham plays a free-spirited wedding-magazine editor named Pippa McGee, I expect to see a train wreck worthy of being called the worst film of the year, so I can go back to Steven Spielberg and Ang Lee movies until next winter. But no: This film, shrill and vacuous though it is, has fleeting moments of wit and – loathe though I am to say it – charm. I can't even honestly call it a bad movie, not that I didn't fast-forward through the phony redemption and lovey-dovey scenes inspired by Screenwriting 101. If Heather Graham is eager to extend her streak of awful movies, she need only combine her "talent" with Uwe Boll to produce a film so incalculably horrible that FEMA will have to be dispatched to theaters showing it. In the meantime, congratulations to the makers of Cake for attaining a minimal level of mediocrity. –Scott Hardie • February 4 2007, 1:10am EST
"Is it hard work being so dense?" asks Shirley MacLaine in this film, and for once, instead of channeling past lives, she seems to be channeling the audience's frustration. This straight-to-DVD washout is a obnoxious cavalcade of stupidity, accented by a circus-like musical score that gets louder every time the film gets extra-moronic. Not only is it the kind of sub-"Roseanne" melodrama that gets drunk on treating ordinary life events as High Drama, but it is rotten with clichés, from the grinning game show host who's an asshole off-camera, to the mangy dog that ruins the big family dinner by running on the table, to the protagonist who secretly attends a friend's book-reading from the back row only to learn that the book is about her. One of the first lessons I learned in creative writing class was that mid-scene entrances and exits of characters are signs of desperation by a writer, who shuffles around the characters when she can't think of anything worthwhile to have them say or do. It speaks volumes that "Carolina" has the most such entrances and exits I can recall seeing in one place; the film can't seem to sit still for thirty seconds without a new character walking in, or another storming off, or a door slamming, or an elevator opening, or a car pulling up, as if the film is in the constant business of pretending to have something happen. Screenwriter Katherine Fugate based the tale on her own grandmother, who raised three girls single-handedly, and I can admire that level of selflessness in a woman, but it gets awfully hard when the fictional version is so aggressively repellant. One scene has her attending a movie with her daughters, in which she shouts at the characters on the screen and passes around bowls of gumbo from her own kitchen instead of buying popcorn, then stands up and loudly chews out the manager who comes to remove her. I can't tell if these behaviors were invented merely to give the scene conflict or if someone actually thought this material was funny, but if the film's goal is to endear us to this colorful old grandma, this scene (like most others) has the precise opposite effect. [Plot spoilers ahead.] The only positive mention I can give the film is its acting, particularly by Shirley MacLaine and Julia Stiles. They may be playing highly obnoxious and highly implausible (respectively), but they know what they're doing, and having former drama coach Marleen Gorris in the director's chair probably helps. But their talents are wasted on a movie pitched at a thirteen-year-old girl's perception of reality, in which a Stiles can play a 21-year-old television producer (!) who goes unemployed for the better part of a year while living in a cavernous apartment and throwing expensive-looking formal parties. There's no use developing your characters when the screenplay needs them to turn on a dime, such as when Randy Quaid's character is chastized for being a lifelong drunk and then later is chastized for showing up late to a family event because he was at an AA meeting, or when Mika Boorem's character obsesses for months over her lottery numbers to the point of hyperventilation, then casually shrugs off the $24-million jackpot when the numbers finally do come up because she's learned that the only important thing is that she was "right" about them all along. I've seen Cocoa Puffs commercials with more verisimilitude. Amateurish and sheetrock-stupid, this torturous production is an early contender for the worst film of 2005. –Scott Hardie
premise: Pixar tells the story of a talking sportscar who gets stranded in a small midwestern town and learns humility from Real America. Ever since being freed by the success of Finding Nemo, Pixar's recent films have been much more about the personal vision and personal obsessions of their directors, and that makes them hit or miss; you're either on their wavelength or you're not. I liked WALL-E. I definitely did not like Cars. Unlike me, John Lasseter is obsessed with cars and racing, and married some action scenes about the two to a hokey hicksville cartoon with Larry the Cable Guy as a chortling pickup truck. Talk about ambitious! The jokes are flat, the animation is weaker than Pixar's standards except in the racing scenes, and the implications of the nature of these talking cars is disturbing to contemplate. You watch the movie thinking about how they grew up, what they think about the usefulness of their form, whether they need certain biological functions. This is a movie that never should have been made. –Scott Hardie • January 24 2009, 12:44pm EST • 1 reply
The producing family behind the 007 franchise have wisely made a course correction with this latest entry, reinventing him for this post-9/11 decade just as the similarly Martin Campbell-directed GoldenEye reinvented him for the 1990s. That's not to say that he's chasing terrorists or oil magnates or fundamentalists, just that the world around this Bond is much more sinister and plays for keeps, and so must he. Gone are the gimmicks and the super-villains and the cartoony action (there's no CGI Bond windsurfing into North Korea here), and in their place is a tough, athletic, virile Bond who has emotional weakness, underestimates his enemies, and gets blood on his shirt – a lot of blood. Fans will appreciate the renewed energy of the series, and non-fans will enjoy an engaging action thriller that jettisons any series backstory, but most of all, the film seems tailor-made for onetime series fans who lost their faith in the Moore and Brosnan eras when the once elegant, sophisticated series became an action cartoon. Why does it feel like it's been such a very long time when we see this new Bond practice actual spycraft? –Scott Hardie • November 19 2006, 10:33am EST • 1 reply
This weird hybrid of Indian melodramatic musicals and Chinese martial-arts epics can't decide whether to take itself utterly seriously or to be cartoonishly silly. At nearly three hours, it has some good action and great shots, but way too much filler. –Scott Hardie • June 8 2009, 2:00am EST • 1 reply
It was a no-brainer to hire Tim Burton to direct this remake (ahem, "re-imagining") of the original, since he specializes in elaborate, whimsical visual landscapes with a hint of malice beneath the surface. This is a bountiful world of wonder with detail in every corner of the screen; several of the sets are worth the price of admission alone. But if Burton's strength is his eyes, his weakness is his heart, and the film's fumbling attempts at intimacy in the final act play like a unnecessary epilogue, even if I suspect Burton is parodizing himself with the rubber-glove hug scene (you'll know it when you see it). I also take issue with the obnoxious Oompa-Loompa songs that bring the film to a screeching halt, but these are small quibbles. By now, you know what you get when you buy a ticket to a Tim Burton spectacle, and this one is no different. It's a feast of gorgeous imagery, (literal) eye candy of the best kind. –Scott Hardie
In adapting P.D. James's Britain-centric sci-fi novel, Alfonso Cuarón has chosen to ignore its statements about Parliament and hereditary rule, and make a more universal film that meditates on the subjects of hope and faith on a global scale. Along the way, he paints in topical commentary about Abu Ghraib and Homeland Security, but they're at the margins; the film is out to convey intense feelings of despair for humanity and suggest what it's like for hope to grow amidst it like a flower in a wasteland, a theme shared with its contemporary Pan's Labyrinth. The despair is clear: In a world where no more children can be born and society has given up, bombings in the streets barely register, and the government is capable of genocidal atrocity without objection from all but a handful of people. Though the cold, disenchanted hero undergoes the usual emotional transformation demanded by this sort of material, the impact of seeing this dystopia is hefty, especially since it's painted with imagery from the real world around us today: Yes, this does feel like how we would turn out if we lost hope too. Critics have made much of the action scenes undertaken in virtuoso long shots of 4-6 minutes, which demonstrate Cuarón's obvious technical expertise (even faking them must have been difficult), and the sequences are riveting for the verisimilitude generated by the technique. You don't have to be a film geek to appreciate how electric they feel to watch. I do wonder if Cuarón isn't so invested in the technique of his film that he neglects the importance of plot; he swears off narrative as a director, and yet the film would be more satisfying if the characters weren't one-dimensional and seemingly lacking in personal history. In that area the film is poor, but it is rich in its thematic urgency and ability to invoke powerful feelings about the fragility of our humanity. –Scott Hardie • May 13 2007, 11:38am EST
An autistic teenager discovers her martial arts prowess in this Thai movie, named for her beloved M&Ms, that anyone familiar with autistic children will find hilarious. It's like watching Forrest Gump using tae kwon do in a movie called Dr Pepper. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:21am EST
When I was a kid, I was told you had to have a reason to frown. The people behind this movie should have learned that lesson. They tell a gloomy story – a somber man returns home after a prison sentence for the drunk driving accident that killed his young son – and they capture the depressing subsistence-level poverty of life in the Ozarks, but they fail to put anything compelling in the tale to make the journey worthwhile. We're shown scene after scene of anguish, including a grotesquely over-the-top sequence where traumatized wife Lisa Blount first throws herself at her returned husband then collapses into wails of grief for her loss, but there's not one scene in the movie that entertains, illustrates, or educates, with the arguable exception that thems mountain folk sure do sing some purty ditties. Writer-director Ray McKinnon apparently created the film as a vehicle for his wife Blount, but he winds up delivering the only memorable performance, as the local scumbag who enjoys picking away at old scabs. A film needs more redeeming qualities if it's going to spend this long wallowing in a pointless bog of misery. –Scott Hardie
This mess about a hapless father, an ungrateful son, and their wacky alien "dog" fails at being funny and even worse at being touching. The kid is way too hard on both of them for his "regret" to mean much, and the alien design is freakishly distracting. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:23am EST
First, the 3-D animation was terrific. Second, everything else sucked. Poor story and plot development, non-sensical conflict, suspension of physical laws, incredible misunderstanding of basic human nature, cliché-driven character dreck - it's all in there. –Steve West • September 19 2009, 6:44pm EST • 2 replies
premise: Friends enjoy a party in Manhattan until a monster attacks the city. The entire film is recorded on their handheld camera. Produced by J.J. Abrams. This low-budget horror film was subject to a massive wave of buzz before its release, which is somewhat unfounded given how very little was known about it before release. Now it has arrived and the very people who anticipated it seem disappointed, perhaps because it's merely good instead of truly great, but I think its perceived flaws are really its strengths. Some say that the obliteration of New York landmarks is an inappropriate reminder of 9/11, but I think it's about connecting us to the primary fear of our time like Godzilla once did (and didn't I Am Legend just destroy New York too?). Some say the horror elements are too predictable and clichéd, but I think the film's intention is to deconstruct them with a cinema-verite approach, treating them as real events happening to real people, to show how other movies have drained them of their power. And some say that the uneventful first act is too boring of a setup with undefined characters, but the sudden disruption of mundane daily life with the monumental is the point here; I'm reminded of no less than James Joyce, who made literary history writing about the profound intruding upon boring everyday lives, although he didn't have a giant monster. Perhaps the problem really lies in what you want out of this movie. If you've seen horror-survival movies and you want a smart deconstruction of the genre by people who have also seen them, you're in for a good time. But if you expect more traditional pleasures like well-developed characters and attractive photography, this is Oscar season; go see something else. –Scott Hardie • January 29 2008, 12:59am EST
[Spoilers ahead.] My review of —The Prophecy” has been lost to time, but in it I wrote of one of the most precisely defined subgenres in all of cinema, the one whose films concern an eternal war between heaven and hell with humans caught in the middle, where a single human woman will turn the tide of war (often because she carries the unborn anti-Christ), and where a world-weary human man is unfazed by encounters with Biblical headliners like Gabriel and Uziel only to wind up face-to-face with Satan himself. So many Catholic-derivative films have shared this exact premise that they have become a category unto themselves, and it becomes pointless to compare them against each other because they’re just so damn much alike. —Constantine” repeats the formula with a gargantuan budget and some damn slick photography, but it struggles with the same plot holes that all such films seem to, such as why an omnipotent God can possibly be engaged in an eternal war, and why humans are so arrogant as to place ourselves at the center of a struggle between beings of sometimes infinite more power and importance than us. Oh well; it’s a fun movie, just not a remotely remarkable one. –Scott Hardie
I really wanted to hold this film in higher regard, but it committed too many plain filmmaking errors: There are few cinematic contrivances more frustrating than the villains waiting in the exact spot where the heroes will happen to arrive, and standing there patiently out of frame while the heroes have a heartfelt conversation, before finally striking. Such extreme coincidence shatters all pretense of believability, leaving you with nothing to enjoy but the technical expertise of the filmmakers, and that ain't much in a not-ready-for-USA-Network amateurpiece like this. Ray Liotta is the only actor who makes an impression, but after eating nails for breakfast in tough-guy parts like "Narc," even Liotta can charitably be said to be phoning this one in. (It is said that he took the part with no prep time when Matt Dillon couldn't fulfill the contract; I hope Dillon didn't let this film down to finish the dismaying "Employee of the Month.") The movie has scenes that work, such as when Liotta sees over and over in his mind the drop of blood that changed his life, and when he seems genuinely nervous about his first date in what might be his entire life, but the film rarely goes for long without leaning on another flimsy contrivance to support the plot it shouldn't be taking so seriously in the first place. This full 180-degree transformation of a monster into a man is better than the film that tells it. –Scott Hardie
This dark and unsettling fairy tale explores all kinds of childhood fears starting with separation anxiety, but the real achievement here is the visual panache. This is another stop-motion cartoon treat for fans of The Nightmare Before Christmas. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:18am EST
Vince Vaughn stars in, co-produced and co-wrote this film. A definite vehicle to highlight his talents. Lots of jokes about the sometime absurdity of relationships and all four couples have relationship reunions of sorts. The island resort hosts were just plain creepy and Jean Reno was miscast as the French love guru. –Steve West • November 7 2009, 10:20pm EST
This sped-up action movie is trash, but it's self-aware, above-average trash, exciting to a fault. It gets a lot of mileage out of its crazy premise and cartoon logic, until it's dragged down by ugly misogyny, playing a public rape for laughs. –Scott Hardie • April 26 2009, 2:22am EST
[Major spoilers ahead.] Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco deserve a lot of credit for making an intelligent film about race that defies political correctness, but their willingness to embrace negative stereotypes undermines the otherwise accomplished production. They establish a pattern of double-reversals: After introducing characters who are unlike crude racial stereotypes, they pull the rug out from under you by revealing that the characters are in fact just like the stereotypes, then do it again by revealing that no, actually, they are not. Each time the first such twist occurs, the film seems to shoot itself in the foot like —American History X” did, preaching a message of racial acceptance while revealing black people to be thuggish criminals and white people to be justifiably paranoid. By the time the second twist arrives and the characters turn out to be the decent, reasonable human beings we assumed from the beginning, we wonder what the point was, since we were only manipulated into believing otherwise (if we believed it at all). The movie makes a great show of its characters discovering that their racial prejudices are wrong, a pattern that threatens to make it predictable, but does it amount to anything? —Do the Right Thing” reveals that its characters are not really racist, that their racism is only an embodiment of their much deeper, hard-wired anxieties; when —Crash” reveals that its characters are not really racist, it shows that their racism is only a plot contrivance. But I’m being too hard on the film. In most regards it’s great stuff: These are interesting, well-spoken characters, who are not always meant to be taken seriously. There’s humor in the film; I especially liked Ludacris’s pompous criticisms of lowbrow black culture while slinging the n-word around himself (and that’s not even mentioning the ironic casting of the part). And there are moments of raw tension, too, as when Terrence Howard challenges white cops to do what he has always expected them to do, or when Thandie Newton must place her life in the hands of a monster in what is clearly the film’s brightest flash point. I, for one, loved the —Magnolia”-like meta-twist at the end that bound these characters together on a night that made meteorological history. If every scene in the film is not entirely convincing (would a black director cave that quickly to pressure from a racist coworker after presumably facing a career full of prejudice?), every emotion is, mapping terrain with peaks of suspense and valleys of anguish. It’s an impressive debut from a filmmaker clearly conscious of his medum’s ability to craft a strong message; I just hope that his next message has more to do with actual reality and less to do with Hollywood reality. –Scott Hardie
Let's hear it for filmmakers who are honest about their own failings. In the making-of featurette on this straight-to-DVD release, writer-director Ernie Barbarash admits that he made it because he was so unsatisfied with how his "Cube²: Hypercube" turned out. If the best way to criticize a movie is to make another one, I suppose that goes double if you're the filmmaker responsible for the original mess. On the whole, "Cube Zero" is the weakest film in the horror trilogy, but it still has a great deal going for it. This one steps out of the cube and tells the story of a former child prodigy who is a computer technician working on the project. Maybe it's because most of the other actors are so lousy, but Zachary Bennett is terrific in the part, carving out a highly sympathetic and human character in the midst of artificiality. He and fellow technician David Huband (the only other good actor) must shoulder the film's moral theme, whether one is truly absolved of guilt for wrongdoing when "motivated" by god or government. Obviously Mr. Barbarash isn't familiar with a history book or a legal brief, but really he's interested in the souls of his characters... Or he seems to be, anyway, within the boundaries permitted by this grim series, which very few characters survive. That's one of the two most off-putting elements, in fact: The grisliness of the death scenes. The original "Cube" had more of a traditional low-budget feel to it (I'm still amazed that the entire set was one room), and the film was so cheap that the victims in the elaborate death scenes looked like the mannequins they were. But computer animation has come so far along that even a super-low-budget release like this one can afford crisp, photorealistic effects, which only serve to make it seem like someone went to a great deal of trouble to animate the most graphic elements of human torture. This isn't quite another "Cannibal Holocaust," but it does portray gore and agony in such crisp high-resolution as to make you question the motives of the filmmakers. Like its predecessors, it never does completely explain why someone would go to so much trouble to watch such suffering; the original dodged the question by limiting its perspective to the victims, but this prequel doesn't get off so easy. Speaking of which, the biggest problem with the film is its human villain. When finally we meet one of the "men upstairs," he turns out to be a ham-fisted cartoon character, as if one of Carmen Sandiego's henchmen broke into a live-action film. It's not that the actor is bad so much as that the character is inappropriate; he couldn't do a worse job of breaking the tension if he delivered every line after sucking on a helium balloon. "Cube" has always worked best when its scares are taken seriously — one of the most chilling moments comes when a technician enters the cube and pauses in muted horror at what he has just done — and this villain is far too cartoonish to appear hand-in-hand with such grim material. I hope that Mr. Barbarash is prepared to try yet again. –Scott Hardie
Proof that CGI has cheapened the movie spectacle can be found in criticisms of films like this one, when viewers complain about the artificial sight of thousands of CGI soldiers bearing down on an immense computer model of the Forbidden City. The problem is, that ain't CGI. The filmmakers really did outfit a legion of extras in extravagant golden armor so that they could march across a set as enormous as the real palace. A few of the dangerous elements were faked (the flying spears and spurts of blood are drawn-in), but the film went to incredible lengths to put on a grand show, and that's the point: This isn't just a story of a corrupt royal family, it's about how living every day in such impossible extremes of beauty and decadence can make it seem reasonable to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives to score a point in a family argument, and the movie piles on those extremes in order to drive the point home. This is a film of exquisite beauty, set in one of the most breathtakingly gorgeous locations in history, and it makes its better-received contemporaries Pan's Labyrinth and 300 look paltry. (image) (image) (image) At its center is a family drama as stagey as the story's origin in a play would indicate. The characters feel the burden of the empire watching their every move – literally, since they are followed everywhere by attendants – and they speak to each other with rigid formality, forcing the actors to communicate in slight deviations and shifts. The film's weakness is that the characters rarely lay down their formality in private and speak to each other like normal people, and the plot hinges on secrets that only seem to remain secret because of this social code, even if that's part of the point. This is the closest Yimou Zhang has come to marrying the emotional complexity of his early work with the grand extravagence of his recent films, and it's a striking combination. –Scott Hardie • April 21 2007, 5:38pm EST
Who is this movie made for? It's marketed as a campy spy-sorority action movie, but it has very little action, all filmed incoherently. It's stupid enough that I thought maybe it was intended as an empowerment film for teenaged girls, but 90% of the plot involves a lesbian romance, and one in which a homicidal criminal seduces a good-natured college girl no less. Lesbian audiences are not the pickiest people around (see the success of "Better Than Chocolate"), but I can't imagine them getting behind this unflattering portrayal, in which the lesbian elements are essentially a tease for horny guys in the audience. This was a germ of a good idea for a comic strip, and maybe it made for a good 11-minute action short, but it doesn't begin to support a feature film because there seems to be no plan here, no aim or purpose to the film. It is said in the making-of featurette on the DVD that the script was written in a matter of hours and the pitch was greenlit on the spot by a studio executive, and the film plays that way. I would still complain about the movie running in ten different directions even if one of them worked, but it can't seem to get a single element right. The plot is implausible beyond even the most tolerant suspension of disbelief, especially after the D.E.B.S. catch one of their own in bed with the villain, walk away from them both, and then grill that member for days about the whereabouts of the villain. Its characters are not people but empty ciphers, primarily distinguishable by their race. (Why does the black one have to be bossy and aggressive?) The villain is supposed to be 21 but comes across like a world-weary thirty-something, making the seduction even creepier. The headmistress character is apparently brain-damaged for no reason other than to make the D.E.B.S. look smart in contrast, which just makes the film even more baffling to watch. The villainess has a few funny lines ("I'm blowing up Australia." "Why?" "I don't like their attitude!") while her loyal henchman seems to have a good fifty or sixty IQ points on everybody else and is perpetually bemused about it, but otherwise there's nothing to recommend. This film proves once again that a good premise should be the starting point for the movie, not the only point. –Scott Hardie
So many movies get remade that were perfectly fine in the first place. How often do filmmakers get to revisit material that failed to capitalize on its potential the first time? I look forward to finding out whether the American remake ironed out the flaws in this somewhat lacking Japanese horror film. While it does a good job of creating a truly spooky atmosphere, it has an awkwardness of pace, such as when the mother makes a ghastly discovery then takes her sweet time getting back to her imperiled daughter. It also doesn't help that the whole film feels muted; the original score is really pretty good but there's so little of it throughout the film, letting the tension dissipate. But there's excellent work by two lead actresses here (including 6-year-old Rio Kanno in her debut film), and the best set that money could buy, one that transforms itself several times over and always convincingly so. The film may steal some of its images, but it knows what it's doing: A lift of the most famous image from "The Shining" transforms into a heartbreaking shot that ties together all the symbolism of mother and daughter. I can't quite recommend the film on its own, but if you rent it in preparation for the remake or just to see all of Hideo Nakata's work, you won't be disappointed. –Scott Hardie
Trust me: Do not consume an entire extra-large beverage during the opening credits. This semi-arthouse horror flick applies a layer of prestige to its commercial flaws with slick, ominous art direction and an Oscar-calibre cast (Jennifer Connelly, Pete Postlethwaite, John C. Reilly, and a well-disguised Tim Roth), but the flaws gradually wither it from the core like termites. For one, there's the annoyingly precocious kindergartner who demonstrates the intelligence of an average twelve-year-old, well-acted by little Ariel Gade but constantly reminding us we're watching a movie. Then there's the ridiculously over-the-top finalé, which cranks to eleven a film that had previously been enjoying a nice, creepy four. And there's the clumsy foreshadowing, which smartly refuses to show the villain in person until the final act but gives away the key to her mystery in the opening minutes, and which has a landlord explaining in detail how the shower's glass panel is unbreakable as a giant, blinking indicator that it will later separate mother and daughter in a crucial moment. I'm also getting sick and tired of horror movies where angel-voiced little kids sing their creepy nursery rhymes in an attempt to unnerve the audience: It hasn't been scary for years, Hollywood. Still, the film gets a few things really right. I like the choice to put so much of it inside the mother's head and subject her to migraines; with its oppressive photography and screeching sound effects, I could almost feel the migraines inside my own head. (I mean that better than it sounds.) The teenaged boys who initially seem to be the cause of the problems may be obvious red herrings, but they help to ground the film in plausibility until it derails in that big climax at the end. And the film makes smart choices on the little details, like having the landlord and the lawyer both abandon the heroine at crucial moments in an echo of her childhood, and making the apartment seem cluttered and lived-in at all times, not clean like most movie apartments. [Spoilers ahead.] How does the film compare to the Japanese original? Well, they're very similar, and it's almost pointless to distinguish between them since they're about equally good and about equally effective as horror movies. The original went for sadness as its primary effect with a heartbreaking shot near the end, but this one is more focused on its duties as a horror film, raising the tension and making the conflict more personal. Whereas the Japanese mother makes a sad choice of her own volition, the American mother essentially has her hand forced by the villain, which makes the villain seem a hell of a lot meaner but strips the mother of her soul; here she only reacts to the events of the plot instead of causing them. And while this film wasn't shooting for the original's melancholy epilogue, having the American heroine leave it with a smile on her face strikes a false note after everything that has come before it. Ultimately the films are too similar to bother separating; the Japanese original is slightly better, but neither is particularly worth renting. –Scott Hardie
I'm not terribly bothered by cartoons that act like what they are. It's the cartoons that don't know they're cartoons that get me bent out of shape. This movie has apparently been created with no reference point in reality; its characters are plastic sitcom archetypes with no thoughts beyond their own trajectory in the overworked plot. Don't you hate it when fluffy sitcoms ask you to take their characters seriously, after they spend most of their time milking those same vapid, moronic characters for cheap laughs? This movie plays like the most self-serious sitcom finalés in tv history. I liked the outrageous Madea character and look forward to seeing her again next year in a true comedy, not a weak drama that doesn't have a clue how artificial and trite it is. And that's not even mentioning the convenient hypocrisy of the plot, in which the main character lies to, steals from, and even tortures her ex-husband nearly to death, while the film preaches a message of Christian forgiveness and the redemptive power of belonging to the church. That the poor woman has already suffered so much at the hands of her cartoonishly cruel partner (all he needs is a moustache to twirl while he cackles) is irrelevant; one does not deserve credit for forgiveness after one has gone on a cathartic revenge spree. Again, I don't mind a revenge movie that knows it's a revenge movie, but I object to a revenge movie that genuinely believes it's a pious Christian fable about acceptance. Please. (Ending spoiler: In a movie with so many ideas stolen from better films, including the title, I was particularly irked by the ending stolen almost shot-for-shot from "An Officer and a Gentleman," one of my favorite films and one that earned its dramatic flourish at the end by playing conservatively up to that point. Here it just plays like a contrivance with no reference to what has come before, like most of the other scenes.) –Scott Hardie
Oh my god, I love this movie! It is not a comedy, although I have seen it called that. This is a story about a man who finds that he has OCD and Tourette's syndrome, and what he goes through trying to get his life together. Excellent, but disturbing.. –Aaron Shurtleff • November 19 2009, 3:32pm EST • 1 reply
[excerpted from Ten Best Films feature] James Bond wasn't the only one chasing a parkour superstar this year: Luc Besson filled his latest glossy, bargain-budget action flick with self-trained stuntmen practicing the exercise fad. The electrifying opening chase scene featuring parkour founder David Belle being chased through the windows and up the lattices of a twisting apartment complex is worth the rental all by itself. The rest of the film may be by-the-numbers action cheese, but Besson knows his discipline like a master cheese-smith. –Scott Hardie • March 18 2007, 9:41pm EST
premise: An epic fantasy adventure begins! Based on the books by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. As far as book adaptations go, the movie was pretty much spot on as to the book. I mean, yeah, there are things that have to be cut out, so it's not like you won't notice little things missing here and there, but the major points of the story are all there. If you've read the books, you know what you'll be getting. Story-wise, this was a great movie, in my opinion. The story does seem a bit dated (it is an older story, after all), but it is still enjoyable. The problem, for me, is the mixture of standard animation with computer generated animation. Some people are fans of that, but not me. There are scenes where the main characters (who are animated in the usual fashion) are fighting the draconians (all of the dragons and draconians are done in computer animation), and it's painful to watch. You can see that sometimes, it is not synched up well, and it is a distraction. I like to immerse myself into a story when I watch a movie, and I can't deal with too many distractions like that. The casting was OK. Keifer Sutherland was (surprisingly for me) very good as Raistlin Majere, and his voice really fit the character well. I couldn't get down with Lucy Lawless as Goldmoon, however. Maybe it's the fact that I still think of her as Xena, and the two characters couldn't be more different. The less said about Michelle Trachtenberg as Tika, the better. I thought that Jason Marsden as Tasslehoff Burrfoot worked well, too, and the actor who voiced Flint Fireforge did well, also. Overall, I would say that it's worth seeing if you are a fan of the series, with the caviats mentioned above. I cannot speak to the experience of seeing this having not been previously exposed to the books, since I obviously read the books long ago. The series was one of my favorites when I was younger, so the story isn't exactly super complex, but it is enjoyable, and the characters are a pretty motley group with different perspectives and morals. It's not your typical bunch of heroes that are all agreed on saving the world and fighting for justice, if you know what I mean. –Aaron Shurtleff • April 19 2008, 11:08am EST
Only by my standards could this be called a 2005 film: Haley Joel Osment filmed it in the spring of 2000 before moving on to "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence," and it saw various foreign releases (theatrical and video) until Miramax quietly distributed it stateside on DVD in the first week of January 2005. That's a shame, because it's a powerful film with a great story to tell, the kind of authentic drama you assume is pure autobiography only until you learn the writer-director was born after it takes place. A living, breathing, bleeding portrayal of rural Poland under Nazi oppression, the film tells its tale with such attention to detail and such three-dimensional characters that it feels much more real than most movies that take place in the present, and as a result the film is considerably more thrilling and more disturbing than it could have been. More than a week has passed since I watched it, and still I'm haunted by one character's villainy, turning the scene over and over in my mind wondering whether I could find a way out if I were in little Osment's shoes. I probably couldn't. No one could. The inescapability of this kind of evil is one of its most chilling traits. I mentioned the attention to detail. One of my favorite scenes comes when a boy and girl make a show of locking themselves in a barn, pretending to engage in sin, but they only wind up sitting in a tub full of black seeds and sprinkling handfuls on each other. There's no symbolism to the scene, no advancement of the plot, no statement about the characters; the scene is about nothing more than the simple pleasure of watching how seeds bounce off of naked knees. The film has an important story to tell, but does not tell it so urgently that it neglects to pause at moments of interest. Overall, the film has a few flaws too large to overlook, including some heavy-handed foreshadowing that may as well display on the screen in BIG CAPITAL LETTERS which characters are doomed, but its strengths are many: Intelligence, raw tragedy, a deep consideration of religious morality, a beautiful score by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek, and a performance good enough to remind you why Willem Dafoe used to be regarded so highly. Don't let another five years go by before you see this. I recommend it highly. –Scott Hardie
Ending spoilers ahead. Can you sue a movie studio for giving you whiplash? This movie goes through so many twist endings, it laps itself and keeps on going. In the final act, there were not one, not two, but six twist endings. The director's last name is "ruse" so I should have known, but this is ridiculous. One single twist ending is bad enough when you have a good film on your hands: Matt Dillon works hard to get us into the head of this angry loser, and despite some abrupt changes in tone, the film ultimately works well in both its darker and lighter moments. And it has some great lines, most of them drenched in profanity. Some argue that the twist endings illuminate the philosophy of the film as explained in the voiceover narration, but me, I think they're a cop-out because the writer-director didn't have real confidence in his story; he could have told the same philosophy without the con game. And stacking twist endings upon more twist endings is like trying put out a fire with gasoline. If I docked this film a half-star for each twist I'd have to give it a negative rating, so a single measly half-star will have to do. Stop the DVD when the news reporter is explaining what happened to the hero and you've got yourself a pretty good movie. (Footnote: I love how the DVD menu spoofs the menu for "Office Space," a film with a similar premise, right down to the mention of "P.T.S. reports.") –Scott Hardie
For the initiated, Fanboys has its moments, celebrating the bonds of friendship that come through fandom. But it's pretty bad, straining to set up unbelieveable scenes with weak, predictable payoffs. These are not the laughs you're looking for. –Scott Hardie • July 12 2009, 5:24pm EST
[Ending spoilers ahead.] Complementing Drew Barrymore's instant likeability as an actress is her shrewd business sense: As a producer, she knows how to put her endearing nature to good use in film projects. "Fever Pitch" is hardly the most cold-and-calculated romantic comedy ever made, but its obvious cross-gender appeal and refusal to break with genre convention guarantee that it will please audiences and make its star/producer even richer. There's a lot to like about it, including Nick Hornby's well-turned phrases and the surprising ease with which the forever grinning Jimmy Fallon slips into the lead role, matching Barrymore's winsomeness. If I have a major complaint about the film beyond its genre-formula structure, it's that it ends too abruptly: Within thirty seconds of the film's beginning, the voiceover narration notes that the film takes place during the Red Sox's championship 2004 season, but that final stunning victory comes within the final thirty seconds of the film, seeming as hurriedly tacked-on as the ending actually was. Perhaps the film is better off as a rental, where you can enjoy the original ending that the filmmakers intended. –Scott Hardie
This is strictly fanservice, as anyone with name recognition of the title can tell at once. Luckily for fans, Square gives some of the best fanservice in the business. This breathlessly-paced movie is stuffed with spectacular action scenes, an unbreakable sheen of cool, and countless inside jokes to the video game that inspired it. If you've enjoyed the game, you can't go wrong with this flick. If you have no idea what Final Fantasy is, well, this isn't the place to learn. –Scott Hardie • September 24 2006, 10:05pm EST
Few movies ask Vin Diesel to tell jokes and not punch people for two whole hours. More should; he's good. When mobster Jack DiNorscio defended himself on trial, it unlocked his inner stand-up comic, and this movie is based on the funny real transcripts. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:40am EST
premise: After her daughter disappears during a long flight, Jodie Foster must take matters into her own hands to rescue her. [Minor spoilers.] When your level of creativity is to cast Sean Bean not as the villain, but as the creepy guy you think is the villain but turns out not to be, your well has run dry. This movie stitches together inspirations from recent movies like Panic Room, Air Force One, and The Forgotten, all of them mediocre but still better than this, and it doesn't come anywhere close to the master inspiration The Lady Vanishes. The movie gets a little juice out of the high concept, and Jodie Foster would be good just ordering pizza, but there's not much to recommend here. –Scott Hardie • January 19 2009, 11:06pm EST
Finally, Robert Rodriguez has found a way to combine action and plot at once. His previous action trilogy – "El Mariachi," "Desperado," and "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" – was a dazzling piece of work, full of vivid imagery and colorful characters, but those existed in a sort of free-form state, with a feeling that each movie could have rearranged its scenes in random order and been approximately as entertaining. By adapting Frank Miller's comics so carefully, Rodriguez's "Sin City" can't help but have the narrative thrust he was lacking. Because it's an anthology, it still doesn't form one single coherent film, but it does have three complete stories with beginnings, middles, and endings. And it's proof just how good Rodriguez can be when he has discipline. Make no mistake; this is a guy movie's guy movie. (Critic Jeffrey Westhoff quipped, "You know you've gone beyond run-of-the-mill movie violence when you need to use the plural for 'castrations.'") A borderline NC-17 level of violence is one of the selling points for the film. But if you have the nerves for it, this is a true roller-coaster ride of a film, and the excitement comes more from Rodriguez's technique than any of the action. It's presented in a gorgeous black and white is used both to boil images down to their essence, as when Clive Owen's white profile sinks into blackness, or when Rodriguez wants to show a striking level of detail, such as in the close-ups that reveal the nuances of the prosthetics work on Mickey Rourke's face. (This film will be long forgotten by the time its deserved Oscar for Best Makeup is given to some other title.) Rodriguez uses animation in a liberating way, presenting bodies and cars and bullets in constant motion against a vast backdrop of urban sprawl and unyielding rain. Like the comics that inspired it, "Sin City" has no time to pause and think because it has a lot of action to resolve in a limited timespan, and it barrels through the material with abandon, striking one astonishing image after another. This is an action movie on steroids, tempered by its themes of self-punishment and redeemed by its brilliant sense of style. It's not for everyone, but the level of violence can tell you that. Besides being difficult to recommend, I wish I could say it was more perfect. The breaks from reality sometimes get too difficult to swallow, as characters are shot full of bullets and struck repeatedly by speeding cars but keep on walking, and also fall several stories at a time without a scratch on them, both reminiscent of the recklessly bad "Daredevil." And some of the actors, particularly Bruce Willis and Michael Madsen, haven't figured out how to deliver the hard-boiled prose with conviction and rhythm, so their dialogue rings terribly flat. But these flaws and a handful of others are minor in the scheme of things, a slight tarnish on an otherwise brilliant work. This is the visual feast for the first half of the year. –Scott Hardie
Unlike most movies based off of popular tv series, this did not have the feel of "Elongated TV Episode." NON SPOILERISH INFORMATION: We are treated to having views of how things are going on in both of the worlds. We see where some of the characters in Amestris (Ed's homeworld) are now, and how they are doing. Not so much so that it distracts. Just to see that, truely, everyone still seems to be connected and life did go on for most. Yet some are still burdened by guilt. One of the interesting things in the movie is the bits of history that are injected into it. Having taken a few years of German class when I was in school, I was already familiar with a decent amount of what was going on it the country at this point in history. As well, the history channel has often made mentioned and showcased instances of Hitler's fascination with occult and items of mythilogical value. In anycase, I do not want to say too much in case you might want to see it. Below, is a tad bit more information, but it gives a big spoiler for the Television Series. Which, incidently, is very much worth watching. WARNING: SPOILER heavy. ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE SERIES A little background information: At the end of the TV series, we were left with Edward Elric, being seperated from everything he's ever known and loved in the "Real World." For those who recognized the events, during World War I in Europe. His brother Alphonse had finally gotten his body back. Besides the fact that Ed was on the other side of the Gate now, his younger brother also ended up with a type of Amnesia. Basically the last several years that he spent running around with Ed looking for the Philospher's Stone, were offered up as an unknown sacrifice. The Movie: The start of the movie goes back in time, to a point where Ed and Al (who was at this point still a spirit entrapped within a metal body) were still together and attempting to stop a mad scientist who had just created a vile weapon. The brothers dispose of him. It is then mentioned that no one ever heard from him again. Then we shoot back towards the present seeing that Ed is in a car with someone who looks surprisingly a like to his younger brother Alphonse. After having car troubles, they end up hitching a ride with a band of traveling Gypsy Ladies who are going to the Carnival. Which, incidently works out great for these two since Alphonse (Heiderich) is part of a group that is showcasing a rocket there. Little does Ed know though that this would ultimately lead to a whole lot of trouble. Thusly, does the FMA movie begin. They are currently in Munich and the year is 1923. –Lori Lancaster • June 7 2007, 2:36pm EST
Chess is not a game enjoyed by people with no attention span, yet that seems to be the target audience of this documentary on the subject. It is edited with such schizophrenic abandon that it often becomes difficult to follow, cutting between different events and film formats faster than Oliver Stone's wildest imaginings, and playing the musical score so loudly that the speech (much of it in Kasparov's Russian accent) cannot be comprehended. This is also the second documentary I've been in less than a week in which a significant amount of the narration was delivered in a breathy and unintelligible whisper for no apparent reason, a storytelling gimmick that had no welcome to wear out in the first place. But the real sin of the film is reporting what happened without exploring it in anything but a superficial, symbolic way. There's even an interview with one chess reporter who pats himself on the back for doing real investigative journalism instead of being a PR puppet, but the film doesn't follow in his footsteps. It presents as literal history Garry Kasparov's explanation for his historic 1997 loss to computer Deep Blue: Another grandmaster was feeding it moves, and IBM refused to prove otherwise though they easily could have. The only "investigation" taking place is corresponding interviews with the Deep Blue team, who explain without illuminating. Why didn't they give up the computational logs that Kasparov asked for? Why did they go to such extreme lengths to secure their control center? Why do they continue to refuse a rematch after the financial bounce from the original victory has worn off? These are questions the film makes the viewer eager to hear answered. For all of Kasparov's explanations about how computers "simply don't play that way," it gradually dawned on me that something much more interesting had taken place than a computer beating a human with strategy: A computer, with more than a little help from its assistants, beat a human with psychology. Kasparov claims that there had to be two computers involved since Deep Blue seemed to play so poorly in Game One and so masterfully in Game Two, but he's obviously a stranger to games like poker and pool, where the fundamental principle of the hustle is to seem much easier to defeat than you are. Deep Blue, probably instructed by its team to play poorly the first time (rather than spontaneously developing the strategy), psyched out Kasparov by throwing the first match and then whooping him in the second, a trick that both parties admit was enough to throw Kasparov off his game. He drew the next three matches and threw the fourth under increasing psychological pressure from IBM – first agreeing to his demands about the logs and then refusing, toying with his staff and reporters by locking them out of the building as security threats, pretending to spy on his hotel room, et cetera. For all the discussions of the pros and cons of being the human or being the computer, none of the interviewees did much to acknowledge one of the most obvious weaknesses of the human, that he can be defeated psychologically while the computer is invulnerable. Maybe it wasn't the film's intention to communicate that that's what happened, but I was left with a strong impression of it all the same. –Scott Hardie
For those who don't love zombie movies, or a great deal of automatic weapons fire, there's nothing to see here. But those with the stomach for this kind of violent gore-fest will be treated to a reasonably thought-provoking new variation on the theme, filmed by an original master who still knows how to direct the best eviscerations in the genre. I just wish there had been more to it: The film does its ninety minutes so well that I was left wondering how good another 45 would have been, since it does a brilliant job of introducing Marxist and Nietzschean concepts into Romero's eternal struggle between the haves, the have-nots and the undead, but then does nothing with them once introduced. Recent zombie flicks like "28 Days Later..." and "Shaun of the Dead" have found new variations on the same theme and followed them through to their logical conclusions, but Romero's latest flick concludes with a bullet-riddled finalé just as it should be warming up. It's technically excellent and Romero still loves to include fun little iconoclastic asides, but its shallowness ultimately makes this a minor effort from a director too long denied a film project large enough to encompass all his ideas. –Scott Hardie
Boy likes girl. Boy follows girl. Girl almost sees boy. Boy continues following girl. It goes on like this for 90 minutes in this near-wordless film about modern alienation, which observes a few small quirks of human behavior and a lot of mundanity. –Scott Hardie • May 23 2010, 3:35pm EST
George Clooney is a newsman's son and an impassioned liberal. Here he makes a powerful statement against the tyranny of fear, by celebrating a journalist who refused to be intimidated into admitting that his sound reasoning was flawed. Great stuff. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:34am EST
Eastwood doesn't fake racism very well, but at 78, he can still play damn mean. His version of Crash is completely predictable, but done very well, with a strong cast and Eastwood's trademark understatement. His last performance is a sharp one. –Scott Hardie • November 13 2009, 10:54pm EST • 1 reply
Rodriguez's zombie movie is a good homage to crappy horror flicks that don't deserve such affection, but Tarantino's muscle-car thrill-ride is much better. It's riveting and totally unique, and the plot's wild acceleration from 0 to 60 is a great rush. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:30am EST
The daily experience of an American GI stationed in Iraq, measured by the futility he feels when policing a city that doesn't care whether he's sent home dead or alive so long as he leaves, is an important thing for stateside Americans to understand. But surely it deserves a more probing film that this, which merely captures the daily lives of select soldiers with precious little insight or commentary. The film is a shapeless mass of chronologically-ordered footage, as the soldiers patrol and patrol and patrol some more in what plays very much like a two-hour episode of "Cops: Baghdad," but rarely does it ask hard questions about what it feels like to fight a war that some of them think is unjustified, and rarely does it probe the effects of the occupation on Iraqis (for better and for worse). Most of its expression comes when the soldiers show off how much they've been practicing their rapping skills, but there's way more than enough; if the amateur rap in this movie were released a soundtrack, it would need two discs at minimum. A tighter focus in the editing room, as part of a larger philosophy of making a fucking point, might have whipped this footage into something better, something these soldiers deserve for the hard jobs they do. –Scott Hardie
For me, seeing this Demi Moore haunted-lighthouse movie in the same weekend as Ghost didn't do it any favors. It goes for cheap jolts instead of lingering dread, it has a predictable twist, and it's just plain not very bright. Moore is a talented actress lacking broad appeal, so she gets stuck doing this kind of straight-to-DVD junk that has no use for her intensity or intelligence. The Welsh island setting is gorgeous, though. –Scott Hardie • June 24 2007, 12:42am EST
premise: Will Smith stars as Hancock, a modern superhero (possible spoilers) This movie is a typical Will Smith action blockbuster. Which, honestly, is his best genre. Set in modern day LA, Hancock is not your average superhero. He's a depressed drunkard whose attempts to save the day are met with criticism rather than praise. The town is sick of him and he is sick of him. Enter Jason Bateman, un upbeat PR specialist who specializes in philanthropy and is determined to turn Hancock into a superhero of Superman caliber after he saves his life. His wife, played by Charlize Theron seems to have a mysterious connection to Hancock, although she won't let on and Hancock can't remember what the connection is anyway. The movie starts off as more of an action comedy with Will Smith style Mr. Cool humor. But when the connection between he and Theron's character, Mary, is revealed, then you get the makings of a true superhero movie. I only wish there was more knowledge of the back ground story. Usually for a Batman or Spiderman flick, I can turn to Will to fill me in on the background of the comic. I would have liked to have had more info on the genesis of the superhero characters, but it is explained as well as it can be in the time frame and with emotion. The key villian is a little under developed. He does have a deformity, and he does acquire henchmen (fellow inmates whose crimes were thwarted by Hancock thus landing them in jail). Mostly though, Hancock follows tradional, very basic Superhero genre formulas and updates it to a more laid back modern day attitude. I wouldn't put it up there wih other superhero movies, but it is a good family film. I enjoyed it. –Jackie Mason • January 4 2009, 9:35pm EST
We expect a CGI children's film to provide dazzling visuals, music, and the odd in-joke meant solely for mom and dad. What we don't expect is one that commits as wholeheartedly to its premise as this one. While they sing, and speak, and seem to have an unusual culture all their own, the movie's Emperor Penguins remain anatomically accurate -- no grasping things with flippers here -- and (to a large extent) limited in their perspectives of the world around them. Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, and Brittany Murphy (in a surprisingly strong vocal performance) may belt out R&B standards, and Elijah Wood (as the youngster protagonist) may have the typical quest-romance story required in such stuff, the degree to which the penguins act like penguins is astonishing. And when humans do finally turn up, they are and remain appropriately foreign and forbidding presences to the animals of the film. Director George Miller and the team at Dreamworks have clearly studied the landmark March of the Penguins, and in grafting a comparatively grounded version of the film's chosen critters onto the standard plotline (borrowed, in this case, from equal parts The Trumpet of the Swan and Footloose), they manage no small amount of invention along the way. Robin Williams tags along as not one, but two sidekicks from two different penguin species. –Kris Weberg • November 24 2006, 12:12am EST
This movie is about two brothers, who have separately achieved stardom in boy bands, exploring their secret incestuous relationship while on a private camping trip. Forgive me, but I was expecting some kind of no-holds-barred satire of pop music and all its dirty laundry, or at least some kind of gay/celebrity/incest sparks of any sort. But no: This is a serious drama about two young men deciding whether or not they're in love; the fact that they're brothers or pop stars has virtually nothing to do with it. The clash of expectations doesn't detract from the film's good points, such as the screenplay's sharp ear for natural dialogue, the actors' comprehensive use of body language, or difficult shots such as a winding mountain road seen between two passengers in an SUV. It does, however, leave you wondering why you're sitting through a talky little relationship movie when a much more interesting film could have been made from the same material. –Scott Hardie
Potter fans automatically put this film on the same lofty pedestal as its forebears, but as an outsider, I was left scratching my head why. The cutting of half the tale to cram it into a movie's running length hurt it immensely, as it felt rushed and seemed to be missing crucial details; the Weinsteins would have filmed the whole novel and cut it into two films. Once again Harry stands there like a dolt forever on the verge of being murdered until he's rescued just in time by the broadly-drawn supporting characters. The idea of a magical tournament is an exciting one, but even by kid-movie standards, the rules of this contest are poorly established and then broken left and right by the characters without consequence, making it a series of things happening loudly instead of a story. As usual, the technical craft that goes into bringing the story to life is superb, especially the visual effects, but the story itself needs some better care if it's going to survive the transition from page to screen with anyone but die-hard fans to enjoy it, many though there are. –Scott Hardie • September 24 2006, 9:37pm EST • 1 reply
The odd Potter films excite me while the evens bore, this one included. It feels like it's just positioning the pieces for the big ending. It's for fans only, requiring familiarity to understand anything. Good music and photography, I guess. –Scott Hardie • December 13 2009, 5:47pm EST
premise: The fifth film in the Harry Potter series. The last thing that I expected would improve a Harry Potter movie would be to cut out more of the source material, but I shouldn't be surprised. The books are sprawling tomes stuffed with their own complex mythology and social history, and that doesn't spell excitement for a casual fan. David Yates, whose quiet drama The Girl in the Café was great and nothing like Harry Potter, pares down the tale to its essentials, and in the process makes the most fun adventure in the series yet. It still has a certain lack of sophistication that gives it away as a kids movie, but it's one that entertains all audiences, including muggles with no interest beyond the closing credits. The film's biggest weakness is shared with the other films, letting the other (grownup) characters come to Harry's rescue while he does almost nothing to save the day himself, but at least we're used to it by now. Here's looking forward to what Yates does with movie six. –Scott Hardie • October 16 2007, 11:24pm EST
premise: Romantic comedy with an all star cast follows several coincidentally linked Baltimore 20/30-somethings who are trying to ride the crazy love rollercoaster. It's obvious this movie was written by two Sex and the City writers. Any fan of the show will recognize the title as a more memorable line from the series delivered so matter-of-factly by Ron Livingston. What this film does that SATC didn't was capture more than just the swiging single girl perspective. The opening string of scenes captures a female woe that is universal to single women everywhere. I admit I was a bit skeptical that this one line from a tv show could be made into a whole movie plot. It is a little hard to care about all the individual characters at first, but the storylines draw you in because they are all very familiar. Almost every character, every story line, and even every scene strikes home somehow for probably everyone starting right off the bat with the opening scene of the little girl and little boy in the play ground. I found myself reminiscing on my own playground memory and nodding along. And not that men are the bad guys in every scenario. The Scarlett Johansen-Kevin Connolly situation shows that women can be the players, and men the saps who watch the phone or misinterpret signals. Not only can you see yourself in almost every character but you can match each one up with someone you know, or knew. This movie does that good of a job illustrating all aspects of the dating/love/relationship/marriage thing. It was good to see Justin Long in a grown up role. Ginnifer Goodwin in a starring role. Ben Affleck in a role that suits his acting style best: small but meaningful. Jennifer Anniston in the "always a bridesmaid" type of role she plays best. Although I think my favorite character was the older woman sipping a brandy and talking about husband 1, 2, and 3 in one of the the SATC-the-early-years, mock-umentary type scenes. Hilarious! Ditto on the two ladies sitting on the bench talking about men and their ironic break up lines. –Jackie Mason • October 16 2009, 11:34pm EST • 1 reply
It's weird to call anything Guillermo del Toro makes "by the numbers," but here it is, a standard Hellboy adventure with the standard payoffs. It still has visual invention to spare and plenty of chuckles, but the fresh feeling of the first one is gone. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:21am EST
Maybe this movie was doomed from the start. As you know from the unavoidable trailer (the same one that spoils every good joke), it's about an unflappably smooth ladies man who can play every romantic note perfectly, and an endearingly clueless schmoe who doesn't let his total lack of sophistication stop him from yearning for women way out of his league. Think for a second: Which man would be far more interesting as the lead in a romantic comedy? Now guess which man this movie makes the colossal mistake of focusing on instead. Hey, there's a certain appeal to Mr. James Bond in the first two acts of the movie, but sooner or later he must get out of the way for Mr. Everyman to triumph over the odds in the end, since the slob is the only one facing any odds and the only one capable of inspiring audience sympathy. The movie contrives a subplot about how the ladies man loses his cool whenever he's around the leading lady so that his story can pretend to have some tension, but after seeing him in action, it's not plausible for a minute. This fundamental miscalculation is symptomatic of a larger problem with the movie, that it's always looking in the wrong place. When the leading man finally lays his heart on the line at a speed-dating event, the movie focuses on the anonymous bit player next to him. When the leading lady is suddenly moved to tears and storms off on the first date, the scene lingers on her companion instead of following her. Later, when the leading man's talking to her through her apartment door and trying to express his genuine feelings, the camera looks through the peephole and distorts his face like a funhouse mirror, but that scene cries out to be told from his point of view, not hers. The whole movie is one mistake after another, with jarringly inappropriate sight gags, torrents of phony-sounding exposition in the leading lady's introductory scenes, and far more Fred Flintstone misunderstandings than any movie should be allowed to have. It takes one hell of a big mess for these four appealing lead actors not to make a difference, but this movie is that bad. Stay away. –Scott Hardie
Though more gritty than most mainstream studio films get these days, Bruce Willis’s latest thriller is otherwise completely conventional. Seen —The Negotiator”? —Panic Room”? —John Q”? A thousand other films like them? Then you’ve seen this one already. It does nothing new and breaks absolutely no ground, going through the usual paces with its double-kidnapping storyline about the idiot police force, the desperate hostages, the smug villains, and the everyman cop caught in the middle. It feels like the four hundredth sequel to —Die Hard” and not just because Willis is the star. He plumbs some unexpected depths of emotion as his usual wounded tough guy, and I have to mention the freshness of the duotone, animated opening credits (they play like deleted scenes from Willis’s —Sin City”), but otherwise this film just a paycheck to everyone involved and a waste of time for the audience. There are better thrillers out there. –Scott Hardie
premise: A loving spoof of action movies, from the director (Edgar Wright) and stars (Simon Pegg & Nick Frost) of Shaun of the Dead. Most action movies are quotable for all the wrong reasons. Hot Fuzz, a loving send-up of the genre, includes the typical cheesy shine-ons whenever the hero gets the better of his opponent, but it's the offbeat character moments that really bring the laughs. Pegg & Frost have become the mismatched odd couple of modern British comedy, but the humor doesn't come from their differences; their friction ramps up the humorous into the hilarious. The same movies wouldn't be half as good without their friendly banter. Hot Fuzz delivers what it promises, lots of action and lots of laughs, delivered with an ironic perspective that would be a turn-off if it wasn't so clear how much the filmmakers really love the movies they're spoofing. This movie is to action-comedies what Scream is to slasher films. Take it seriously and you might be disappointed by the obvious solution to the mystery driving the plot, but then, isn't that true of most action movies? It's about the comaraderie, the sound of automatic weapons, and the tongue-in-cheek fetishizing of tough-guy one-liners. It's for anybody who gets a giddy grin at the possibilities inherent in the premise or the cast. –Scott Hardie • November 24 2007, 12:46am EST
If I do not go to the same extreme as critics and hail this as one of the best films of the year, it is a reflection on the art, not on the story. I'm overwhelmed by the experience of Paul Rusesabagina, the undistinguished everyman who found a way to save 1200 lives during the Rwandan civil war. He did not set out to save lives – in fact, the film shows him always reluctant to take on more people – but once the refugees were in his care, he went out of his way to protect them and comfort them, using ingenuity at every turn, never resorting to any more violence than banging a pot around the kitchen. His is an amazing tale. The film that tells it is good if not great. Since Western influence inspired the civil war in the first place, it seems like the real story trying to emerge is why the world looked away while Rwanda murdered itself. The film states openly that Europe and America don't give a damn about Africans getting killed, but it doesn't see the irony, that it must overcome the same problem. After a steady diet of Holocaust films, most recently the devastating "The Pianist," it's hard for a white audience to get worked up over some well-dressed people forced to collect their drinking water from a swimming pool (the horror!), whatever their race. A few bridges are wisely built with some prominent white characters, including a journalist who asks helpful questions about the Tutsis and Hutus so the audience has a primer, but I must insist again that the most interesting story is why the world did not intervene: If there's one thing us white Americans are good at, it's feeling awful sorry about how we didn't help out these people or those people when they needed us. The movie is at its best when it dangles the hope of foreign aid and then snatches it away. But I'm focusing far too much on the negative. This is every bit the moving drama it should be with this source material, which two lead performances that bring out the vigorous humanity in their real subjects. The film's soundtrack also does everything right, ranging from innocuous pop songs while establishing the peace that's about to be broken, to perfectly ominous low-frequency hums during times of mounting dread. And the film often shows us a happy, joyous Rwanda, all the more powerful reminder that it's a place worth preserving. Whatever its inadequacies, the film as a whole is unforgettable work, a portrait of a real hero in a fascinating place. It is worthy of attention from every audience. –Scott Hardie
I wonder what it would be like to watch this movie with a circus knife-thrower. There's a person who has devoted years or possibly decades to training, just to be able to throw knives at an assistant a few feet away without actually striking them. I wonder whether the knife-thrower would be moved to fits of discomfort or laughter by "House of Flying Daggers," in which knives soar through the air pulling off all kinds of effects: They spontaneously stop spinning with their blade forward, they circle like boomerangs around the action, they slice through many tree-like stalks of bamboo when needed (other times getting impaled in a single stalk), they soar through the air like flocks of birds when thrown by offscreen assassins too far away to see their targets but strike a whole platoon of soldiers with deadly accuracy. In whatever fantasy China this is, knives spin through the air so often they may as well be considered weather. I'm not criticizing the film, only commenting on its primary visual motif, which makes good on the title. This is a film of elegant visuals and elaborate choreography, and viewers who like this kind of movie (you know who you are) will be in for a treat. Odd that a Zhang Yimou film doesn't pack more of an emotional punch or thematic depth, but it's more interesting than "Hero" and arguably more accessible to the average Western moviegoer. If you aren't familiar with this new renaissance of balletic martial arts films, this is an excellent place to get started. –Scott Hardie
premise: Will Smith plays the lone immune survivor of an airborne plague, roaming the streets of Manhattan with his dog, avoiding contact with something dangerous within the city. On the footsteps of I, Robot, here comes another Will Smith sci-fi action movie that might not be as cerebral as its venerated source material, but is still a lot smarter and better-made than most of the brainless CGI-riddled junk that Hollywood churns out (much of it also starring Will Smith). Following a man into the depths of loneliness after three years of solitude, it has a undercurrent of bitter sadness, unusually grim and emotional for a movie founded upon explosions, stuntwork, and special effects. It also makes a great adventure, as the hero makes Manhattan his private playground and does things we never could. It's a shame that the filmmakers traded down in their efforts to distance themselves from the source material (really? the title comes from Bob Marley now?), because the film would have been better as a straight adaptation. But it's still a smarter, richer movie than it could have been. –Scott Hardie • March 30 2008, 8:57pm EST • 1 reply
Patrick Creadon's documentary is good at spelling out how we racked up our steep national debt (the abridged 90-minute version anyway), but is short on solutions and even shorter on style. There's not much here that you couldn't get by surfing Wikipedia. –Scott Hardie • March 22 2012, 9:35pm EST
It should have been great. Mike Judge does satire very well, that is when people realize he's being satirical, and who better to rail against the dumbing-down of America? His plot sends two ordinary people 500 years into the future, where they are the smartest people on Earth due to successively stupider generations. It inverts Judge's Beavis and Butt-head concept (two idiots in a normal world), and sets up a comic goldmine for taking stupid-American jokes to their logical extreme. But a funny thing happened on the way to the punchline: The movie got so into its lame trying-to-escape-the-thought-police-and-return-to-present-day plotline that it neglected to include many gags. Imagine Office Space with half as many jokes and you have an idea of the comedy wattage here. Some of the material is very funny, and the deleted scenes hint that more good material was cut out, but poor test screenings sapped the studio's nerve and this was re-edited for a disappointing quickie release so fast you could've blinked and missed it. It's an ironic shame that morons in the audience are to blame for turning a smart satire of stupidity into a moronic let-down. –Scott Hardie • June 17 2007, 10:50am EST
It's not that rap can't work in a period musical; it's that rappers can't make movies. OutKast are brilliant musicians with limitless charm and creativity, but when they go this far out of their element, they need to be reigned in by a director who knows the territory, not a buddy who shot some of their music videos. Everybody here wants to make a Movie, and that gives it the pace of rush-hour traffic as it comes braking to a halt every two minutes for an intense scene where André experiences profound love or where Big Boi gives or receives lethal threats. It needs very much not to take itself so seriously. The songs are great, but then almost all of them are reworked from OutKast's best album, and listening to that album with your eyes closed is vastly more entertaining than watching this clumsy mess. –Scott Hardie • April 22 2007, 5:29pm EST
premise: A sci-fi spoof of Charlie's Angels with an intentional D-grade sensibility. Anna Nicole Smith's last film. There are bad movies that slowly win you over with self-deprecation and a sort of weird appeal. Then there are bad movies that make you burst into laughter every few minutes at how seriously they take themselves. Then there are some that are just plain depressing, making you sink into your couch with despair at the human race that made them. Illegal Aliens is that kind of bad movie. It got a small wave of attention for being Anna Nicole Smith's last movie, posthumously released, but it's as trashy and unappealing as anything else she created in her sorry life. This spoof of Charlie's Angels and Men in Black casts Smith in a trio of alien-fighting protectors of Earth. Her partners are "the competent ones," not because they do their jobs effectively, but because they don't spend critical scenes poking a dildo in their ears and talking on a dildo like it was a telephone. For some reason, Smith adopts the chirpy, high-pitched voice of a grating cartoon character, and the phrase "nails on a chalkboard" doesn't do the character justice. But she's nothing compared to the villain, a temper-tantrum-throwing caricature of whatever the director thought he was lampooning. Joanie Laurer's performance makes her WWE career look like Masterpiece Theater: She channels her inner 4-year-old, alternately screeching and gutturally groaning her dialogue as loudly as she can, all with pouty, constipated expressions on her face, like Judy Tenuta covering Cannibal Corpse. It's the worst performance of its kind that I can recall seeing. How am I supposed to evaluate anything else about the movie when these two central performances are so off-putting they force you not to pay attention? Furthermore, who really cares? This is a bad movie thoroughly aware of its own badness and hopeful to entertain in spite of itself. It attempts to be clever with sight gags and cheap stock footage, which I would give it credit for if the attempts were successful. This is not a bad movie for bad-movie enthusiasts, just a depressing ninety-minute eulogy for a bottom-feeding celebrity who didn't deserve the attention in the first place. –Scott Hardie • October 20 2007, 4:07pm EST
This is precisely the sort of movie that gives artsy debuts by young indie directors a reputation for being unbearably pretentious. Like Sofia Coppola but untempered by her modesty, it piles on the quirky characters and moody navel-gazing, seemingly determined to defeat any chance it has of being genuinely moving because it's too busy being adorable. Sigourney Weaver, Jeff Daniels and Emile Hirsch are game for the material, but they could be a whole lot better with real characters to play instead of these independent-film clichés. If writer-director Dan Harris has much of a frame of reference beyond the superhero films he's more famous for writing, he doesn't demonstrate it here, attempting to tug a heartstring while quoting Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins. The "shocking" final-act revelations only confirm that A) the film doesn't trust the audience to have figured out the obvious a half-hour earlier, and B) it thinks it's a whole lot deeper than it actually is. –Scott Hardie
This year I made a necessary adjustment in my rating of movies, because gorgeous and visually exhilarating films that otherwise had little or no merit, such as the Matrix sequels, were winding up some of my most praised titles every year, a trend that stayed true to my personal priorities as a film-lover at the expense of my reviews having any value to anyone else. I couldn’t help but think of this seemingly insignificant switch when I watched this French-Hungarian sci-fi graphic novel brought to startling life on film, because it contains some of the most complex, gorgeous, and original imagery of the year, but houses them in a stale, half-baked plot that doesn’t stir the imagination anywhere near as well as they do. Filmed with the same technique as —Sin City” and —Sky Captain,” in which the actors are real but literally everything around them is pure CGI, this movie is a creative feast for the eyes, set in a dystopian 2095 New York where blue-haired mutants live among ancient Egyptian gods returned to the Earth they claim they created. Possibly inadvertently, it inspires thoughts about the place of man in the fictions he creates to entertain himself and demystify the universe, but the plot is too murky and confusing to be much fun, and the tone of the film is muted when it should be as vibrant and lively as its visuals. If you’re the kind of viewer who appreciates sequences of exquisite beauty just for their aesthetic value, you should see this film, but to general audiences I just can’t recommend it. –Scott Hardie
Released only two weeks into the new year, here is a comedy that is likely to be one of the warmest and kindest of 2005. Like Paul Weitz's previous film "About a Boy," this one tells a totally implausible story with so much emotional verisimilitude that it doesn't seem to matter. So what if these men would actually despise each other? So what if the older man would be fired on his younger boss's first day? So what if the film lacks the backbone to turn the younger boss into the villain he should be? It defies conventional expectations by populating a movie about corporate takeover with kind, gentle, friendly human beings who honestly like each other. David Lynch redefined his own expectations as a filmmaker when he took a similarly PG-rated turn with "The Straight Story," but with this release Weitz is only reinforcing his reputation as a upbeat filmmaker devoted to positive male relationships. Dennis Quaid might have been robbed of his potential as a leading man in his youth, but he has aged into an excellent father figure in his recent films, a square-jawed embodiment of gently-fading masculinity who guides his younger costars into adult virility. Will Russell Crowe still be this manly in his fifties? Here Quaid shows again why he has always been underappreciated as an actor, because he brings grace and integrity to roles that do not show them off. Quaid's performance is one of the best reasons to see "In Good Company," which may be transparent in its plot machinations but is unexpectedly true in its emotional tone. –Scott Hardie
Shirley MacLaine has played "lovable" grandmas before in much worse movies, but this old lady is wise and patient, and anchors an above-average dramedy. Cameron Diaz's ditzy lines sound like they were intended for a sitcom, but she delivers them sincerely without aiming for a joke, because after all, her character doesn't know that she's funny. At this point, it's probably beyond hope that Curtis Hanson will return to the great heights of his best movies. –Scott Hardie • July 18 2011, 8:07pm EST
Samuel L. Jackson and Juliette Binoche are actors of effortless appeal, but even their combined charisma is not quite enough to convince us that the love story supposedly at the heart of this post-Apartheid drama is anything but a distraction from the much more important events going on around them. Nelson Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was one of the brightest ideas of the twentieth century: Instead of trying to forget the atrocities committed in the country’s name, a decision that continues to plague Germany after sixty years, his Commission offered amnesty to any officer of Apartheid who gave a full confession of his crimes and listened to his victims’ stories in court. The film partially bungles these testimonial scenes when it populates a montage sequence with the same faces we’ve already seen, making it seem as if this nationwide program has approximately ten participants, but worse, it turns to an unconvincing and dramatically inert love affair between two reporters covering the events. As a white Afrikaan and a black American, their dialogue about the past and future of South Africa is interesting and awkwardly hopeful, but the film puts them in the way of better material. It also would help if the DVD included subtitles, since the South African accent is occasionally incomprehensible; I had to rewind a crucial scene three times just to understand why the hell it had happened. This is a thoughtful film about an interesting historical experiment and not at all difficult to watch, but I wish I could say it was better. –Scott Hardie
premise: A former Army sergeant (Tommy Lee Jones) is determined to find his missing son, a soldier returning from Iraq. Inasmuch as a movie about topics as somber as war and death can "rule", this one did (kind of like saying that Schindler's List "ruled"). But rule it does, as it takes a serious look at the heavy price of war that is paid by *everyone*... all without a single bullet fired or bomb dropped anywhere -- in fact, with barely a cumulative moment of combat to be seen in the whole length of the film. And even more poetically, it does so with nary a political stance or moral indictment, but with sheer patriotism and humanity. Admittedly, I was surprised to see Susan Sarandon playing wife to Tommy Lee Jones in a film about war -- I suppose it should have been some kind of tip-off... but her supporting role was introduced with such fluid subtlety that, "Was that Susan Saradon?" only entered my head as an afterthought to her very brief first scene. And, as it turns out, the marriage of these two actors unfolds into a perfect synthesis of the dichotomous study of human nature in wartime that follows, because there really is no glorification and no villification here -- no black or white -- just a disturbingly realistic portrayal of people coping in complex and confusing times and situations... including a few poignant micro-studies in gender and race/ethnicity issues along the way, assisted by the fine acting of Charlize Theron. I highly recommend it. –Amy Austin • October 19 2008, 9:09pm EST
It's a blast to see Indy back from the cinematic retirement home, still surviving impossible stunts and discovering ancient secrets and charming the audience like magic. This one feels routine and has too much CGI, but it's still a familiar good time. –Scott Hardie • June 14 2009, 11:59am EST
Few films illustrate the story-vs-style schism as well as this one does. Viewers like me who enjoy a creepy atmosphere and prolonged sense of dread will eat it up, while viewers who require a story will be disappointed. For horror fans, it delivers the necessary jolts and gore, but its pacing is decidedly slow, as if the characters are half-awake. It also has an annoying bad habit of cross-cutting several scenes together at once, such that we're taken out of each scene just as it's getting interesting, only to return minutes later. These elements would be less annoying if the movie weren't so good otherwise. It takes place in an understaffed and desperately underfunded emergency room in the middle of the night, as the staff debates the cost of care, whether to ship their patients to other hospitals, whether to close to trauma, whether to conserve supplies even when they're needed. This is surprisingly well-grounded in reality for a cheap-shock horror film. At the end of the first act, there's an incident of unwitting malpractice and the staff uneasily conspires to cover it up, giving each character either fear of being caught or a guilty conscience. This event, interesting all by itself (this film could easily have been a gripping drama about hospital ethics instead of a horror movie), provides a strong psychological foundation for the terror that follows, by throwing the already-desperate characters off balance and establishing an air of paranoia and malfeasance at this creepy hospital. It's the masterstroke that makes the film work; without it, there'd be little to the movie but the jump scenes and gross-outs. There's so much to like in this film, from the psychology of the horror, to the crisp blacks and greens that set the tone for this graveyard-shift ER, to the actors who capably communicate that they're ethical people trapped in an unethical situation. It's the kind of movie you don't mind not making sense because it's doing what it's doing so well. But it leans too hard on "shocking" revelations at the end, breaking the spell of the atmosphere, and it has that unfortunate slackness of pace. It's said this is the first film in a planned trilogy, and I'm already looking forward to the others, but that information is not crucial to enjoying it: This is a highly interesting little movie by itself, enough of an ethical tug-of-war to appeal to drama fans with enough skin-crawling shocks to appeal to horror fans. It's worth a rental. –Scott Hardie
Tarantino's WWII flick from the forgotten "macaroni war" genre is ambitious, intentionally preposterous, superbly acted, and endlessly entertaining, once you accept his limited interest in moral consequences. I could watch this movie go on for hours. –Scott Hardie • January 23 2010, 7:36am EST
premise: A documentary about the cultural impact of America's most infamous porn film, which caused an uproar over censorship and cultural values. You can't make a boring film about sex (unless you're Catherine Breillat). Watching Inside Deep Throat is exciting, partly because of the sex but mostly because the sex makes every interview subject so excited. While the documentary is aimless in its exploration of its subject, veering between themes like censorship, independent filmmaking, crime, and bottomed-out lives without a clear purpose, it does feature a lot of interesting people and lives along the way. The most affecting is Linda Lovelace, who famously and spoke out against pornography years later in a futile effort to erase the sins that ruined the rest of her life. Her false claims about being forced to perform at gunpoint weakened her argument, and Inside Deep Throat's impossible claims about the porn film's sky-high box-office tally also diminish its authority, but it's still a entertaining look at a cultural flashpoint of the seventies. –Scott Hardie • July 19 2008, 11:40am EST
Like slathering on cologne after skipping a shower, all the flashy style and casual intelligence Spike Lee can bring to this picture only mask the truly dumb script that it started with. The script is so well-versed in heist genre history that it names its own predecessors in dialogue, but the characters still make banal, idiotic mistakes because the plot requires them to, keeping them three steps behind the audience at all times. Denzel Washington's detective is so bumbling that the filmmakers seem to have added as an afterthought a scene mentioning that this is literally his first assignment with hostages. He's not just out of his league with the villains; he doesn't belong beside his fellow officers. Who wants to watch Forrest Gump play chess against Garry Kasparov and be asked to root for Gump? But of course, smarts aren't everything in a movie, and there's enough breezy style and raw tension in various scenes in the film to make it plenty enjoyable. The heist itself is impressive, seemingly predictable but suddenly surprising, and thrilling in its audacity. The best moments are the quiet ones, where the cops chit-chat and Washington talks face-to-face with the heist mastermind. Jodie Foster may seem bored, but she brings sharp individuality to a character who deserves more attention. It's a fun film, just not as smart as the people making it or the people watching it. –Scott Hardie
The final Futurama movie is the weakest and most forgettable of the bunch, with its characters' relationships and development treated like a rushed afterthought. There are a few chuckles for longtime fans, but no big laughs like the other titles. –Scott Hardie • July 2 2010, 8:46am EST
Robert Downey Jr. is the best thing in Iron Man and it knows it, adopting the actor's intelligent and world-weary charm as its own. It gets all the superhero details right and then some, with an unusually strong origin story in Afghanistan. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:26am EST
Brendan Fraser is the wrong choice for the villain in a taut crime thriller, but indie movies have to attract financing somehow. Scott Glenn has the real key role here as a criminal trying to keep his life together, but the film isn't as good as he is. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:38am EST
premise: A young man discovers he can teleport at will. Starring Hayden Christensen and Samuel L. Jackson. Directed by Doug Liman. Here's a concept: A movie that shows what it would be like if an ordinary man had the ability to teleport, and also if he and everyone he knows was brain-damaged. The characters in Jumper are short on imagination, personality, and vocabulary, like the movie itself. It dreams up a man who can teleport at will, who realizes the moral implications of his talent, and the best it can do with him is have him be attacked by nameless agents who have scarcely any stated reason for coming after him? [Spoilers ahead.] Just when you think it can't get dumber than that, it turns the man into a superhero who references comics by name. Except he's not interested in saving anyone – it shows him ignoring dying people who only he could rescue, then has him abandon an unwitting fellow traveler to be crushed under a tank. It's one thing for the movie to pass off comical scenes where he leaves wide-eyed bystanders atop historical monuments in his travels; it's another thing to show him kill innocent people and not care. How many different writers altered this script over time? The only thing to praise in the movie is the action, which takes advantage of the film's premise in some interesting ways, and doesn't skimp on the special effects. But the rest of the movie is a dull waste of potential, starting with a premise that could lead to a hundred interesting stories and choosing one that isn't. It adds insult to brain-cell injury by informing you constantly that you're only watching a prequel; the rest of the Jumper series will no doubt bore audiences for years to come. –Scott Hardie • February 18 2008, 10:39pm EST
premise: Quirky and inquisitive 16-year-old (Ellen Page) deals with various consequences of exploring relationships. So I finally got around to seeing one the most hyped films of 2007, and I didn't hate it... but I didn't really love it, either. In keeping with my usual "spoiler-free" movie MO, I managed to stay rather unaware of the plot & details of this film (except for the obvious issue of teen pregnancy and the usual trailer tidbits)... despite its Oscar status and a high profile that even staked a national news presence (albeit unintentionally, I'm sure) in one of the most disturbing stories of teen pregnancy of the decade (Teen ‘pregnancy pact’ has 17 girls expecting). Based on a quoted researcher's astute comment regarding this, however -- along with actually viewing the film -- I'd say that it was Juno itself that was unfairly tainted by the news story. Contrary to the hypothesis of "the ‘Juno’-Jamie Lynn effect", I didn't see any particular "glamorization" of teen pregnancy going on in Juno. However, I did have an unshakable perception of mildly pro-life leanings under the slightly derisive (albeit humorous) overtones and commentary on women's health-care clinics... which only resulted in an annoying prolongation of and complete agreement with the feeling in Scott's description of the film's opening sequence: ...Rainn Wilson as a convenience store clerk using hipness to the point of nuisance, then dials down the ironic banter to a sustainable level for the remaining ninety minutes. I guess, for me, the "ironic banter" -- though funny -- was just slightly over "a sustainable level" for serious appreciation? The "hipness" becomes "tragically hip" and, dare I say it... a wee bit inauthentic. My overall feelings from the (slightly strained) dialogue were that a) Diablo Cody, while displaying a fine and unique talent for writing, must be a pistol with quite the colorful background and upbringing herself -- in fact, I'm betting that she was a handful of a teenager; and b) am I just getting "too old"??? Perish the thought. Don't get me wrong, though... I did enjoy the film quite well, and I found Juno herself -- along with *all* of the characters, actually (and probably, most of all, J.K. Simmons as her dad and my particular standout/favorite among the supporting cast) -- to be quite likable. And like Scott, who ranked Juno as #6 of his "ten best" of 2007 (do I vaguely recall his naming 2007 a bit of a thin year?), I found the heart of the film to be in a young woman's poignant mini-revelations and first lessons in life and love. Underneath her precociously witty and modern teen exterior, Juno is really an ingenue. And underneath its tragically hip and modern take on teen pregnancy, Juno is really a sweet coming-of-age story. –Amy Austin • November 13 2008, 10:19pm EST • 8 replies
Juno is one of those fragile little indie films that you have to see before the weight of its buzz makes it impossible to appreciate It navigates a risky minefield of indie quirk and arrives triumphantly at the other side, touching and terrific. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:44am EST
premise: Breakdancin' kid breaks his dumbass noggin in a talent show and awakens from a coma twenty years later. Okay. Clear sign I'm spending *way* too much late-night/early-morning TV-watching time, I know... Yes, this movie actually deserves to suck for being the lamest reason/excuse/"plotline" to bring back the 80s, ever... but I still had to upgrade it anyway for bringing back the 80s in some of the stupidest/funniest lameness ever. If you want to feel a little bit old while taking a good chuckle-spotted moon walk down memory lane, then this movie isn't a *total* waste. After all, I had all but forgotten about tight-rolling (a memory traumatically blocked by my lifelong curse of having cankles, no doubt... but I see that Katie Holmes recently got a good dose of Internet-raking for try to initiate a jean pegging comeback... ha!). Highlights that saved this piece of crap from total suckitude include some pretty chuckle-worthy Karate Kid jokes, Bobby Lee's robot training, a pretty decent revival of the art of breaking at the climax of the, um, movie, and... my personal favorite -- a moment that would almost single-handedly propel this tripe into the realm of "It ruled"... if only it weren't for the other 107 minutes of run-time -- the awesomely laugh-worthy cameo appearance of a certain 80s TV-star/stud-turned-international singer/stud-turned-campy Internet/advertising stud. I don't want to give anything away with any spoilers or anything, but... just don't hassle my Hoff -- word! Certainly no need to go out of your way waiting up for its appearance on cable... but if it just happens to be on in the background and/or you just *really* want to ensure that you're engaged in some highly effective multi-tasker time-slaying while on the computer... well, then this junk-food for the brain can rule at something! –Amy Austin • October 20 2008, 5:06am EST
I believe the term for movies like this should be "hypothetical comedy." The director tells Will Ferrell to deliver all of his lines really hyped up, mixes in some shots of Mike Ditka staring at him and puts some peppy ska tunes on the soundtrack, and voila, it's supposed to be funny. (You think I'm making this up. One of the DVD extras shows the producer explaining the film: "Well, it's about Will Ferrell as this soccer coach, and Mike Ditka's in it... See, already you're laughing.") There's just scene after scene that make no sense, like Ferrell handing out pet finches to his baffled players. Ferrell can be funny when he has a meaty character to play, but mostly this movie has him stuck playing the same emasculated, imaginationless everydad that make tv sitcoms such a bore. His only funny scene comes when the man gets hepped up on caffeine and turns into a raging jerk, which means Ferrell finally gets to play a meaty character. This summer's "Bad News Bears" remake wasn't very good either, but at least it had real jokes in it, not high energy and the premise of comedy happening. This movie is worth nobody's time, especially Farrell's. –Scott Hardie
This is a pretty dumb movie about pretty smart ideas. Too many rewrites left it crammed with inconsistencies and clichés, and the dialogue is laughably bad. But it has a great hook at the start, and stunning disaster scenes that belong in a better film. –Scott Hardie • August 30 2009, 1:27pm EST
Seeing this film and —Diary of a Mad Black Woman” so close together proved to me what I’d always suspected about that most damnable trait of a bad movie: Cartoonishness. Tyler Perry’s earnest drama wants us to take its characters seriously and be moved by them, but it fails because they’re plastic people existing in a sitcom-like cartoon reality. On the other hand, —Kung Fu Hustle” knows it’s a cartoon and deliriously embraces this trait, using CGI to escalate its martial-arts silliness to Looney Tunes extremes. At first the antics were mildly annoying, but it didn’t take long for the film’s high spirits to win me over, and by the end I was giddy with excitement at each new trick Stephen Chow managed to pull out of his hat. This is a movie for people who see a lot of movies, who love not being able to predict what crazy idea the filmmakers will come up with next, who enjoy a movie most when it is a labor of love rather than a commercial work made for the opening-weekend box office. Chow and his talented cast and crew, most particularly the CGI artists who stretch his characters out like old Plastic Man cartoons, had the time of their lives making this delightful wonder, and their fun is infectious as you watch it. It’s light-hearted, hallucinatory fun, a parade of increasingly clever sight gags and double-takes, and it’s some of the most fun you can have at the movies this year. Don’t miss it. –Scott Hardie
premise: An apartment-building super befriends a water nymph who washes up in his pool. M. Night Shyamalan has quite a chip on his shoulder. A victim of overnight success with The Sixth Sense and its famous twist ending, his earnest and more thoughtful followups like Unbreakable, Signs and especially The Village were booed for their gimmicks of "twist endings" that weren't twists at all, but integral parts of the story, as audiences missed the points he was trying to make. A turning point in his diminishing career, Lady in the Water indicates that he has become so bitter that he now thumbs his nose at audiences by giving them a boring, half-developed children's fable in the name of entertainment, hates critics by having one eviscerated by a monster as he declares it unrealistic, and considers himself a unheralded storytelling genius as evinced by his representative in the film, a raging egotist of a writer who could change the world for the better if everyone would just take him seriously. Shyamalan has clearly touch with a lot of things, first and foremost what makes an interesting story that carries your interest from scene to scene. From any other writer-director, this film would merely be a misbegotten mess, but from Shyamalan it shows how a modestly talented filmmaker can ruin himself by believing his own hype. –Scott Hardie • April 9 2008, 11:10pm EST
This headlong dive into a Maxim-like fantasy of London organized crime has impeccably good-looking people acting smart and, more importantly, acting cool, but gradually the actors find the humanity under their characters. Especially good are Daniel Craig as a man who has learned that swallowing his pride is essential to success in his business, and the ever-reliable Colm Meaney as his boss's hard-nosed messenger. The film isn't kind to its women, but it does pull off its macho-metrosexual blend fairly well, and earns several big laughs. It's a good choice for genre fans or anyone wondering whether Craig will make a good Agent 007 (on this evidence, yes). –Scott Hardie
It's one of the most pleasing tales the movies can tell: Dedicated teacher overcomes bureaucratic obstacles and classroom hostility to unlock the hidden genius of his students and change their lives for the better. That's probably why it's been told so many times, and this version is gratifying but adds nothing new to the formula. It's been a tremendous hit in France, which is odd because it's exactly the sort of shallow, calculated product the French often accuse Hollywood of putting out, but there's no denying the joys of the film, which include some beautiful choral singing and no shortage of ingenious solutions when the teacher encounters resistance in the classroom. It's a big pleasure and I recommend it, but I wish it had been more ambitious. –Scott Hardie
It's too bad that everything about this movie (including the DVD cover) gives away its paranormal secret, since its slow, steady reveal is so good. More interested in its dark mood and character than any mere scares, this is a sophisticated horror movie. –Scott Hardie • April 1 2012, 10:37pm EST
I'm a stranger to the original Internet shorts, but whatever the subject matter, the phrase "the first feature film to be created entirely in Macromedia Flash" got my attention. I was impressed with the fluidness and forward momentum of the film, knowing that many of the individual shots had to have taken upwards of a day to create. It could have wound up playing a lot more disjointedly than it does. Whatever political-correctness alarms were going off in my head over the adaptation of parasitic, vicious monsters into loveable cartoon characters, I concede that the pimp is becoming an iconic figure in American trash culture, and the film is pleasantly enjoyable once you swallow that bitter pill. A few scenes induce big laughs, especially a violent commercial for an action figure, and the voice actors nail their material, in particular Lil' Kim and Jill Talley. It's too tasteless to recommend, but I can't say it didn't give me a few laughs. –Scott Hardie
The limits of indie quirk are tested in this anti-family film, where bizarre characters who couldn't exist in real life intersect and learn things and hug. It works in spite of itself due to a talented cast across the board, who nail their every scene. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:43am EST
premise: John McClane returns, older and even more grizzled, to battle high-tech terrorists in the Internet age. Somehow even stupider than the ads made it seem, this uninspired sequel-by-the-numbers vindicates every doubt that series fans expressed about director Len Wiseman, and vindicates every time Willis declined to waste his charisma on another retread of Standard Bruce Willis Action Movie. It's not boring – stuff gets blown up real good – but it's so married to the formula, you can predict what font they'll use for the closing credits. The portrayal of computer technology is ridiculous even by Hollywood's crazy standards, and that says nothing of the portrayal of the limits of the human body: McClane is thrown many stories through the air and slammed into concrete walls, and he just gets up and keeps going, apparently having completed his evolution from blue-collar everyman to Looney Tunes drawing. What made the previous Die Hard movies so popular and enduring was not Willis's charm or the explosions, but the elevation of the material into something greater than a genre picture. The first took a high concept and ran with it, inventing the action-movie formula that has become a cliché since. The second worked its way through a labyrinthine plot that made the defeat of the villains seem like a Herculean achievement instead of inevitable. The third was determined to keep the audience guessing, with puzzles and unpredictable turns of the plot. But the fourth? Like Wiseman's abominable Underworld movies, it's perfectly content to stick to the formula and be just like every other predictable bore that preceded it, devoid of ambition. Movie-making is damn hard work, so Willis is right to ask why he should waste his time making something that isn't good. Willis, and McClane, deserve better. –Scott Hardie • December 22 2007, 1:03am EST
This upbeat documentary about a ballroom-dancing course taught to fifth graders across New York City is charming and sure to appeal to anyone who likes kids, and on that basis, I would recommend it to some. But one single word in the opening narration ruined it for me personally: "Mandatory." This program is compulsory for 6,000 poor, innocent children who don't deserve to be forced to dance in step with one another, usually in front of a city-wide audience at an annual competition and now in front of documentary filmmakers as well. Watching the movie, I had nothing but painful flashbacks to my own mandatory dancing classes growing up and how, like most of the kids, I hated every second of it. It's one thing to push the kids who sign up for this kind of thing voluntarily, but the principal who openly berates her slow-learning students because she wants the elusive trophy comes across as nothing but a soft-spoken drill instructor. The only value I see to the competition is teaching kids how to cope with defeat; likewise, the only value I see for the kids in this documentary is learning that sometimes you're made to look like a fool for other people's bemusement. –Scott Hardie
premise: The New York zoo animals leave Madagascar only to land in a game preserve in Africa. So this month's movie took us to one of Magic Johnson's theaters. The same Magic Johnson of NBA and AIDS contraction fame. I really admire his efforts to bring renewal to various urban locations and this particular theater seems to be helping in those matters here. We brought our two girls, our wayward son, and our niece's 10 month old toddler who we were babysitting. Just the right group to benefit from a movie showing targeted at an autistic audience. With this large a group, it helps my wallet that the tickets are reduced price for these showings. There was a table full of autism awareness literature and home-made crafts for sale like earrings, ribbons and greeting cards in an autism theme at the entrance to the theater we were in. Just enough time to get them settled and a trip to the snack bar. It's dificult to be sure that anything bought at the snack bar is gluten-free so we tend to bring snacks with us and nobody complains. In line in front of me was Funny Lookin' Kid 1 who couldn't decide between plain and peanut M & M's. He was debating with FLK2, apparently a younger sibling, who threatened a tantrum if his M &M's had peanuts in them. This was merely my interpretation of their grunts and glaring. They could have been discussing global warming for all I know. Two verbally uncommunicative kids doing their best to make their intentions known. As their argument became louder and more demonstrative, Mom showed up to save the day and they settled for Whoppers. Go figure. So I get my stuff and head back to the theater to find FLK1 and FLK2 sitting right in front of me. It served as a reminder of why these showings are important and despite the distraction for me, I took pleasure in my tolerance of their autistic behavior. The best joke of the movie happened during the opening credits when the Dreamworks logo of the young boy fishing from a crescent moon gets mugged by the movie penguins who steal his fishing rod and reel in dinner. The movie goes steadily but not sharply downhill from there. The same animals from the first film are all represented again with the same voice actors. The same relationship details are replayed: Melman the giraffe expresses unrequited love for Gloria the hippo; Alex the lion is still egotistically concerned with how events effect only himself; King Julien is remarkably monomaniacal; and Chris Rock gets to say 'crack-a-lackin' several times. And there's the rub. What's diferent about this movie from the first one? Oh, yeah. We get introduced to Alex's parents who lost their cub from a game preserve by poachers. Yawn. The penguins are used just right. I would probably enjoy a film exclusively devoted to them but maybe not. Their limited screen time may have lent to my appreciation of their antics. What I could have done with a lot less was kung-fu granny and Sacha Baron Cohen's King Julien. Annoying little bastard. Cedric the Entertainer was sadly wasted as a monkey flunky with little addition to the movie but will.i.am was an inspired choice to voice another egotistical animal, this one an amorous hippo. The conflict was a stupidly transparent lift of the Lion King conflict of rightful king, jealous rival for the throne, clever plan to use the child to usurp the throne, miserable failure of unrightful king when given opportunity to rule, rescue from imminent death (lack of water this time instead of food), banished son returning to save the day. The differences (there were a few, of course), just didn't seem numerous enough to outweigh the notion that constantly crept into my mind: Haven't I seen this somewhere before? If I were Disney, I'd consider litigation. The kids loved it but Dad was very lukewarm. –Steve West • November 22 2008, 6:11pm EST
You don't need my recommendation to see this cultural phenomenon (it has already inspired the usual tug-of-war over family values), but that's just as well because you're not quite going to get it. The film is satisfying because there's only so much you could ever want to know about emperor penguins, and the movie reaches that point two-thirds of the way through its running time. I believe that it succeeds so well because it exhausts such a limited subject, but while I can criticize its artistic limitations, I can also admit that it's a pleasure to watch. This footage captures what humans have wondered ever since the flightless bird was first spotted, how in the hell it can breed and raise its young in such a brutal environment. The answer is filmed with crisp photography that frequently shows the birds down to their individual feathers, and also astounding, as we learn how these birds literally do not eat for months as they incubate their eggs. If you see the movie, forget the talking heads and simply lose yourself in the elegant compexity of nature. –Scott Hardie
[Spoilers.] Takashi Shimizu's criticism of the recent fad of J-horror flicks (The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water, The Eye, Pulse) has an honorable premise: Attack the audience, not the industry. His hero, a documentarian captures a suicide on camera and becomes obsessed with the grisly footage, rewinding it over and over while we're forced to watch over his shoulder as Shimizu condemns our bloodlust. When the hero journeys into subterranean caverns to find more horrors, he brings a pretty woman back with him, but she turns out to have a taste for his blood, and Shimizu seems to be shouting a warning about allowing this kind of psychological disturbance into our mainstream culture and shared consciousness. Or at least, that's what I presume his argument was, since to me it seemed like he was criticizing the J-horror genre for being incredibly boring. His hero wanders and wanders and wanders to the point where we expect the end credits to start rolling he's been gone so long, and he stares so long and hard at his video monitors that we want to plead for mercy from Shimizu for ever wanting to watch a movie in our lives. The pace accurately captures the mindset of this lonely, cautious man, but it fails to entertain and needed a longer development phase. (The movie was made in nine days.) Just because a movie challenges the mind doesn't mean it has to bore the spirit. –Scott Hardie
premise: The life of Marie-Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) and her marriage to Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), told with a few modern touches. Directed by Sofia Coppola. Like her contemporary Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola's movies are beginning to seem alike, no matter how much she changes the setting. Here's another story of an intelligent, high-spirited young woman bored by the men in her life and trapped in a luxurious, comfortable, and totally lifeless environment. Pity she doesn't have a filmmaking career to work out her upper-class demons like Coppola does. I kid. Really, I like all of Coppola's innovations here, from focusing so closely on life in Versailles that we understand Marie-Antoinette's royal perspective, to slipping in modern music and props that breathe new life into an aging story. It's a gorgeous movie, set in a world of opulence unequalled by any in our imaginaton; had this been filmed on sets instead of the real palace, they would have won an Oscar. And yet there's a familiarity to it, a lack of excitement, perhaps partly due to how many years Coppola spent preparing this movie before the cameras rolled. It's a good movie with elements of greatness. –Scott Hardie • October 20 2007, 10:34pm EST
Every director wants to be Hitchcock. Woody Allen gives it his best shot with this twisting thriller about an affair and its cover-up, and he hits the right notes throughout. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is great as a man who never thought he'd do these things. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:47am EST
Put Happiness, Ghost World, and Lost in Translation into a blender, and it starts to look like this loopy 2005 indie comedy, often mislabeled as a drama. It's laugh-out-loud funny in some parts, and endearingly sweet in others. –Scott Hardie • January 31 2012, 7:49pm EST • 1 reply
premise: In a time of ages past, there was an ancient warrior civilization known as Sparta... Take on 300 Well... it sucked. It was nice to have Kevin Sorbo in it, and the latent homosexuality 'real fans of genius' song was cool, but that was about it. I'm glad that this was only a Library loaner and that I did not have to waste money on this. Almost all the jokes were crude and revolved around sex. Sure, sexual jokes can be funny, but I watch parodies because I at least want something witty from time to time in my humor, not just 'lets see how many ways we can fit britney and sex into this.' The pit of death was funny at the beginning, but after a while it just dragged on an became too repetitive. I suppose this would be a decent movie to invite a bunch of buddies over to see so that everyone could make fun of the lameness of it all. Hmm,,, "Meet the Parents, Pirates of the Caribbean" I did not see any of this in there. I saw too many American Idol refs though. –Lori Lancaster • November 16 2008, 6:35am EST
[excerpted from Ten Best Films feature] Movies like this are why December is my favorite month at the cineplex. It's a gorgeous, lavishly-created adaptation of a classy piece of literature, with some showy acting performances and grand waves of melodrama. As long as it doesn't take itself too seriously – this one has a generous and self-depricating sense of humor – it's some of the best entertainment movies can offer, letting us inhabit other people's lives, great lives, the same way a novel does. The critics weren't kind, but I found it to be a moving story with great villainess, still resonating in my heart weeks later. But what I loved most about it was Dion Beebe's rich cinematography: Nearly every shot was a complex play of light, color, and detail, giving the film the look of a painting. (example) It's the kind of movie where if you happen to pause it, you wind up studying the screen, admiring the composition. I'd love it even if it didn't include a fan-service reference to that Ang Lee movie with which it shares its lead actresses. –Scott Hardie • September 24 2006, 9:24pm EST
The last time Michael Mann turned one of his tv projects into a feature film, it resulted in Heat, one of the smartest and slickest crime pictures the genre has seen. Miami Vice instead seems like Mann-by-numbers: There's the gloss, the attention to detail, the vivid locations, and the belief in the audience's intelligence. But it's missing a center, as if the inspiration stopped at the title, with a typical action-thriller plot borrowed from the textbook. In interviews Mann said he wanted to probe into the psyches of undercover agents and why they put their lives and loves at risk, but by all indications he completely failed, probing more deeply into their shower and hair-combing routines. Circumstances forced an improvised ending, but the film is a mess long before it gets there, albeit a pretty mess. –Scott Hardie • February 19 2007, 6:19pm EST
[I am careful as always to avoid spoilers, but as this film has a highly charged final act, you're best off not reading anything about it in advance. Go out and see this very good film before someone spoils it for you.] Clint Eastwood has gradually become the Ernest Hemingway of tough old directors, turning out pictures that have no spare dialogue, no spare moments, and no spare symbolism. The only style here is lean efficiency. That filmmaking method suits brainless Hollywood blockbusters, and if Eastwood were interested in them he could probably make a pretty damn good one. But being naked and being empty are two different things: There are strong moral themes running through Eastwood's films; he has asked the same question here in "Unforgiven" and "Mystic River" and other films. The commentators who knee-jerked into accusing this film of having a political agenda have missed the point because they have objectified one of the main characters, thinking that Eastwood is dealing with the character's condition instead of the character's request. (In other words, the condition exists only as a plot point to set up the request, which is the real level at which the film is thinking, and the level at which we should be responding to it.) If I understand Eastwood as a filmmaker, the what in his movies exists only so he can ponder the how, the question of how his characters keep arriving at the decision that they do. It's a question that obviously fascinates him, and by now it would probably bore us if he were not a storyteller of considerable talent and certainty. The film has its weaknesses — they call it "classical," I call it "clichéd" — but it is not a difficult film to watch, that's for sure. Eastwood finds the anticipated (and very funny) punchlines in the banter between the headstrong athlete and the reluctant trainer, and he provides the usual satisfaction inherent to the arc of a sports movie. It is also evocatively photographed, frequently hiding portions of the characters' bodies in shadow as they speak, forcing us sometimes to consider the words independently of the speaker. It's a fulfilling, well-acted, self-confident film, exactly the sort of professionalism that has become the hallmark of Eastwood the director. Those who enjoy his films, and there are few who do not, should not miss his fine new one. I hope they are allowed to make up their own minds about it. –Scott Hardie
[excerpted from Ten Best Films feature] Two brothers find a bag full of money and debate whether to give it to the poor or spend wildly. I lost count; is this Standard Hollywood Plot #8 or #9? It doesn't really matter anyway when a film is told with this much charm and style. Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce evoke the world as seen by a nine-year-old boy who counts Catholic saints as his playmates: With a lot of imagination. One sequence has a house rise up from the ground board-by-board around the boys as they picture a new house; another loses them in a sea of schoolchildren as they feel lost in their new school. The younger boy spends the film wondering whether his mother went to Heaven, and to reinforce it, shot after shot looks down on him from above, including a delightful sequence where he wanders room to room and the camera passes through walls as it follows him through the house. The film's Expressionism also allows it to link themes together: After the younger boy is cast as Joseph in the school play and runs away on a journey similar to Joseph's, he remains lit by a spotlight as if he's still on stage, further suggesting that the film's reality as we see it is largely a product of his imagination. All the neat visual tricks up Boyle's sleeve wouldn't amount to much if the film wasn't also an enormous pleasure to watch, like the emotional equivalent of a loving hug from a child. It's full of life, and takes as much joy in its traditional British wit as in its CGI sight gags and playful synthesizer score by John Murphy. When the young boy gets a big goofy grin on his face, so do we, partly because the film is so good at putting us in his mindset and partly because he's just plain adorable. The only place where the film's originality falls short is in its villain, a vaguely sinister criminal who shows up every fifteen minutes to make the same threats over and over; less of him would have meant more of the boys (or the saints) and a better film. Besides, the movie finds a much better conflict between the brothers themselves, as the younger one struggles to do what he thinks is the good Christian deed despite the other's warnings to hoard the cash. Viewed as a family film, it's so entertaining you hardly notice what a great children's morality play it is, but adults will enjoy it on a deeper level, appreciating how many rules it breaks as it retells one of the most reliably entertaining yarns in the movies. –Scott Hardie • September 24 2006, 9:26pm EST
premise: In a film by Dave McKean, Neil Gaiman, and the Jim Henson Company, a teenager disappears into a bizarre fantasy world that needs her help. Here's a fantasy movie for people who thought Labyrinth was too plain. Inhabiting a dream landscape far richer and stranger than anyone's subconscious could actually invent, this adventure tale combines CGI, puppets, paintings, drawings, and live action to create a gorgeous production that continues to reveal astonishing new sights all the way through its ending. It finds emotional power in its story about a teenager breaking free from her parents, even if the characters are thinly-developed. It's too bad this film didn't find a larger audience; it's hard to imagine anyone not being charmed by its many imaginative surprises. –Scott Hardie • March 25 2008, 11:00pm EST
premise: A woman who has always wanted a baby finds out she only has a few days left to conceive. For bad-movie junkies like me, Heather Graham is the most reliable actress in Hollywood. Just when this movie seems at last to be getting its act together and becoming remotely watchable, bam! It stumbles again! Another tasteless joke, another forced plot device, another annoying line reading. This is a brainless sitcom apparently lacking a script, in which the actors hem and haw their way through what seems like mumbled improv. Forget cracking jokes spontaneously; this cast can't even make it through entire sentences, as if they've all suffered recent blows to the head, especially semi-stoned best-friend Mia Kirshner. Their slow-witted blankness is offset by the cartoonishly hyper musical score, which keeps playing its little heart out in an attempt to carry the disastrous film all by itself. Graham has one genuinely moving moment in her acting, in an inevitable burst of emotion late in the film (notice the score try to outdo her), but otherwise she's as dull and talentless as ever, changing in and out of her British accent like a costume. She's not just a bad actress; she consistently chooses some of the worst star vehicles in the direct-to-market movie business. Her name on the DVD case has become a promise that the film is going to suck, and she doesn't disappoint with this film. –Scott Hardie • December 14 2008, 8:10pm EST • 1 reply
I would rate this higher but it scared my daughter. She still enjoyed it but animated films lately are geared more toward adults and not kids. I thought it was hilarious. Hugh Laurie shines as Dr. Cockroach and Bob the Ooze is predictable but funny. –Steve West • April 11 2009, 1:28pm EST
It seems silly a year later to even try to reflect on last summer's action-comedy hit, since it has inspired both an upcoming tv sitcom (even though it itself was based on a failed tv sitcom) and a Hollywood supercouple who would seem weird if Tom and Katie weren't around. But the movie is a nutty little entertainment and easy to like, coasting by on Brad Pitt's one-liners and some fantastic sets. It's about as good as $110-million comedy with two giant stars can be, which is to say, we're lucky any wit from the original script survived. It's not a good movie, but it's a fun one. –Scott Hardie • August 13 2006, 5:40pm EST • 1 reply
If prizes were given out for good intentions, Spielberg's latest might deserve Best Picture. While carefully avoiding partisanship for either side, he shows the origins of the modern era of middle-eastern conflict, that eternal circle of eye for an eye for an eye, and in doing so suggests that simple revenge is no kind of policy for a nation attacked. It's a lesson still relevant decades later, and Spielberg applies his usual technical brilliance and richness of detail to make it seem fresh, but isn't this movie just a little too smart to score such a simple point? Given the pedigree, I expected a plunge into the depths of human regret over violence wrongfully inflicted and the psychological effects of being an assassin, but the analysis stayed on the surface and the story moved on to increasingly unrealistic turns, such as when the hero empathizes with the slain Olympic athletes on an individual level that has nothing to do with him, his work, or the movie. Something more and deeper and better could have come of this. Perhaps good ambition doesn't go hand in hand with good intention? –Scott Hardie • February 4 2007, 12:49am EST
[Ending spoilers ahead.] I never thought I'd be so disappointed in a film designed to illustrate Nietzsche's best-known quote. It's well-acted, sure, and in the early scenes it seems to be going somewhere. But it spends its middle act going around in circles, and by the time it tries to pull a surprise ending on you by revealing two characters to be total frauds, you get the distinct feeling it thinks it's smarter than it is. What's the point here? That the most self-righteous born-agains are sometimes pretending? That the rich use the poor and throw them away? They could have called this "My Summer of Duh." –Scott Hardie
This sequel sells its increasingly preposterous plot twists with an ever-wider shit-eating grin on its face. It keeps moving as fast as it can before the audience can catch on that they've been sold expensive non-entertainment. It's lame and forgettable. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:36am EST
This scary and powerful thriller is among the most violent Best Pictures, a contemplation on man's helplessness against the ravages of the natural order. The foley artists worked overtime to make the faint, precise sound effects a key part of the plot. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:29am EST
Don't you hate that sinking feeling during a movie when you realize you're not supposed to know a key plot element that was casually given away by the press or the trailer? This film would play a lot better as a quiet little drama that gradually pulls the rug out from beneath you as sinister undertones are revealed, but for many audiences who will see it because of the Oscars attention or the book, it seems instead to take forever getting to an inevitable conflict. The emphasis on plot over character is furthered by Philip Glass's typical overwrought score, in which such mundane acts as a knock at the front door send his orchestra into shrieking hysterics, as if This! Is The Most Intense! Movie! of All Time! Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett have more in common than spelling their names weirdly: They're superb actresses who can't make a bad movie, but who can waste their talent in a mediocre one. Dench has several disquieting monologues and Blanchett is a lightning rod for audience sympathy, but the movie doesn't know what kind of film it wants to be and pulls away from them. This could have been an icy little character-based thriller, but itstead it's a portentious Best Picture wannabe with a score that huffs and puffs and wants to blow your house down. It's a disappointment. –Scott Hardie • September 13 2007, 10:00pm EST
Rod Lurie's heroines suffer nobly for their principles, and this is another of his polished dramas that delivers his message with a punch. Every aspect of this under-released picture is top-notch, especially the cast, each of whom nails their big scene. –Scott Hardie • May 3 2009, 3:39pm EST
"If you can understand what I'm saying, you're not paying attention," says a woman in this film, speaking directly to us dumb Americans who pretend to understand this kind of work. I don't have enough knowledge of Godard to evaluate this film in its proper context, so the only reaction I can express as an uninitiated viewer is mild befuddlement. Here Godard throws out many ideas about violence, and in the English translation they are well put – "He who kills a man for an idea is not defending an idea but killing a man" – but he does little or nothing with them after bringing them up, inviting no further reflection from his audience. Just because the bulk of his film falls in the "purgatory" chapter of his hell-purgatory-heaven model doesn't mean it has to be so dull and meandering. The best part of the film is the long montage of violent images in "hell," which dwells on for so long as to compel consideration of the futility and wastefulness of violence. A whole feature could have been made of that poetically edited collage, or should have. –Scott Hardie
The freshness and verve of the original films are gone, and the "cool" act is increasingly transparent, but this sequel still coasts along pleasingly on the appeal of its leads and setting. Matt Damon makes the most of his deserved bigger role. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:47am EST
It’s not without irony that Quentin Tarantino led the jury that awarded this Korean thriller the Palme d’Or at Cannes, since it shares so many of his strengths as well as his biggest weakness. Intense to a fault, this revenge flick follows a man determined to find out who kept him sealed in an apartment for fifteen years, a quest that leaves him bloodied and his enemies robbed of various body parts. It’s a carnal, vicious film where even the lovemaking is violent, and it contains one electrifying fight scene where the hero beats his way through a whole gang in a single, unbroken three-minute shot. But the movie has such an intensity of focus that even the minor scenes are treated as epiphanies, a momentum-killing style that frees the viewer’s mind to wander just as the clockwork plot demands concentration. There’s a revelation at the end of the film that would make M. Night Shyamalan jealous, based on the kind of labyrinthine plot that rewards multiple viewings as you understand just how carefully the trap was set, but the film is so exhausting that you can’t imagine watching it more than once. –Scott Hardie
By now, indie rebel Todd Solondz is known for several trademarks, and they all make the usual appearances: The unblinking stare at unconventional morality, the blunt transgressiveness of his punchlines, the rooting for a pitiable loser who doesn't even achieve a symbolic victory, the gleeful pressing of political hot buttons. But with this film, his most accomplished to date and his first drama, he adds two new techniques: Lyricism and allegory. Before, he simply showed us freaks and pariahs with no meaning beyond their own little worlds; here, he crafts a genuinely haunting, visually beautiful movie about a girl who means a lot more about what it is to be free in our radically politicized society. The film is of abortion, but it is not about it: It does not comment on whether abortion is right or wrong in this context or any context. It succeeds at treating both its pro-life and pro-choice characters evenly, at first making them into comical stereotypes and then revealing the depths of compassion beneath them. Instead, the film takes the most passionately charged issue of modern America and quietly shows that people on both sides are prisoners of their own beliefs, taking other people's lives so they can hold their precious values so dear. When the film, in a scene of breathtaking beauty, puts its heroine in a toy tugboat and sends her downriver, Solondz makes clear that the spirit of oppression Mark Twain railed again a century ago is still lurking in our nation today, and still children are largely paying the price for it. If you're heard of "Palindromes" before, it's probably because of its casting gimmick: Eight different actresses of varying races and ages (and even gender) play the same 13-year-old white heroine. Since every actress plays her alike, it's not very distracting, but it does beg the question of what exactly Solondz is trying to achieve. Every review I've read seems to interpret his choice differently, from suggesting that Solondz argues we're all equally oppressed when any one of us is oppressed, to suggesting that Solondz wants us each to identify with the heroine by giving us as many different heroines as possible, to suggesting that Solondz wants us to realize that we judge different people differently even if they make the same choices. My own interpretation, which proved to be correct when I bought the DVD and read the eloquent liner notes, is much simpler: Solondz is telling an emotional story as much as a political one, and each actress represents the heroine's emotional state and self-perception at that moment, sometimes sweet, sometimes ugly, sometimes grown-up, sometimes heartbreakingly innocent. When she finds salvation in a Christian household, her awkward path there makes her feel like a giant freak who doesn't belong, so Solondz casts a morbidly obese black woman to stand out among the tiny white children ("Gulliver among the Lilliputians" as Solondz puts it). After she has a particularly difficult journey and feels world-weary, he casts 43-year-old Jennifer Jason Leigh to play her. These external manifestations of her inner emotional state are invisible to the other characters and in another movie would be invisible to us too; by showing us so explicitly how the heroine feels about herself at every turn, it makes the movie that much more wrenching and powerful. Before, Solondz has made us think; at last he is making us feel. There are numerous other virtues worth mentioning, not the least of which are the brilliant performances by Sharon Wilkins, Debra Monk, and especially Ellen Barkin in their roles, but my words would be wasted if I have not already convinced you to see it. There are people who cannot enjoy a movie on the subject of abortion and people who cannot enjoy a movie with different actors in the lead role; there's nothing wrong with that, and those viewers are right to skip this title. But for viewers open to this material, and especially viewers who have seen Solondz's other movies and will appreciate how he is openly building on the foundation of his earlier work, will hopefully find this movie as exquisite and as moving as I did. It is not to be seen lightly, but it is to be seen. –Scott Hardie
Fair warning to the interested: Pan's Labyrinth isn't a fantasy film with beautiful imagery, it's a grueling, graphically violent war movie that happens to include some fantasy elements and beautiful imagery. Much like director Guillermo del Toro's excellent earlier film The Devil's Backbone – he considers this a sequel in spirit – it's an allegory for the Spanish civil war that juxtaposes the cruel realities of fascism against the optimistic fantasies of the opposition (in both cases children), who are portrayed as noble but ill-equipped to stop their own oppression. What del Toro wants to say about the failed Republican resistance to Franco, and about good's resistance of evil in general, is said by the blossoming flowers shown at the beginning and end of Pan's Labyrinth, a striking visual device from a director who delights in presenting unexpected visions without warning. You never know where del Toro will place his camera or what trick of lighting or makeup he'll employ next, but his techniques always inspire a reaction in the audience, and he uses it to make great points. You'll be alternatively scared and stirred by del Toro's shocking effects, but if you understand his symbolism, you'll be touched on an even deeper level. –Scott Hardie • February 1 2007, 5:23pm EST
When Charlyne Yi interviews people about love, she gets some great tales and some cute kids. But when the fake documentary forces material about boyfriend Michael Cera or the film crew, it drags to a halt. The entire second half feels pointless. –Scott Hardie • December 6 2009, 12:22am EST
The words "animated Iranian memoirs" don't usually send people rushing to rent a title, but this film deserves widespread attention. It's not just a moving and spirited life story, it's a look into real life in Iran too easily forgotten in modern times. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:38am EST
There's a reason why the phrase "diminishing returns" is often associated with sequels to sequels. After already being given less the second time around, how much less is left to give in the third? The only new elements in this third film (and second disappointment) from the mini-industry cranking out Pirates of the Caribbean movies is the presence of a Rainbow League pirate council, well-paid Chow Yun Fat as a far-eastern pirate, and the quirky afterline as imagined by the rum-addled brain of Jack Sparrow, but only the latter is a sight worth seeing. This movie continues the decline started by the second film, ironically getting more boring as more action is piled on, and the pointless return of Geoffrey Rush affirms that the filmmakers can merely reintroduce old elements without spin and audiences will think that's worth something. As always, the technical teams do a brilliant job, and the rousing Pirates themes have rightfully become the adventure-music standards of this decade. But would it kill them to put in a few more jokes, or demonstrate a sense of wonder about these amazing happenings? Apparently passing three hours of the audience's time is enough. –Scott Hardie • June 17 2007, 11:52am EST
By attempting to top the original, this sequel wound up making it look even better. Audiences fell in love with the original Pirates not just because of Johnny Depp's flamboyant weirdness but because it was that rare achievement, a massive summer blockbuster that was really good, with intelligence and wonder and obvious care taken by the creative team to craft entertainment of a fine caliber. The sequel, sadly, is exactly what the original wasn't: Big, loud, clunky, and stupid. Here we have characters making bad decisions just to further the plot, action scenes without consequence, amazing sights that don't register in anyone's reactions, and so many pointless plot twists that the movie invites easy parody. Predictably, the production design and animation teams do their jobs admirably, especially in the creation of a wholly-CGI villain who seems more real than the humans appearing beside him, but everyone else phoned in their work so Disney could reap their easy mega-fortune. I have no illusions about the movie industry being a business and everyone involved with this film only doing it for the money, but the first Pirates proved that some filmmakers still take the time to create quality entertainment at this level, and sequel shows how rare that is. –Scott Hardie • June 17 2007, 11:39am EST
Miyazaki once again puts most animators to shame with his joie de vivre and attention to detail. His take on The Little Mermaid is for young kids, but it's as gorgeous as any other film he's made, especially the breathtaking first few minutes. –Scott Hardie • November 5 2009, 10:20pm EST • 1 reply
This isn't a bad movie, but it's a ho-hum recreation of what remains the much more powerful original, which I suggest renting instead. Like Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot Psycho remake, you wonder why it goes to such trouble to be so mediocre. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:42am EST
[Ending spoilers ahead.] As much as I disliked this predictable thriller, I would love to see a genuine behind-the-scenes expose about it, because I could swear the included ending isn't the original ending. It's not because it's unhappy, it's because the film so carefully sets up a procedural third act in which an innocent woman will be charged with her husband's death after she unwittingly planted clues that she's his killer all week long – an ending that would not sit well with Sandra Bullock's bland but loyal fanbase, so they pulled an American Beauty and dropped the courtroom drama in favor of a quickie epilogue that affirms the "value" of what came before, the heroine learning life lessons and the audience learning they should have seen a different movie. Bullock likes safe formulas, but to her credit, she's very good at what she does, and here she inspires us to care about a woman standing at a moral crossroads – but she's hamstrung by the film's off-putting message about predetermination: She causes her own unhappy ending, and yet she is powerless not to cause it. Some would say the film exposes free will as an illusion; I say she could have prevented her unhappy ending by pulling her head out of her ass and figuring out her predicament even half as quickly as the audience does. This isn't a movie about free will; this is two hours of watching a dense woman make mistakes you can see coming a mile away. Avoid it. –Scott Hardie • March 29 2007, 11:23pm EST
premise: A biography of the pre-FBI lawman who chased John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd. Starring Christian Bale and Johnny Depp. Because this is about the mutual understanding and sympathy that develops between a bank robber and the lawman pursuing him, who have only a few scenes together, and because it is written and directed by Michael Mann, it is impossible not to think of Heat while watching this movie. But a key part of Heat's success was the way it alternated between cold scenes with Robert De Niro's rigid, disciplined thief and hot scenes with Al Pacino's wild-eyed firecracker of a cop. Christopher Nolan based the Batman-Joker dynamic in The Dark Knight on Heat, reversing the sides of the law. This time, perhaps because it was more historically accurate, perhaps because he cast the wrong lead actors, perhaps because he's getting mellow in his senior years, who knows why, Mann decided to make both men cold, stiff, and robotic. The result is a lifeless movie that fails to stir the audience or make much impression. Even the prolonged shootouts, and there are several, seem rote. The movie intends to be deep, but neglects to reveal enough of its subtext, at least to me. Watching interviews with Mann and the cast on the DVD afterwards, I had several epiphanies like "oh, that's what his expression meant" or "that's why he did that." If your movie needs footnotes to be understood, it's in trouble. Christian Bale is a very internal actor who can summon complex emotions, but can't always project them, and his performance here is muddled. Johnny Depp is more than charismatic enough to play the celebrity outlaw John Dillinger, but he's also too smart for the role. We can't buy that this sophisticated man with intelligence in his eyes has spent only a few weeks of his adult life outside of prison, and that he doesn't have a plan beyond the next morning. Marion Cotillard is much better as Dillinger's sweetheart, who's smarter and tougher than he is. A movie about her would have been a lot more interesting. –Scott Hardie • February 21 2010, 9:34pm EST
premise: Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Djimon Hounsou, and other members of an eclectic cast star in this stylish deconstruction of superheroes. Into an increasingly crowded off-brand superhero marketplace comes Push, another Heroes-inspired production without the silly costumes or notions of saving the world. This movie is the anti-Jumper: Both movies are completely preposterous, with a lot of pointless action, antagonists with barely-explained motives, parental abandonment issues, and interchangeable bad guys Samuel L. Jackson and Djimon Hounsou. But Jumper lacked imagination; it had the ingredients but not the recipe. Push is a triumph of stylish direction, committed acting, believable special effects, a brooding soul, and best of all, actual thought given to what these characters might do with their abilities and how they might feel about the ridiculous conflict they're caught up in. This flick is loads of fun for fans who like their superhero movies brainy and stylish. –Scott Hardie • February 7 2009, 11:22am EST
premise: A direct sequel to Casino Royale finds Bond seeking revenge and pursuing the same criminal organization. This follow-up to Casino Royale has all of its gravitas and craftsmanship, but none of its soul. A story about an assassin losing the ability to feel is interesting, but the continued adventures of Agent Killbot lack something. Bond seems to be the same man at the end of this movie as he started, despite what happens, and the journey doesn't seem to have been worth it. The production was so rushed that the dialogue (what little there is) was often written the day of filming, which does not benefit the outcome. Still, even if it didn't have the same sense of purpose that made such a difference in its predecessor, it's an above-average action flick. The influence of the Jason Bourne movies is now crystal clear, especially with a trio of scenes that seem deliberately lifted from that other series, and this ramped-up tempo gives the action scenes an adrenaline shot in the arm. The movie is one breakneck chase scene after another in a variety of vehicles and locations, each more spectacular than the last. I just wish all of the money and skill that went into this picture could have been put to better use than the sum of its parts. –Scott Hardie • December 10 2008, 10:24pm EST • 1 reply
Aside from the special effects, the only part that was relatively interesting to the group over here (4 kids, 3 adults) were the glimpses of the Sci-fi con and Storm Troopers. Nostalgia for the campy 70's flixs is the only thing it has going for it. –Lori Lancaster • April 7 2009, 9:16am EST
premise: Pixar's latest film, developed by Jan Pinkava and finished by Brad Bird, features the adventures of a rat who dreams of cooking in a fine French restaurant. As Pixar digs deeper into the particular obsessions of its stable of filmmakers, it loses not just sizeable chunks of its audience not interested in professional motorsports or French cuisine, but some of the epic scope of their ambitious earlier films. Brad Bird's last film was The Incredibles, which redeemed the half-baked satire of its first half with some terrific whiz-bang adventure sequences in its second half. Late in the production of Jan Pinkava's modest, sweet-natured tale of Parisian chefs, Bird took over and tried to inject more action and suspense, but it's too little too late: This tale simply feels too small, too dull, and too static for filmgoers accustomed to more from the kings of modern animation. It's not that the film puts its focus on human (and rat) personalities over action sequences; it's that those personalities just aren't interesting enough to carry a whole film. Of course, the animation is superb, there are a number of laugh-out-loud funny moments for kids and adults, and best of all, the film will make you want to cook. –Scott Hardie • April 3 2008, 12:12am EST
Like the sequel-in-spirit to last year’s overachieving —Cellular,” this low-budget thrill ride plays like a B movie that wants to give you your money’s worth. It’s the kind of the tightly-written little entertainment that ends after it has explored every twist of its simple premise, and the cast and crew clearly enjoyed their work. Cillian Murphy has the looks to play a villain like this but unfortunately his skills leave something to be desired; his cold-hearted rogue feels more like a nuisance than a threat, especially next to the commanding Rachel McAdams, who never loses control of the film from start to finish. It’s a minor, forgettable movie, but a fun ride while it lasts, and it shouldn’t be missed for fans of the genre (or of McAdams). –Scott Hardie
Like in Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler's obnoxious man-child character is surprisingly effective in drama, but this movie belongs to Don Cheadle as his forgiving, ethically-torn friend, the only one who understands the weight of all that happens. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:42am EST
premise: A CGI-animated extension of the video game series, using the same voice cast. After three craptacular Milla Jovovich movies that didn't have much to do with the Resident Evil games to start with and went downhill from there, Capcom has pulled a Marvel and started making their own movies instead of letting someone else screw them up. I don't know whether the exact same animation team and creative talent that worked on this also worked on any of the games, but what matters is that it feels very much like the games and takes place in their world. It's set in the "present" of video game series, between 4 and 5, but is essentially a sequel to the events and characters of 2. If you don't know what that means beyond the numbering of the game titles, then this isn't the rental for you – it's an entertaining action-horror flick with a lot of terrific animation (other than the sloppy lip-syncing), but I can't imagine anyone but series fans bothering to see it. Those who do will appreciate its inside references and consistency with the games, down to personality tics of the main characters. It also shares their attention to detail and silly over-the-top action scenes. This DVD is a lot of fun, and does the series right. –Scott Hardie • January 18 2009, 7:50pm EST
Not a dreary drama about a failing marriage, this film is a cry of rage against giving up on your dreams for fear of failing at them, and it only really sparks when it hits that nerve. It's a beautiful, expertly acted movie, with a haunting score. –Scott Hardie • August 1 2009, 5:49pm EST • 1 reply
Not to be confused with the Jack Black comedy possibly inspired by its real-life subject, this documentary covers a year at the Philadelphia-based Paul Green School of Rock, an after-school program for kids who want to be rock stars. Some of the kids have no talent but are charming anyway, reminiscent of the cherubic standouts from —Spellbound,” but a few of them are remarkably gifted, including an astounding twelve-year-old who whips through one of Van Halen’s most pyrotechnic solos without breaking a sweat. Though Green himself comes off as a personal tyrant mostly interested in the glory of having coached the guitar masters of tomorrow, the movie about him and his school is endearing and full of energy, a pleasure even for audience members who don’t like rock music or cute kids. It’s one of the most fun movies this year. –Scott Hardie
One of the best things a film can do, and this goes double for documentaries, is just to show us a professional at work. Simply watching a skilled laborer perform his craft or an artist assemble her work takes us out of ourselves and lets us experience what it's like to be that person. There are perhaps five minutes of great singing by the mariachi performer featured in Romántico, a man with a somber face and voice, but the other 75 minutes of the film achieve a lesser fascination. Documentarian Mark Becker's intention was to follow around one of the mariachi who perform in his California neighborhood, and he found a natural storyteller in his subject Arturo Arias. The film took an unexpected turn when Arias abruptly returned to his family in Mexico, but Becker followed him and wound up covering a year in his life. The film portrays daily living in an impoverished small town, with its hard labor under a hot sun and the constant anxiety over declining health without a doctor in sight, but it also shows us a father who adores his teenaged daughter (who seems nonplussed to be filmed) and listens to the stirring tales of a man who has spent a lifetime refining them. Nearly free of stylistic touches save for a few extreme close-ups and paired images, this documentary gets out of its own way and lets this weary, earnest man tell us his life story. It's rarely compelling, but it does inspire warm feelings and vivid memories. –Scott Hardie • June 24 2007, 12:59am EST
It may be hard to do wrong by material about disabled people finding the courage and spirit to live independently, but such inspirational trifles are not usually as entertaining as this one. Funny in unexpected ways, this witty Irish comedy applies its brain as much as its heart, and seems as awake as most films on the subject are dreamy. I do fault it for having too conventional a storyline and pulling the standard heartstrings in the standard order, but perhaps that's a consequence of its public funding. Whatever its limitations, it manages to pull off a graceful subtlety on the minor points of its story, and it has two excellent lead performances by able-bodied actors who never fail to communicate what they mean even when they don't have real lines to speak. Only the most cynical viewer would fail to enjoy this smart, touching little entertainment. –Scott Hardie
premise: Jennifer Anniston and Rob Reiner are the perfect pair for this romantic comedy. some spoilers, but not more than were let on in the trailers Rob Reiner and Jennifer Anniston prove once again that romantic comedies don't have to boring "chic flicks". They can be clever, adventurous, well written, and explore real human emotion rather than fairy tale feelings. While Reiner's previous When Harry Met Sally, and The Story of Us, and Anniston's The Break Up were so realisitic they drudged up emotions so raw and basic and heavy, Rumor Has It is a dash lighter and more playful while still touching on those unglamorous real life relationship feelings. Sarah Huttinger (Anniston) returns home to Pasadena for her sister's (played by Mena Suvari) wedding. She has just accepted her boyfriend's proposal and is wrought with modern day confusion over whether she should marry this man who seems perfect, or continue to make an "adventure" out of her life by not tying herself down. She soon finds out from a pep talk with her grandmother (expertly played by Shirley MacLaine) that her mother (who died while Sarah was young) had the same reservations before her marriage to her father and ran away for a weekend with the mysterious Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner), an old flame from her high school days. Before long, it is revealed that Sarah's grandmother also had a fling with Burroughs and their family story inspired the book on which "The Graduate" was based. Sarah freaks when she realizes that the timing of her mother's tryst may have resulted in this Burroughs being her biological father. She then sets off on a journey to find Burroughs, determined to figure out her paternity. The humorous chain of events lands her full circle by the end of the movie having to face the original problem over her engagement cold feet and helps her shed new light on her feelings. This movie is well directed and well cast. It is nice to see Kevin Costner in a comedic role. His character is so cool and elusive, you don't even recognize who is playing him at first. The film is light hearted and enjoyable. In traditional Reiner and Anniston fashion, it deals with real relationship feelings and problems. But it does so in a whimsical Shakespearean "Much Ado About Nothing" kind of way. –Jackie Mason • January 4 2009, 9:58pm EST
This heart-on-its-sleeve romantic comedy has a few good laughs, mostly courtesy of Dylan Moran, but mostly it avoids any real comedy or real feeling by overdoing the hero's mistake and then overdoing his redemption (and overdoing Hank Azaria's villain). –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:33am EST
[excerpted from Ten Best Films feature] Low expectations always help a movie seem better (I guess that Poseidon remake wasn't too horrible...), but how could a gritty, child-in-peril thriller with nobody's favorite movie star Paul Walker as a bottom-feeding mob bagman turn out to be this good? First, it has a method to its gruesome madness, revealed in full in the cleverly animated closing credits if you didn't catch on sooner: The movie is a gory adult fairy tale, where the babyfaced Cameron Bright (good actor for his age) encounters pimps, pedophiles, and pushers as the Brothers Grimm might have portrayed them. Second, it takes the grit into delirious, NC17-skirting excess, with graphic hedonistic sex and gunshot wounds so improbable they had to be created with CGI. An early shot of a victim-hurtling, point-blank shotgun blast shown from the gun's point of view sets the tone for a movie that's like the killer shark of Tarantino knockoffs, unable to stop swimming or it will die. If you can stomach it, it's one hell of a movie. –Scott Hardie • April 24 2007, 9:30pm EST
Remember the conventional wisdom on "Pirates of the Caribbean"? It was a family-friendly action film based on a theme park attraction, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Gore Verbinski, and the trailers made it look hammy and brainless. How could it possibly have been any good? But it turned out to be a little smarter and a lot more fun than the conventional wisdom could have predicted, one of the surprise good entertainments of the year. History has repeated itself with "Sahara," a miscast Clive Cussler adaptation directed by the son of Michael Eisner on his first large-scale production, which looks unyieldingly stupid in the trailers. Whoever directed the marketing for this film has chosen to highlight the dumbest moments and hard-pedal the preposterous Confederate-Ironclad-in-the-African-desert premise, making this look like a colossal stinker. But to my happy discovery, it isn't. All those same dumb moments are in the movie, diluted with two hours of skillfully directed action sequences and performed by actors who, if not right for the parts, at least approach them with high energy and dedication. Matthew McConaughey is an underappreciated workhorse of an actor, bringing unneeded intensity to roles like in "Reign of Fire" and "Frailty" that other actors in his place would merely phone in. His laid-back slacker persona couldn't be more wrong for the Type-A millionaire globetrotter Dirk Pitt, but other than a certain hamminess (unavoidable in this kind of film), he manages to carry the film anyway, with charm and energy. He's matched by the equally miscast and equally devoted Steve Zahn and Penélope Cruz; only the mild-mannered villain, the world's least scary genocidal warlord, is given a perfunctory performance. Cussler has always preferred the fantastic to the plausible. In "Sahara," that approach sometimes inspires delight, as when the heroes resourcefully escape the desert in half of a wrecked plane, and sometimes it inspires groans, as when Dirk Pitt spends a full minute dangling helplessly from a ledge unable to save himself but, as soon as the villain's back is turned, effortlessly climbs back up. It doesn't help that the characters explicitly point out the flaws in their own movie, like when the sidekick mentions (twice) that there's no way the hero's method of victory at the end should have worked, and when the villain says that "nobody cares about Africa," as if acknowledging that the setting is likely to bore most of the film's target audience. Also making the film difficult to enjoy is the schizophrenic musical selection, blaring classic rock songs at the most inopportune moments, as when "Sweet Home Alabama" plays while the characters are cruising through an impoverished, plague-stricken African village. It's a credit to the film's charm that it manages to be highly entertaining despite these recurring annoyances. And speaking for myself, I can't help but appreciate it when a mainstream film goes to the trouble of including scenes of no consequence: When Dirk Pitt bought his female companion a pair of exotic seashells and explained how science had yet to determine why they glowed in the dark, I rolled my eyes because I knew that in some later scene they would use the shells to see in the dark and/or discover how the shells worked; but no, the scene has no relation to anything else in the movie, and exists only so we can enjoy the appeal of actors McConaughey and Cruz flirting with each other. "Sahara" might be built out of every stock adventure-movie cliché in the book, and its far-fetched plot details are often introduced less than gracefully, but it's still a lot of fun, not half as brainless as it seems, and unexpectedly gratifying. It's the last movie I would have expected to recommend, but here I am doing it. –Scott Hardie
[excerpted from Ten Best Films feature] There was just too much slackness of pace for this Korean flick to make the top ten, but I'm happy to call it one of my favorite films of 2005. It has something for everyone: Part thriller, part science fiction, part drama, part comedy, part horror, all weird. An unstable man convinced his former boss is an alien invader kidnaps him, shaves him bald, straps him to a chair, and plots to kill him, while his more intelligent captive plots an escape. It's a strange, unpredictable battle of imagination, and the film takes great pleasure in walking the line, going a long time without saying for sure whether the boss is an alien, or his captor is insane, or possibly neither, or possibly both. It follows in a new Korean trend of ultra-violent pictures that don't skimp on the gory injuries, but it's actually a gentle film at heart, more interested in its hero's fragile innocence than what horrors he's capable of inflicting in his seeming madness. I can't recommend this funny little freakshow enough. –Scott Hardie • September 24 2006, 9:23pm EST
If you thought "Driving Miss Daisy" was too fast-paced and difficult to follow, here's a movie just your speed. It does tell a story with feeling and it does get slightly more lively in its second half, and it's refreshing to see a pro-American foreign film for a change, but the whole thing is about as thrilling as an afternoon at a law library. This one's a sleeper hit without the hit. –Scott Hardie
[spoiler] This survival-oriented Western is gripping for most of its running time, especially in the wordless first act where fugitive flees lawman through frozen forest. But it stumbles in the final act, especially with a degrading supernatural ending. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:40am EST
At last, Joss Whedon’s feloniously mishandled sci-fi tv series gets its feature film sequel, and as expected, it’s dense with character details and in-jokes for fans while being just as exciting and surprising as the best episodes of the short-lived series. —Firefly” took the unpromising concept of a pistols-and-horses Western set in the space age and made it work through talent, charisma, and force of will, and —Serenity” extends the premise to a bigger canvas without the limitations of a weekly serial. Thankfully, it also abandons or goes easy on the more gimmicky elements of the show, such as the swearing in Mandarin and the silent space sequences, focusing instead on the complicated plot it has to tell, resolving one of the series’ central mysteries in a dense two hours while still managing to fit in a number of sensational action scenes. The uninitiated are likely to enjoy it even if they don’t understand what the hell is happening most of the time, since the film seems made unapologetically for fans who already appreciate its sarcastic wit and consistent ability to pull the rug out from under you just when you think you get it. The film is a treat, and I strongly recommend it, but first you have to rent the original 14-episode series that inspired it. Together they’re worthy of every ounce of love and praise the fans lavish on them. –Scott Hardie
My love of the Matrix films is no secret, but I have never been fond of Don Davis's bombastic score, which assaults the ears like a blanket of napalm. At the risk of sounding like an old man, tone it down already! I couldn't help but think of Davis while listening to Steve London's equally overachieving score for this low-budget horror indie. Every action, even the slightest twitch of a shoulder, is underscored with screeching violins and thunderous chords, as if he accidentally overbooked the orchestra and, aw shucks, he may as well use 'em. It's a distraction during the unevenly-paced film, which consists mostly of Steadicam shots that lurk in the woods watching the heroes from afar. It's a time-honored gimmick of the genre, but really, 65 minutes of it in a single film is enough. Really, the only three things I can praise in this witless, ham-fisted excuse for entertainment are A) the creepy makeup on the villains and victims, B) the creepy cinematography during the psychic premonitions, and C) the extra-creepy discovery made by the hero when he wakes up chained to a chair in... well, does it matter? The rest of the movie is so infuriatingly edited (intercutting and leaving scenes just as the tensions mounts) and poorly acted (I'd call Tim Murphy a poor man's Viggo Mortensen but I don't want to compliment him) that it's not worth renting by anyone, anywhere, any time. It starts with an intriguing premise – naked teenager shows up covered in blood at a police station and won't talk – but insists on badly miscalculated attempts to create and maintain an air of dread, losing its good ideas in a morass of stupidity and minutes wasted at a time. Avoid it. –Scott Hardie
Teen movies are like horror movies: The vast majority of them are as dumb as bricks because the audience isn't discriminating, but every once in a while, a great one comes along that takes advantage of the genre's unique access point to our psyche. She's the Man is not one of the great ones. It is one of the recent string of Shakespearean plays "adapted" – that is, dumbed down and then dumbed down some more – into the teen movie format, standard clichés intact and every punchline visible a mile away. The sexist soccer coach that sets the plot in motion is a particularly unbelieveable specimen from Planet Sitcom, not that the movie demonstrates an understanding of the basic rules or strategy of soccer when it shows the sport being played. –Scott Hardie • May 29 2007, 8:41am EST
This is Holmes for ADHD sufferers, a four-hour mystery stuffed into half that time with rapid dialogue and hurried fight scenes. It's fun, with a clever screenplay and classic twists, but the real charms are the lively score and art direction. –Scott Hardie • December 28 2009, 11:23pm EST • 4 replies
Kevin Spacey, playing "shrink to the stars," is the best thing about this mopey indie drama overstuffed with quirk. The movie sets up confrontations and catharses that it's not willing to follow through on, but it does project its feelings very well. –Scott Hardie • March 22 2012, 6:30pm EST
[excerpted from Ten Best Films feature] Advent Children is made to excite and is likely only to excite video game fans. Silent Hill, on the other hand, is made to scare the bejeezus out of you, and is likely to have that effect on anyone. This year's valedictorian of the what-the-fuck-is-going-on school of horror moviemaking, the movie strands its heroine in a nightmare beyond reason or redemption, bringing her (and us) visions of things that cannot be. It's H.P. Lovecraft for the Playstation generation, and it's a gorgeously freakish vision to behold. –Scott Hardie • April 22 2007, 9:14pm EST
[excerpted from Ten Best Films feature] Apparently all her work helping James Bond and training geishas isn't good enough, because Michelle Yeoh still has to slum through horrible straight-to-DVD camp like this to pay the bills. Truth be told, even though the movie's as incredibly stupid as Yeoh looks in her superhero costume, I confess to enjoying it anyway. She plays a millionaire fashion model and cosmetics heiress (!) by day, but by night, she puts a colander on her head and prowls the city on her hi-tech motorcycle, battling incompetent thugs led by a cheap rip-off of the villain from Star Trek: Nemesis, who himself was an expensive rip-off of Billy Corgan. If Yeoh and costar Richie Ren didn't do the whole movie with goofy grins on their faces and a weird innocence, it would be unbearable, but somehow in spite of its lack of decent action and sub-Catwoman moronity it manages to be a silly good time. Don't bother renting it; it's strictly for people who get a grin just seeing Michelle Yeoh on a movie screen. –Scott Hardie • September 24 2006, 9:20pm EST
premise: This sequel picks up in the lives of the four friends, who three summers later, still share a bond and a mystical pair of jeans. I first have to say, I was a big fan of the original movie. First off, it has the coming together of 4 successful television phenoms - Amber Tamblyn of Joan of Arcadia, Blake Lively of Gossip Girl, America Ferrera of Ugly Betty, and Alexis Bledel of Gilmore Girls. A sisterhood of strong acting will always draw me to a movie. In the overstretched world of sequels, the title and concept of this sequel is simple. But it works. The first movie, taking place the summer the girls are 16 takes them on individual coming of age adventures and ties them together through a mystical pair of pants that somehow fits all of them. This installment picks up after their first year of college. The premise is the same, however, I didn't find myself bored with the concept. I was once again interested in the challenges the girls faced with school, friendship, family, love/romance, sex...all taking them to exotic locals once again. And the format keeps you from zoning out by flipping secen by scene to what a different girl was doing at the time. And who could get sick of seeing blue Mediterranean waters! Once again, I think I found myself most interested in the stories of Carmen (Ferrera) and Tibby (Tamblyn) Bridget's story (played by Lively) borrows a bit too much from In Her Shoes. Bridget is probably the most troubled character and while she resolved some of ther family issues, I feel that there wasn't enough time to really let her character have any fun (maybe she had too much fun in the first movie when she was in Mexico!) Lena (played by Bledel) portrays a more typical story (love-heartbreak-love), but it is enjoyable anyway and serves as a control to some of the more serious themes and serves as something anyone watching can relate to. The famous pants really take a back seat here. As is fitting. As the girls grow older, silly superstitions become more passe and they are able to deal with the 4 major themes, love, trust, strength in self, and reconciliation with family in a more grown up way (as we all must eventually). This installment is a perfect follow up to the original movie. The ending didn't really seem to leave room for another after this. I could honestly see a third movie taking place maybe when the girls are say, my age and dealing with themes such as marriage, babies, death of a grandparent perhaps, job choices etc. Done in the right way, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 3 could be just as enjoyable as is 2 predecessors. –Jackie Mason • March 1 2009, 9:28pm EST
premise: A woman holds a horrid little sexual secret! Watch what happens when she reveals it to her friends and family! Ugh! This was written and directed by Bob Goldthwaite (apparently he's not Bobcat anymore), and it shows. I won't reveal the big secret, but you're told what it is 2 minutes in, so I'm really not hiding anything from you. I was tempted to rate this 'It sucked', because it really wasn't very good, but, honestly, the main actress really does do a great job in the movie. (Plus, she's cute, and I don't normally find blondes cute, so take that for what it's worth.) I honestly feel sympathy for her character, which doesn't happen often, especially in a movie which is so full of distractions and crud. The actress (Melinda Page Hamilton) hasn't really done much else, but I hope to see her again in more movies, preferably not with Bobcat Goldthwaite writing/directing. Anyhow, the girl gets engaged to her "dream man", and agonizes over whether to tell him the big secret she's been holding since she was a young, naive college girl. Unsurprisingly (and this movie would blow if they didn't), she tells him, and he is not amused. At all. Then, her family finds out, and they pretty much disown her. Eventually, things work out, she dumps the fiancee, meets someone new, etc. etc. etc. I won't spoil the rest of the movie, but the message at the end seemed to be (to me) "It's OK to lie and hold secrets back from people. In fact, life works better that way!" I do not agree with that, and so, that's probably a big part of my dislike for this film. This movie is billed as a romantic comedy. It's not funny. Maybe it's one of those dark comedies, where they aren't funny in a serious way that make people say they are comedies, but don't expect the funny, because you won't get it. The situation is ludicrous, but that's about it. It's really kind of more heart wrenching to see how everyone privy to the secret changes how they feel about the main character. If you're looking for a weird and different movie, this could be your cup of tea. If nothing else, you'll see what I think passes for great acting, so you can judge your opinion of my opinion based on this, because I can't say enough about what a great job Melinda Page Hamilton does in this movie. I might start a fan club! [EDIT] Apparently, this movie has also been called Stay, so if you see that, it might be the same movie. The version I watched was called Sleeping Dogs Lie. –Aaron Shurtleff • May 9 2008, 3:26pm EST
The Academy was right to crown this the best picture of 2008: It's a gripping, dazzling telling of a great story. I use the adjective "brilliant" when describing Danny Boyle's work and this is no exception; he outdid himself with a great entertainment. –Scott Hardie • August 2 2009, 7:27pm EST
What could have been an intense thriller or a stylish action flick wound up being neither by trying to be both: Joe Carnahan set out to make the kind of blood-soaked, anything-goes flick that 1970s audiences would see at a drive-in theater, or (ahem) grindhouse theater, but style is not among his strong suits. Weird elements like moronic redneck assassins bringing chainsaws to a gunfight can't play against such a somber, post-9/11 tone. Had Carnahan fully committed himself to making a serious project that suits his nature, he might have had something really sharp like his previous films. Smokin' Aces is entertaining and I liked it in spite of itself, but its jokes fall flat, its plot twists are screamingly obvious, and it's just too slow. –Scott Hardie • June 23 2007, 11:02pm EST • 1 reply
premise: A high school senior is haunted by her dead twin as she vacations with friends in the Louisiana bayou. Directed by Dan Myrick of The Blair Witch Project. In his audio commentary, writer-director Dan Myrick makes clear that he has no lack of ambition, since he models himself after Hitchcock by emphasizing story and character over the trappings of genre. The problem, then, must be lack of talent, because the story and character are awfully slim in this brain-dead Euro-horror remake, even by direct-to-video standards. The soundtrack eagerly rachets up the tension every time the heroine finds herself alone, even when it's clear nothing scary is about to happen. The film wants to be scary, but doesn't have a clue how to create characters in peril that we care about, how to indicate real menace lurking in the shadows, or how to deliver the goods when the moment finally arrives, leaning on shoddy CGI probably necessitated by the film's budget, and a laughably "shocking" ending. The other Euro-horror release this month, The Orphanage, is like a master class in creating intense dread compared to this amateurish mess. –Scott Hardie • January 26 2008, 1:15am EST
Knowing that this film is the work of a novice writer-director who struggled to make his ideas clear on "Project Greenlight" (he lost the competition but got the film financed anyway) could be the key to enjoying it. Many films use clichés and few deserve get away with it, but gosh, you just want to cut the kid some slack; he's trying his darnedest, you know. The film is pretty good when it settles into the daily lives of its down-to-Earth protagonists, playing out like a low-key riff on "American Beauty" with more plausible dialogue. Nicky Katt's poorly-developed pawnbroker is a weakness, spouting off wise sayings while never demonstrating any actual wisdom, but David Strathairn's put-upon everyman makes a sympathetic lead: He loves his wife and he loves his father-in-law and he even loves his mischievous dog, and this is the story of his standing by them as they reject him and test his patience, because that's what everymen do. Ultimately the uplift can ring a little phony (especially when the ends are tied too neatly in the closing scenes), but Murphy has an ear for dialogue and a suberb casting director, and he works this laid-back drama into a touching and traditional yarn. This might be one of the most pleasing little indie movies this year. –Scott Hardie
The careful balance found in Spider-Man 2 is lost here among too many villains (3?!) and a goofy riff on emo angst that's on the wrong wavelength. The last movie made action figures into believable human beings; this film achieves the opposite. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:30am EST
The sense of fun that this reboot brings is just what the series needed. It's vital again, though I'm not sure its abandoning of any deeper meaning is the plus everyone thinks. Hooray for a solid, thrilling adventure that dusts off an old favorite. –Scott Hardie • May 7 2009, 10:45pm EST • 3 replies
One of the chief complaints about the first two prequels is that they felt like trailers for a better movie coming in the future, so it's nice to have finally arrived at that better movie. This film successfully capitalizes on twenty-eight years of series history to make its every turn convincingly seem like an earth-shattering development; a first-time viewer with no advance knowledge of the series would get a fraction of the enjoyment. (It's a good thing for Lucas that audiences the world over already love his series.) This film is not just the culmination of the six-film series but also its climax, the point towards which the earlier films were driving and from which the later films derived, the point of no return. It's a credit to Lucas's strength as a storyteller that even though we know what Anakin Skywalker's fate must be, the film plausibly dangles hope that another outcome is possible, and bona-fide dramatic tension develops in the last movie you'd expect to have it. It carries the strength of the messenger sequence in "Romeo and Juliet": No matter how many times the play has been performed in these five centuries and always turned out the same way, you still have hope that Friar Lawrence's messenger will arrive in time to give Romeo that news that will let him live happily ever after with Juliet, but Romeo's ill-informed servant speeds by and doom closes its grip on the young lovers. Lucas may like to rewrite his own history, but still, even he wouldn't change the ending of "Sith," and yet throughout it, the battle for Anakin's soul has such compelling power that we hope against the inevitable, and I suspect we will still be able to hope it when revisiting this film after ten years or twenty years. It's every bit the "space opera" that was the original in 1977, except it replaces the freshness of youth with the richness of age. For capturing the full weight, power, and majesty of the "Star Wars" saga in one powder-keg of a finalé, this film is, in my mind, the best of the entire hexalogy. What helps it get there is an effort to overcome the weaknesses of the previous two films, which I admit had many flaws even though I did find them nearly as off-putting as many viewers. It can be agreed that the performances were wooden, so here Lucas employed dialogue coach Christopher Neil to help the actors find the rhythm of their lines and the conviction to carry the heavier material. To address charges that the dialogue was flat, Lucas hired an uncredited screenwriter (whose name I cannot for the life of me find right now after reading it a few days ago) to polish the draft, and it resulted in great moments like Palpatine's chilling monologue at the opera, where he hints at the hidden depths of evil within himself. If the special effects in the first two prequels seemed like demo reels for the CGI gurus at ILM, now Lucas actually uses them to entertain and tell a story, and lets their magnificence demonstrate itself. And though Jar-Jar Binks is given a hat tip with two fleeting appearances on screen, he is wisely kept mute. The cumulative meaning of these changes is clear: Lucas can be faulted for having poor judgment when the series started, but he has the capacity to learn from his mistakes and improve himself. Were he to have filmed all three chapters at once, we'd have gotten a "Sith" riddled with Jar-Jar's annoying presence and more yawn-inducing galactic politics, but the man clearly has a self-improvement streak, and I defy viewers not to give him credit for it. What's left beyond the dialogue, which sometimes remains stiff even with the script revisions because of Lucas's insistence on keeping to his classic adventure-serial paradigm, is the spectacle of the affair, and that's what everyone has truly come to see. Lucas does not disappoint, delivering a droid villain twice as deadly as Darth Maul's double-sided lightsaber, and breathtaking alien worlds such as the neon garden jungle where Aayla Secura does battle. John Williams's score is cranked to maximum intensity, heightening the sensation of "space opera" and helping the dramatic material transcend itself, as when Anakin is at last left alone to ponder Palpatine's offer in the Coruscant sunset and we realize this CGI-animated sci-fi cartoon has an actual soul inside it. If I have any real complaint to register, it's that the film drags for too long between its brilliant middle act and dynamite conclusion, taking too much time for its characters to learn information that we in the audience have long known, and more judicious editing would have preserved the momentum of the picture through this necessary stretch. But that's a minor quibble in the face of such ambitious storytelling and otherwise excellent craftsmanship. "Star Wars" has long been the iconic apex of science-fiction entertainment, and the best achievement of its final chapter is drawing upon the series's grandness and enduring popularity to go further than the series has before, into action sequences of awe-inspiring breadth and deep into the tortured soul of its iconic antagonist. This is 28 years of cinematic history realized in the best possible way. –Scott Hardie
The first question you should be asking yourself is, "Have I read this already?" Seriously. I cannot stress the importance of reading the graphic novel (or it's graphic-less novel form) before seeing this movie. The story (which is by Neil Gaiman...if you are familiar with his work, that will mean something to you, take it for what it is) in the movie is not exactly identical to the graphic novel's plot, which was something of an annoyance to me. I think that a lot of the appeal to me of Gaiman's works is the way he tells a story, and relates everything to everything else. This movie, while still enjoyable, changes enough of the novel's original plot line that it really end up lacking in the end, though what it is that is missing escapes me. This is, to give it the best genre I can, a magical, romantic fairy tale. A young man, trying desperately to win the heart of a woman who intends to accept the marriage proposal of another man, sees a falling star, and swears to return that star to his beloved, if she would but consent to marry him. Feeling that such an oath is so much hot air, she accepts, and thus young Tristan sets out on a quest to return the star to her. Unfortunately, the star has fallen on the other side of The Wall, which is the border to a magical realm (in the novel, it's Faerie, but that's not mentioned in the movie, in which the land is called Stormhold). And, if you are familar with Neil Gaiman, there are a host of sub-plots and side plots that all run parallel to the main story, which would be too much of a spoiler to discuss, I think. The acting is very good. Michelle Pfeiffer plays an evil witch. Robert DeNiro plays a dashing pirate captain (the funny twist on this character does not happen in the novel!). Charlie Cox does a very good job with the role of Tristan. And the star of the film (pun intended) is, of course, the lovely Claire Danes, who plays the part of Yvaine. You'll understand the pun when you see the movie! Of course, I have a huge crush on Claire Danes, so take that into consideration. In summation, I give this a It Ruled, but I am bothered by the changes between the novel and the movie. I'd say see the movie and read the novel, and see which you prefer, but see the movie! –Aaron Shurtleff • September 7 2007, 3:40pm EST • 2 replies
Big ideas are the currency of Stardust and it gets pretty far on them, with lightning pirates and aging witches and fratricidal princes. But Claire Danes is terrible as the blank female lead, and the homophobic jokes just fall flat. Too bad. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:35am EST
Forget ponderous philosophical ruminations on the blurring line between technology and people: This old-fashioned adventure movie pays a few lines of lip service to its overwritten anime brethren, then gets on with the spectacle. This is exhilarating entertainment at full throttle, much like the nonstop-action formula that served Indiana Jones so well, as 1866 London becomes a battleground between the grandest machines of war that Katsuhiro Ô ;tomo can devise. It actually earned a stunned "wow!" in my living room as one astounding sight topped another. Ô ;tomo is a master animator, crafting unparalleled detail into every shot, and here his work is successfully enhanced by CGI trickery that allows his rooms to spin on an axis and his 2-D characters to encircle each other in three dimensions. I'm glad that I saw "Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence" only a week before this: That movie made it look impossible to combine traditional anime and 3-D CGI, but "Steamboy" makes it look easy. Ô ;tomo's skill at animation is the very best thing about this feature and it deserves to be widely seen. I wish the rest of the movie was as easy to recommend: It drags in the second half as the action becomes unremitting (the subtitled version that I watched is 20 minutes longer; both versions are on the DVD). And for large portions of the film, there's not much color either, as the characters explore the drab, shadowy bowels of a massive machine world. But if you still want to enjoy a firecracker of an adventure movie with breathtaking visual detail, you can't go wrong with this film. It's one of the best pure entertainments of the year. –Scott Hardie
This weird comedy doesn't run in predictable directions with its neat premise (its hero Will Ferrell can hear the film's narrator in his head). It's more interested in the warm human moments between its odd characters. This one's for the brain and heart. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:45am EST
It's a simple horror premise that could go so wrong: The apprentice of a mad doctor studying immortality keeps waking up only to be murdered again. The film is moody and approaches philosophical, and succeeds at being unsettling more often than scary. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:29am EST
This by-the-numbers indie comedy travels familiar roads, but it's charming and warm, and inspires welcome feelings. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt play siblings like they've lived lifetimes of mutual frustration. Watching them work is a simple pleasure. –Scott Hardie • October 8 2009, 10:43pm EST • 1 reply
This movie isn't bad, but it misses so many chances to go somewhere with its premise, like commenting on our culture or getting more creative in the action scenes. Half an hour of subplots was trimmed in editing, so maybe it was intended to go deeper? –Scott Hardie • October 18 2009, 8:54am EST
premise: Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and Helena Bonham Carter film the bloody Broadway musical about an insane barber who slices his customers' throats. Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury they ain't. Burton regulars Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter can't sing with the intensity of the stage production, nor portray the heights of madness they should. Depp in particular made a fatal acting choice when he decided Todd should be distant and stoic, when instead Depp should ham for the camera as a raging, wide-eyed lunatic – it would be vastly more entertaining, it would be in the spirit of the show, and if Depp has a problem with that kind of performance (as I expect he does), then he's the wrong man for the role. The result of this poor casting is a film made by people who like Sweeney Todd very much but aren't the right folks to pull it off. It's a curiously muted and purposeless movie, with little macabre fun to be had, and little sympathy for the devilish protagonists. To its credit, it looks great, rendering mid-1800s London with Burton's typical Impressionist flair, with terrific costumes by Colleen Atwood. Depp's makeup suggests a man who never sleeps, and before long you realize that his loft is designed without a bedroom. The supporting actors are generally good, especially Ed Sanders as the boy Toby, who might be a better singer than any of the adults around him. But there's a much better film to be made of this musical by people who understand it better. –Scott Hardie • January 1 2008, 9:22am EST • 2 replies
"Ambitious" doesn't begin to describe it. Charlie Kaufman puts his feelings about life, love, identity, creativity, and death into this sprawling production, and the primary feat is that it even begins to cohere. It's weird and sad, and totally profound. –Scott Hardie • February 9 2012, 4:35pm EST
Much is made of Stephen Gaghan's dense, layered screenplay, the sort often called labrynthine. I'm of the crowd who believe that trying to keep up is part of the experience, and who like it that way. Watching this movie is an act of concentration, in which you spend half your brain power watching a scene and the other half stitching the previous scene into the growing quilt of scenes that came before it so that they make sense. None of this has anything to do with Gaghan's message, but it sure keeps you from dozing off. And hey, the whole plot's right there on Wikipedia if you get lost. Gaghan's message is different things to different people. Many critics think that it's the futility of trying to control regional politics in the modern era. Roger Ebert understood it to be that the world's oil is running out and world powers are getting more corrupt in their pursuit of what little oil is left. Instead, it got me thinking with disgust about the oil barons of the Middle East who spend their fortunes on palaces, yachts, and sports cars while their people wither away from hunger and disease; if oil does run out in ten years, the region will again be poor and backwards. The hero of Syriana, if the film has any heroes at all, is a Saudi prince who wants to invest his oil fortune in his country to give it a future, and it's telling that this prince who happily sells every drop of oil he can is the West's target for elimination. Through the story of the prince and the Western men who influence his fate, sometimes from distant continents, Gaghan forges a tale of tension, sadness, and thought-provoking politics. It's worth seeing. –Scott Hardie
Zack Snider indulges his bloodlust in this short film drawn from the Watchmen mythos, a parable that was intended to inform the larger novel but in Snider's hands becomes a grim orgy of unspeakable violence. That would be fine if it were good. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:24am EST
Petey Greene's outspoken personality and unique vantage point on the civil rights movement made him a great figure for a biopic, but this film belongs to Chiwetel Ejiofor as his jealous friend, who wants to be Greene and can't. We know how he feels. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:45am EST
premise: A Thai melodrama that mimics several American film styles, most notably Westerns. You don't hear many movies described as a "technicolor Thai Western," especially with imagery this bold, and it's an even bigger surprise to discover that the parts with the eye-popping visuals are the weakest. This Thai film, which took years to score an American release, has a great first act, a love story between a peasant boy and a rich girl who fall in love in a river of neon-green grass. Then the film turns into a action movie, aping Westerns and war movies and gangster pics, and it falls flat, seeming not to have a clue what to do with each genre. The Chinese Kung Fu Hustle successfully mixed martial arts and gangsters with a similar love story, but that was a screwball comedy told at a quick pace by a filmmaker who knew what he wanted to do; this murky melodrama feels lost and slow-witted by comparison. Admire the photography, but don't bother watching it. –Scott Hardie • May 18 2008, 12:52pm EST
premise: A high school girl finds that she is a very special individual. Chaos ensues. It's really not a surprise what makes our young protagonist special, so I'll come right out and say it: Vagina dentata. Brings a shudder to every man's loins, let me assure you! Well, this movie deals with a young woman, who has taken her pledge to remain pure until marriage very seriously. Which I guess explains why she's never been to a gynecologist (until a very "poignant" scene midway through the film, of course!) ever in her life to have discovered this before a very unfortunate sexual assault (not that there is any other type of sexual assault). Then, things go a bit crazy, stuff happens and men suck. Yeah, this movie pretty much makes men look like mean jerks, and they get what they deserve. Girl power! First of all, there are several scenes in this movie where they show the big stacks of what we should assume is a nuclear power plant in the background. Because, obviously, living close to a nuke facility would cause such craziness as a woman just spontaneously having vaginal teeth. I have issues about the safety of nuclear facilities (more specifically, the truth of the danger of them versus the paranoia commonly spread about them), so this didn't sit well with me. Personal issue. Second, most of the male characters are pretty scummy in this film. I mean, yeah, it would be horrible for mostly innocent, good men to be subjected to what I am sure you all can imagine happens to the men in this film. But, they could have tried to be less stereotypical in the portrayal of bad men. It also struck me as how quickly the character goes from a nice girl who pledged to be abstinent to an avenging angel who..um..uses her special qualities for the betterment of her little area of the world. Really? I would like to think that your typical woman would be a bit more shocked and dismayed about discovering such a mutation, rather than just using it as the main character does. What do I know, though? Honestly though, for the subject matter, the film is not too gory, other than a few bloody "stump" shots and some nearly hilarious looking severed penises. [DISCLAIMER: I have never seen a severed penis, and if I find that a severed penis lying on the ground actually looks like that, I will apologize. I hope I never have reason to discover what a severed penis looks like!] And, amazingly, the sexual content is pretty tame. This movie could have been nigh-pornographic, and it is refreshingly good that the sex scenes are mostly PG-13 (except for the men screaming, and the severed penises, of course!). This movie was OK. It had its good and bad points, but it was entertaining enough. I would recommend it with reservations, and only to people I knew would find this kind of thing entertaining. –Aaron Shurtleff • July 17 2008, 4:23pm EST • 4 replies
A movie about a teenager with vagina dentata can go in lots of directions, and this one does, satirizing the conflict between sexual repression and objectification in our culture with an unexpectedly smart script. Too bad it gets dumb at the very end. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:26am EST
premise: An unwilling virgin gets encouragement and pressure from his friends as he woos a single mother. Judd Apatow directs Steve Carell. There's something about this movie that's like There's Something About Mary. Almost a decade ago, that movie built early buzz among film hipsters with a killer cast and trailer, then unsurprisingly turned into a blockbuster hit with its scatological and sex-anxiety humor, and, flush with vindication, the hipsters praised the artistic genius of the Farrelly brothers for bucking the system and making a movie their way. A few of us were left cold by the movie itself, wondering how intelligent adults were turned into 13-year-old boys, laughing at penis jokes and relating to anxiety about pretty women. It's not that the movie was bad; it's just a mystery to us how it became a massive hit with middlebrow cred. The same story now applies to Judd Apatow's 40-Year-Old Virgin, a movie that shouldn't appeal to 40-year-olds anywhere but has somehow made Apatow a revered new king of Hollywood comedy. It may have a great supporting cast, with Romany Malco, Seth Rogen, and Paul Rudd nailing their lines, and some surprising visual gags from out of nowhere, on par with, say, "Brett" turning out to be Favre. But most of the time, it's just not funny, meandering around in humorous riffs without taking off. Apatow sets up his scenes and then lets his actors improvise most of the dialogue, which lends unpredictability at the expense of a screwball pace. What should be a madcap sex romp sags into a muddled sitcom about male sexual anxiety that's squeamish for all the wrong reasons. It's not a bad movie, but it's a very overrated one. And the less said about the Age of Aquarius, the better. –Scott Hardie • December 10 2007, 10:39pm EST • 1 reply
The best thing about this documentary on the so-called dirtiest joke of all time is comparing the comedians who perform it. Each one seems to deliver the punchline in their own definitive style: Paul Reiser is conversational. Andy Dick is overenthusiastic. Steven Wright is meticulously articulate. George Carlin is gleeful about it, relishing the act of joke-telling. Drew Carey underlines his with a Broadway-esque pose. Richard Jeni is self-deprecating. Billy Connolly tells it like your funniest chum down at the pub. Emo Phillps falls back on his whiny, broken-voiced persona. Gilbert Gottfried just plain shouts it. As these accomplished comedians and countless more dissect The Joke, it's possible to gain a deeper appreciation of their style and of professional comedy in general. But it's also possible to get really, really tired of hearing it, which is why I can't quite recommend this. It's interesting and frequently laugh-inducing while it lasts, but you'll be drained by the time Tim Conway starts mugging for the camera over the closing credits. –Scott Hardie
I'm surprised to learn online that the second Futurama movie seems a lot more popular than the first. It has a few laughs and great animation, but it mostly drags, and intercuts too much between simultaneous subplots that rob it of momentum. –Scott Hardie • April 18 2010, 10:50am EST
This sequel to Bourne Supremacy borrows its tight plotting, fast editing, and shaky camerawork, putting off many filmgoers. I liked both movies, even if this one feels a little like warm leftovers. Matt Damon and Joan Allen are still damn good. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:30am EST
Another Narnia film ports the mythos to screen with visual sheen but no understanding of what makes a tale worth telling. The characters are blank, the action routine, the twists predictable, and the special effects lame. At least the costumes are good. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:41am EST
premise: An adaptation of the C.S. Lewis classic in which four children venture into a fantasy land to rescue it from an ice queen. I enjoyed the Narnia books as much as any kid, but then I grew up. Where the Lord of the Rings films were sophisticated, complex, and challenging, the underdeveloped Narnia films they inspired are probably all doomed to be as dull and imagination-free as this first title, that is if they even get more than two or three titles in. There's just not much to like here, with filmsy two-dimensional characters, a rushed introduction, and overwhelming Christian allegory that doesn't paint non-believers in a very good light. This is another Hollywood misfire where a vast fortune is spent on special effects and marketing, but no one can be bothered to enrich the script. What a waste of money. –Scott Hardie • March 27 2008, 9:44am EST
premise: F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story about a man who ages backwards is grafted onto a Forrest Gump-like tale of a life full of adventures and coincidences. Starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, directed by David Fincher. (Major spoilers ahead.) It's no wonder that this movie feels so much like Forrest Gump. It was written by the same screenwriter, Eric Roth, and began development in 1994. That long gestation period resulted in the film's biggest weakness, that every filmmaking team that got their hands on it over the years made changes, and it feels like a lot of the pieces don't fit with each other. Early chapters go into great detail about Benjamin's adventures in Russia, filling almost an entire act of the movie, then by the end, he goes to India, he brushes his teeth on a mountain, he rides his motorcycle, he comes home. That's it, in a matter of seconds? Somebody liked some chapters and didn't like others, and along the way the movie got uneven. It seems to run out of creative steam around the time Cate Blanchett shows up at his doorstep, with 40 minutes left to go but no more ideas about what to do with the time. And I won't even get into how the movie cheats us out of seeing what he should look like at the end of his life. If this sounds like a negative review of what is actually a pretty good movie, it's because I'm disappointed that the movie came so close to greatness and missed it. The first two-thirds of the movie are so good that it was shaping up to be the best film of the year. It has a new spin on the lifelong love story. It's steeped in mannered New Orleans color. It has genuinely funny scenes like the unlucky faith healer. It has some beautiful (if too brief) ballet dancing. Brad Pitt and especially Cate Blanchett deliver good performances, him making Benjamin into more than a cipher, and she creating such a strong love interest that she seems like the lead while being in only half the movie. The makeup and CGI that makes them old, particularly hers in the hospital, is astonishing. Just when this movie was looking like something extraordinary, it creatively went on break and never really came back. I recommend the good movie that it is, but I regret not seeing the great movie that it could have been. –Scott Hardie • January 17 2009, 10:31am EST
Though it's not very good at concealing who the villains are, and its scenes follow the same pattern over and over – hero and heroine arrive at exotic locale, discover clues to an ancient mystery, are chased away by villains – those are problems with the famous book, and the utterly faithful approach mandated by the book's popularity means they're unavoidable. What the movie gets right is its release date: Despite its cerebral subject matter, this is popcorn entertainment perfect for a summer evening, a fun adventure across Europe with a bounty of inspiration for its plot details. There's a reason Hollywood already cashed in on the formula with National Treasure; it's Indiana Jones with emphasis on being a college professor. There's no reason not to see this movie (it's far too make-believe to threaten anybody's faith) and have a great time at it. –Scott Hardie
Christopher Nolan continues to demonstrate how much better Batman stories can be when taken seriously. The crown jewel of the film is Heath Ledger's psychotic, re-imagined Joker, cinema's most hypnotically captivating villain since Hannibal Lecter. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:22am EST
premise: An alien visits Earth in this remake of the 1951 classic, starring Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly. (Every remake is new to someone out there. Spoilers ahead.) Even though that wasn't its point, the original Day the Earth Stood Still inspired one of the core plot elements of so many other alien-visitor stories: Mankind will assume the alien is hostile and attack it rather than try to learn from it. Kathy Bates, an intelligent and compassionate woman (even her villainess in Misery was a caretaker), is the wrong person to lead the gung-ho, the-aliens-are-going-to-kill-us-all charge here, and it contributes to the film's feeling of going through the motions for no particular reason. That's what baffles me about this picture: The filmmakers have been trying to make this movie since 1993, back when its two stars had just done Point Break and The Rocketeer, and what does a decade and a half of planning get them? Some ambiguous mishmash about why the human race has to be exterminated, some more ambiguous mishmash about why the alien changes his mind, and slightly more detail about the tanks and planes mounting the resistance. This is the kind of brainless junk studios crank out hastily to make a buck when they realize they're sitting on the rights to a classic with a famous title they can slap on a poster, not the work of auteurs who have thought long and hard about what the original film meant and how to update its urgent message for a modern world. This film may be dull, especially since it's about the most important day in the history of mankind and all, but it has a few saving graces. Keanu Reeves is perfectly cast as a robot-like alien visitor (did he audition for Gort?), and he finds some interesting physical movements for his character, like the way he scales over a cemetery wall as fluidly as taking a step. Jennifer Connelly and Jaden Smith both deliver pretty well in the big emotional climax they were hired for. The film has a fraction of the sense of awe and wonder it should have about an event of this magnitude, but it still has enough to keep you thinking throughout. With the same material, this could have been a much better movie, but it has just enough to keep you entertained until the end. –Scott Hardie • December 21 2008, 8:57am EST • 1 reply
This five-chapter drama has some of the best acting I've seen in years, profiling five women with harrowing ties to a dead body in a field. Marcia Gay Harden is outstanding as a worried mother with deep wells of compassion. This is a heartbreaking movie. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:37am EST
premise: A young man suspects that sinister forces are toying with him when he realizes that he keeps dying violently, only to wake up in a new life each time, traumatized and amnesiac. [spoilers] Despite its promising premise, this movie offers exactly one (1) life and death for the hero before revealing the nature of the sinister forces, which might make suitable villains for a minor episode of The X Files. From there, it's a slow slog through one walking-speed chase scene after another, as the hero is menaced by pretty tv actresses and CGI smoke effects. And he becomes a superhero at the end, another film in 2008's lamest twist-ending fad. There are a few intriguing moments when the hero enters a new life unprepared, but like the legions of underachieving horror movies before it, this one has no ambition to be better than the paltry sum of its parts. –Scott Hardie • August 17 2008, 6:02pm EST
Scorsese's adaptation of the Chinese Infernal Affairs keeps its dense plot intact but transplants the action to the Irish mob in Boston. What, would the Italian mob in New York have felt too familiar? This is damn good, riveting throughout. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:36am EST
This would-be futuristic thriller blends ideas from Jean-Luc Godard and David Bowie together into a intriguing mishmash of sci-fi philosophizing, but as it limps towards its anticlimactic ending, it seems as if one set of ideas is dragging the other one down. In one corner: Consumer credit is now based on human sexuality, and people only date to boost their buying power. The movie riffs endlessly on this idea, such as when a woman is sentenced to two years of hard labor (teaching high school!) for deflowering a teenager and robbing him of his future buying power, and there discovers a Thoreau-quoting rebellion underway. In the other corner: An alien has come to Earth and assumed human form to find her planet's wayward prince, but if she spends too long in human form, she won't be able to swim back out to sea and return to her home. This story is told with scenes of the alien learning how to talk and how to eat, but it never goes anywhere dramatically and it never makes a point, eventually causing frustration whenever it distracts from the much more interesting political story. Were this alien subplot nixed from the start, this would have been a much tighter, much better production. Perhaps that's a misnomer: This film is so micro-budgeted it evokes the D-grade sci-fi of 1950s where alien outfits were made of tin foil. This is supposedly a future society where everyone is stamped with a bar code on their wrist and undesirables are exiled to a prison colony on the Moon, but people still wear blue jeans and drive Acuras? The illusion is shattered whenever the movie looks around; the narration mentions "on the surface, things still looked the same," because the producers didn't have a budget for anything but ordinary cars, ordinary clothing, ordinary locations, everything from present day. If you can forgive the film its microscopic budget (easy) and sit patiently through its dull alien-visitor material (not so easy), you're in for an intriguing vision of the future of our consumer society. –Scott Hardie
[Minor spoilers.] I've said it before, but no bad movie is quite as painful as a good movie that was within reach of greatness and missed the mark. "The Girl in the Café" is a good movie about a diplomat whose romantic awakening spurs him to conscientious political action. The problem is, it begins as a better movie, a very well-acted romance about this icy civil servant and the patient young woman who begins dethawing him after a chance encounter in a coffee shop. So much of their relationship is communicated in precise nuances of gesture and body language that we watch in fascination as it unfolds, awaiting the big romantic flourish at the end as the man finally reaches the end of his emotional arc and comes vividly to life; instead, the romance gradually fades into international politics about extreme poverty in Africa until the romance is barely even attended to in the final scenes. The characters debate an important international issue, but the movie fails to make the matter nteresting; at one point the young woman points out that all the diplomatic reports would be more compelling if they had pictures of the starving and suffering, and it occurs to us that the same could be said for the movie itself. Like the flipside of John Boorman's recent "In My Country," an outspoken and deeply felt movie about a dull romance that gets in the way of interesting politics, here we have a quiet and intellectual movie about some dull politics that get in the way of an interesting romance. It's hardly impossible to succeed at both, and "The Girl in the Café" comes close. For over an hour it seems to be headed for somewhere really pleasing, but it takes a wrong turn at Reykjavik. –Scott Hardie
premise: A turn-of-the-centry girl must travel to distant lands, discerning friends from enemies, in this stylish fantasy thriller. Plenty of fantasy movies have thrown together unlike elements. The same year as this film, Stardust combined airship pirates with evil witches and talking stars with medieval princes. Theoretically, there's nothing wrong with The Golden Compass tossing together airship cowboys, good witches, truth-telling compasses, animal familiars, intelligent extradimensional dust, talking polar bears, gypsy scholars, robotic wasps, and a mountain of other bullshit. It's that it introduces each new element so arbitrarily and without any sense of wonder; the characters simply accept talking polar bears who are mad about their stolen body armor as if they're all over the place. Superhero movies aren't a bright genre on average, but at least their characters usually remember to show a sense of wonderment at the amazing events they're involved in. These characters have zero personality and zero emotional investment in their plight, which doesn't exactly inspire us to care what happens either. The movie becomes a series of increasingly ridiculous story elements only appealing for their camp value; the filmmakers obviously worked very hard at producing something joylessly devoid of entertainment value. Who in their right mind thought this would launch a franchise? –Scott Hardie • May 30 2008, 7:33pm EST • 3 replies
Sometimes you're just not on a movie's wavelength. I could tell that this 40s-style melodrama about WWII intrigue was well-crafted, but I just didn't find myself interested at all in its outcome or characters. I didn't expect to find these actors boring. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:28am EST
There's a nightmarish anxiety caused by an enemy that cannot be vanquished and will not stop coming after you, but that's the only thing scary about the bugaboos in this fast-track sequel with incredibly low ambitions. Dozens of times, the ghosts simply appear somewhere in the frame with their long black hair and white skin and frozen-scream expressions, and, well, that's pretty much it. You can get the same effect by looking at photos of the Cure. Don't they need to do something? They're emblematic of the whole movie that way. Normally films like this are at least a success with their production design, but not even a Shinto shrine inspires anything more than the same bland, humdrum look. I like Amber Tamblyn's performance even though her character has the emotional presence of a trembling chihuahua, but otherwise this vanilla scarefest is all boo and no bite. –Scott Hardie • October 14 2006, 10:58am EST
OMG! Do NOT see this piece of crap! I love mindless comedy as much as anyone, but this is truly the worst movie I have ever watched. A bunch of guys go out for a bachelor party in Vegas, and nothing hilarious ensues. –Aaron Shurtleff • February 2 2010, 12:26pm EST • 9 replies
If you ignore its reputation and take this on its own terms, this is a very quotable and often hilarious screwball comedy about a ridiculously out-of-control weekend in Vegas. It does right by its heritage, the raunchy slob-fest comedies of the 80s. –Scott Hardie • August 15 2010, 11:15am EST • 1 reply
Sorry, fans: Despite my earnest efforts, none of Douglas Adams's books have held my attention beyond the halfway point. Adams was a writer of many brilliant ideas that tended to burn out quickly. Take the dolphin material that opens this movie: Once you chuckle at the notion that dolphins are imperceptibly more intelligent than humans, all you're left with is the clever wordplay, which could kindly be called funny but not ha-ha funny. Though it includes a fair bit of Adams's narration (he wrote every draft except the final one), the film burns millions of dollars for every minute of screen time, so it understandably has little time for anything that isn't part of the plot, and there's a feeling that everything is rushing by at a breakneck pace, with barely a moment to glance at the many sight gags crammed into the background. Combine this with an unexpected cartoonishness – the shrillness of Joby Talbot's hyperactive score is nearly unbearable in the multiplex – and the film becomes more difficult to like the longer it plays. But like it I did. I haven't laughed this much since the last Jason Schwartzman movie. Adams's cerebral goofiness is in full bloom, and the special effects realize his every impossible conceit, with special credit for the exceptionally well-done sequences illustrating the Hitchhiker's Guide itself. I loved Mos Def's facial contortions during the poetry reading, but as expected, Sam Rockwell stole the whole film in the most plum role, taking Zaphod's conceitedness and irresponsibility to exaggerated extremes. With its toss-everything-in-the-blender approach to comedy, including everything from sight gags to puns to clever wordplay to physical comedy to non sequitors to satire, there's enough here to appeal to every moviegoer no matter their comedic tastes. For such an expensive and eager-to-please movie, I just wish it had been more ha-ha funny. –Scott Hardie
Richard Gere is game for the unflattering biopic of Washington Irving and his fabricated biography of Howard Hughes, and the film is pleasantly interesting, but it neither probes through to Irving's true motivations nor cranks up the tension enough. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:44am EST
Thank you, Roland Suso Richter, for giving the world yet another highly-stylized psychological thriller in which the hero goes back and forth in time, unsure what is real or memory or nightmare, unsure who is really who, trying to prevent the accident that ruined his life. After the modest success of "The Butterfly Effect," "Identity," "Gothika," and other films in the derivative subgenre, I'm surprised Miramax wasn't able to rush this one into theaters for a quick buck. Anyway, if I'm upset with this film, it's because, for a while there, it seemed to be going somewhere. After an intriguing prologue and brilliant opening credits sequence, the film was on the ground running, repeatedly pulling the rug out from under the hero and photographed with a glossy sheen. But its zip gradually faded away, until the limp final scene that provided little plot closure and zero emotional closure. The most interesting scenes of any movie show where the filmmakers' hearts lie, and in this one that's the electric first act. Too bad about the last one. –Scott Hardie
How often is it that Edward Norton is a movie's biggest weakness? A role as a stage magician seems well-suited to his calm, trick-up-his-sleeve confidence, but it's that same quality that makes him a cold fish in scenes of passion. That might be a bigger problem if this film was truly the grand romance promised by the commercials, but it's much more of a densely-plotted mystery and police procedural like an Agatha Christie thriller, and as such it's very entertaining. The characters are likeable and reasonably intelligent, and the stage sequences are fascinating, full of wonder and dazzlement that would enthrall a crowd even today, let alone a century ago. What sells them are the special effects, which are so obviously special effects – it's CGI intentionally made to look just a little unreal, as the illusions would seem to their audience. The mystery behind the plot isn't much of one, but movies like this can excel at style and spectacle, and sometimes that's enough. It's a fun mystery and well worth renting. –Scott Hardie • October 31 2006, 11:38pm EST
Though its emotions never come all the way into focus – Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn seem to internalize their characters' grief until there's little none left to see – this thriller is every bit the masterful production guaranteed by its pedigree and promotion. Having two recent Oscar winners in the lead roles can help: Penn does a chivalrous, urbane variation on his usual weary tough-guy, while Kidman convincingly suggests that her character could be either a genuine victim surrounded by conspiracy or the liar at the heart of it, a traditional noir role made unusually savvy and convincing by one of the best actresses currently working. The efforts of the actors are lent invaluable aid by the real United Nations building, which gives the film such a sensation of realism that we forget the characters are archetypes and come to care, even deeply, about the outcome of their tale. For me, by the time Kidman faced a critical choice in the third act, the feelings and motivations on both sides of the issue were so clear that I felt myself just as torn as she, and I realized the film had succeeded in creating a true three-dimensional moral dilemma. It would have been nice if the African nation in the film had been a real one to match the real UN building (what a letdown when the narration mournfully reads off the names of "slaughtered innocents" and we can only think they're not real people), but the politics are not truly central anyway: This is not a film about grief, it's a film about what grief can do to the people who bear it. That such a useful post-9/11 subject comes in the form of a captivating and expertly-made thriller is icing on the cake. –Scott Hardie
[Spoilers!] Considering the wealth of story-telling possibilities they allow, it's a shame so many time-travel movies wind up with the same three or four plotlines. I'm sure that's due to the usual restrictions of making art this expensive, but it's no less disappointing when an idiosyncratic and sharply acted thriller like this succombs to the conventional necessities of its budget. Adrien Brody and a grunged-out Keira Knightley suggest the depth of their bond after an incident that neither can forget, and there's an urgency to their romance that most films are simply not able to muster. I even appreciated the firm sense of timing John Maybury was able to bring to the film from his music-video background, making the hallucinations trippy but not over-the-top, and inventing an end-credits animation so fascinating it gets its own explanatory bonus feature on the DVD. But these strengths are diluted by a deadened atmosphere, as if the film dreads its mandatory ending and is stalling for time until then. It's a mishmash with some uncommon qualities that I'd like to recommend, but on the whole it's too much of a long, limp letdown for me to do that. –Scott Hardie
premise: A documentary follows the quest for the world record high score for 1982 arcade game Donkey Kong and the quirky competitors pursuing it. Following in the tradition of competitive-subculture documentaries like Word Wars and Spellbound, this cult favorite finds plenty of weird, interesting characters as it follows the world champions of Donkey Kong in their struggle to top each other. The difference is that Scrabble tournaments and spelling bees have audiences; nobody seems interested in what these men accomplish besides the handful of other arcade high-score enthusiasts around them. It's a lonely, unhealthy pursuit, and the most reward any of them get out of it is 15 minutes of fame in a documentary that makes them look weird. Is it any surprise that the community rallies around their established champion? They're such a tiny subculture that they can't bear the disruption that a fresh outsider might bring. Unsurprisingly, King of Kong plays loose with the facts in order to tell its story, but it carries a number of potent messages about unfair competition and unhealthy obsessions without spelling any of them out, and it has a number of funny sequences. You don't have to be a fan of classic video games to enjoy this movie, but it does help to have been on the outside of a clique, looking in. –Scott Hardie • March 24 2008, 9:41pm EST
Supremely poignant and intimate story of family, culture, pride, friendship and betrayal, as well as an exposition of the troubled political climate and history of Afghanistan. To borrow from another of the author's titles: a thousand splendid tears. –Amy Austin • August 25 2009, 6:30pm EST • 2 replies
This movie is as good-looking but devoid of real feeling as its star Keanu Reeves, semi-drowsily going through the motions of its convoluted romance plot. The setting is pretty, at least, and it's good to see these stars together on-screen again. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:44am EST
Drawn-out killing scenes and a rape scene that lasted entirely too long. As the credits rolled, I was sick to my stomach. How did Mari's brother die? Why was Krug in jail? There's something to be said for character development, even in a horror film. –Erik Bates • October 4 2009, 11:53am EST
We don't really need a drama to educate us that the Stasi were corrupt and good people suffered in East Germany, but this one mines history for an effective thriller about a cold officer forced to choose between duty and justice in his surveillance job. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:28am EST
A professor tells his colleagues that he is a caveman who has survived to the present day. They question his story, and in the process debate biology, history, philosophy, and religion. That's the whole movie. What a great concept, if the ideas and performances can back it up, and they do. The late Star Trek writer Jerome Bixby made this script his life's work, and it's packed with his considered thoughts on a wide variety of subjects. It's also packed with Star Trek actors, which might be how it wound up in my Netflix queue in the first place. It's very thought-provoking, although possibly insulting depending on your religious beliefs. It's the best movie I've seen in some time now. –Scott Hardie • March 31 2012, 7:55pm EST • 1 reply
This offbeat comedy sends up military "intelligence" and New Age quackery with uneven success. It has a terrific cast and crack timing, but its weakness is an anticlimactic ending. The whole movie feels like a big buildup to a punchline that never comes. –Scott Hardie • November 7 2009, 12:22am EST • 2 replies
Frank Darabont strikes out on his fourth King adaptation, a routine horror film that misses ample opportunity for social commentary. Worst is the over-the-top ending that has nothing to do with the original story and punishes you for caring what happens. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:41am EST
The ironic slant of the satirical newspaper is easy to misunderstand, which kept this from its planned release years ago, but it's a treat for Onion fans. It follows recognizable situations through to their logical conclusions, with hilarious results. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:43am EST
Guillermo del Toro produced this film and mentored its director, and it feels very much like his Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone, but more of a pure ghost story. It's insanely tense stuff, two hours of white-knuckled suspense. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:47am EST
I didn't bring to this movie any love for the stage version because I've never seen it, but apparently I still thought better of it than most critics. It has an unmatched extravagance of design; every shot and every square foot of the set are filled with detail. One critic complained that a lot of art direction doesn't equal good art direction, but I liked what I saw and I was grateful that they piled on so much detail, crafting one gorgeous vision after another, because it gave me something to enjoy during Andrew Lloyd Webber's middling songs. By the end of the film I had grown to like them, but their schizophrenic lack of structure and rhyme scheme, changing melodies at whim, became so distracting that I wound up ignoring most of them. Gerard Butler is adequate as the Phantom (if too young and handsome), while Emmy Russom uses her lifetime of opera performance to great effect as Christine, carrying the production on her capable shoulders at only 16 years of age. Joel Schumacher hasn't always delivered quality films, but he is an undeniable master of the complicated technical aspects of film production, and here he marshals an exquisite set and talented cast into a fine performance of a less-than-fine musical. It's all window dressing, but what amazing window dressing it is. –Scott Hardie
One of Nolan's lesser mindfucks, this one deserves its cult following for its period atmosphere and good performances by Bale and Jackman. But it fails to say anything with its convoluted revenge story, and its explanation of the magic tricks is a cheat. –Scott Hardie • March 28 2011, 11:13pm EST
Full of New Orleans backwoods stereotypes, voodoo, and jazz, this animated production lacks in likeable characters. It's redeemed by a pleasant musical score but Disney repeats the dead parent theme again. Not their best effort. –Steve West • December 12 2009, 12:43pm EST
Is it possible that "Aliens" has ruined us for strong maternal heroes? After figuring out Samara's secret in the original film, Rachel should no longer become terrified by her presence, and regard her as a predator to be fought off, especially when Samara threatens her son. I don't necessarily buy Rachel's transformation from a lousy, mostly-absent mother in "The Ring" into Suzie Homemaker in the sequel (which is wise to build a plot point on how her son calls her by her first name), but taken as the conceit of the film that Rachel now feels a push to protect her son, it's unsatisfying and downright disappointing to see her become nearly petrified at the alarming signs of Samara's interest in him and each new corpse that she produces. It's telling that "The Ring Two" comes most alive when it finally uses the one F-word granted by its PG13 rating, in a moment of maternal toughness that we've been waiting for Rachel to flash for the entire film. More scenes like that one and this film might have been something interesting, instead of the drab, languid mess that it is. Too many scenes drag on far beyond their ability to make a point, particularly when Rachel comes home to find her son watching tv; the film circles around that nap-inducing slog for what seems like an eternity before something finally happens. I hesitate to charge any film with the dreaded "b" word (boring), but these filmmakers have made it easy for me, by underestimating the level of interest the audience can maintain in these hollow ciphers of protagonists. There's watchable material here, along with a chilling Hans Zimmer score and some impressive technical effects, but they're lost in a sea of cold, gray nothingness. Pretentiousness isn't doing the horror genre any favors. –Scott Hardie
Ed Burns broods grimly in this moody murder investigation, like The X Files without the supernatural. It's a fairly weak indie movie, but it does stir feeling for its wounded hero, and the photography of snowbound Nova Scotia is haunting. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:46am EST
Is it possible to consider this film any other way than as a fan of The Simpsons? It begins the fanservice even before the studio bumper is over. So many of us have loved the show at one time or another that the movie arrives in your hometown theater with the cultural goodwill of a visiting wartime president. Much like the writing-staff alumni that made this film, it unites us; the newspapers could proclaim, "Today, we are all Springfieldians." But is it funny? It can't live up to the glory years that broke so much ground (what can?), but for a series in its eighteenth year, this is some pretty triumphant comedy. It riffs tirelessly on pop culture, American foibles, its own rich characters, and general weirdness, with so many different comedic styles that no one can't find something to laugh about. Some movies never find their comedic center and give you the impression they're throwing every joke at the screen in desperation; The Simpsons has such a massive comedic center that these many varied styles bounce around inside it comfortably. Like any good movie arriving at the end of a long trail of hype, it suffers from being too short. Eighteen years they worked on this, and they couldn't crack a 90-minute running time? But it's eighty-seven terrific minutes while it lasts, a true comedy for everyone. Let's hope it's not 2025 when we see the next one. –Scott Hardie • September 11 2007, 1:20am EST
By now, the name of screenwriter Ehren Kruger in the credits all but guarantees a smarmy, mediocre script that seems to elbow you constantly to point out how clever it is. This is the hack who produced such unctuous let-downs as "Scream 3," "Reindeer Games," "Arlington Road," and the two "Ring" movies, all of which were so wrapped up in the ingenuity of their unguessable twist endings that they saw nothing wrong with their zero-dimensional characters and chasmal plot holes. Cursed with the same weaknesses as its forebears, "The Skeleton Key" aspires to better itself by borrowing local color from New Orleans and building an atmosphere of mounting dread, but it fails at both attempts. The movie simply doesn't know how to make its audience care what happens, especially about its dim-bulb protagonist as she stumbles her way through a mystery that Nancy Drew would have solved in the first act. It's mediocre filmmaking based on a mediocre script, and only the set designers and sound editors seem to make any effort to transcend the material. There's simply no compelling reason to see this competent but empty waste of time unless you're a sucker for any ghost story set in the Big Easy (like I was). –Scott Hardie
All of the pieces are here for a really good drama, with two actors at the top of their game. But the movie, presenting a bad case of "Hollywood crazy," never really takes off beyond bland ruminations about friendship. There's some great music, though. –Scott Hardie • October 1 2009, 8:29pm EST
The bar has been raised for children's fantasy films ever since Harry Potter came along, and this winning entertainment is up to the challenge, delivering a fleet-footed adventure with appealing actors as the young leads. It's minor but a lot of fun. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:32am EST
The lives of an Israeli family are explored, as a young woman prepares for her arranged marriage to an actor from Syria. I cannot recommend this movie highly enough. The characters are well played, and it gives some insight into life in this area. –Aaron Shurtleff • April 7 2009, 9:53am EST
[excerpted from Ten Best Films feature] Hell exists on Earth and Tommy Lee Jones evokes it perfectly in his first feature film, as his characters traverse a vast, scorching stretch of southern Texan wasteland with only enough water and shoes for one of them. The film is at times funny and quirky, but this epic journey into a desert inferno takes it to a whole different level, where a man careless towards others learns how careless the universe can be towards him. Depending on your outlook, that lesson might inspire you to laughs or to tears (or both), but either way the film can be deeply moving. It's a statement of personal values – namely, that a life has meaning when you give it one – by Jones, a star who has always exuded integrity and now invests his film with it. His unpredictable tale gives us funny characters, a harrowing journey over the Mexican border, and a hell of a lot to think about. –Scott Hardie • March 18 2007, 9:39pm EST
Audrey NIffenegger wrote this as a novel because it was such a big story. The filmmakers lacked that wisdom and raced through his (not her?) lifetime in under two hours. It's a good romance, with a few moving scenes, but it goes by too much like a blur. –Scott Hardie • November 7 2009, 7:55pm EST
If Joan Allen brings so much focus and life to bit parts in commercial films, it's no wonder she's capable of carrying an indie movie on her shoulders when the lead role is written specifically for her. Just as the blend of malaise, anger and bemusement fit Kevin Spacey like a glove in "American Beauty," so does this role play precisely to Allen's strengths: A woman betrayed and simmering and unsure of her future and blunt about her needs, while still maintaining the air of elegance and poise that define her. Allen is capable of sharpening her insults with the same ice-cold cruelty as Spacey, and equally capable of suggesting the depths of despair and pride that her self-awareness sometimes brings her, but the movie's poor release date and her lack of a Y chromosome will keep her from getting the Oscar that Spacey won and she deserves. She's one of the best actresses working today, and this film deserves to be seen simply to appreciate the perfect precision of her performance. There are times when the film is magical, when Costner's jocular supporting character demonstrates casual charm or when one of the daughters' crises brings a moment of pathos to the production. But the gifts of all six primary actors are betrayed by the film's recurring pretentiousness, when it includes scenes that it thinks are artful or whimsical but produce the sensation of your bumper car being hit from behind. Its most egregious example comes when the youngest daughter's gay best friend (already an indie-film red flag) decides to prove he's not scared of bungee jumping, and his attempt sends him crashing through the living room windows; Allen tries in vain to show frustration but the other actors are told to laugh spontaneously at the preciousness of the moment, and you just want to gag at the film shoving its artfulness down your throat. Had a half-dozen scenes like this wound up among their deservedly deleted brethren on the DVD, the rest of the film would have been one of the best of 2005, for the strength and intelligence and clarity it otherwise possesses. Allen's fantasy about the obnoxious radio producer is hilarious, and the third-act plot twist is an unexpected delight, not the shameless cheat that most critics charged. This is a fine film even when it gets in its own way, and it's a must-rent for any lover of good drama or admirer of Joan Allen. –Scott Hardie
The genre is called "romantic comedy;" this film succeeded fairly well at the romance but didn't seem to know how to pull off the comedy. Debra Messing has some of the sharpest comic timing on television right now, so it's a rare sight to watch her bungle punchlines and strain unconvincingly with pratfalls. I hate to say it, but after seeing this film, I can't help but question her talent. As Grace Adler, she works in a deep groove of irony, so her acting can only be truly appreciated on a technical level. But in "The Wedding Date," she is tasked with creating a three-dimensional woman for whom the audience is supposed to develop strong sympathy, and she's out of her league. The further we get from Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan's glory days, the easier it becomes to appreciate how thoroughly they mastered the genre. A film that seems to go about everything the wrong way deserves some left-handed compliments. It overcomes a totally unbelieveable setup with the sheer charisma of its two leads; Dermot Mulroney plays a gigolo who doesn't need the money and just happens to have an Ivy League education, and somehow makes him seem like one of the most down-to-earth, not to mention watchable, characters in the movie. Photographer Oliver Curtis is determined to bring soft-focus back into vogue (or fail trying), and Holland Taylor is one of very few actresses who can pull off the lines she says here, which are the kinds of things that no mother would ever announce about one of her daughters. If you're looking for a date movie, you're probably better off with "Hitch" or even "Sideways," but if you wind up in the theater for this movie, that wouldn't be so bad. –Scott Hardie
premise: Picking up six years after the tv series ended, the FBI lures back Mulder & Scully to help solve the disappearance of one of their own after a self-professed psychic gives the case a paranormal angle. X Files fans have never quite forgiven the series for its unresolved ending (though a few of us liked it that way), and following up six years later with a feature film that ignores the main storyline isn't a way to reward their patience. It doesn't help that the film is so dour and joyless, almost completely lacking adventure and a sense of humor, choosing instead a weighty morality play about how ethical it is to prolong a life by unnatural means, with its characters in a fog of gloom as they wade through the mystery. This feels like a season-seven misfire, accomplishing a lot with its stylish photography and moody atmosphere, but not terribly entertaining. It doesn't do much to please series fans, and the non-initiated will find it a gloomy and unusual thriller, so enjoy it for what it is and hope that the truer "ending" will someday come. –Scott Hardie • July 29 2008, 12:22am EST • 3 replies
Action director Chan-wook Park returns with a dark drama about a priest horrified to have become a vampire. Like his best work, it probes deeply into human nature and features some thrilling photography, but it's sometimes hampered by shrill overacting. –Scott Hardie • November 29 2009, 6:38pm EST
Burton has occasionally faltered when venturing into other filmmakers’ territory, but he rules his home turf like no one else in the business, crafting one magical masterpiece after another with such consistency that his name now gets stamped on the title frame like a brand identity. This spiritual sequel to —The Nightmare Before Christmas” was co-directed by Burton and shares both his Gothic, Expressionist aesthetic and the charming, befuddled everyman who is his usual hero, but the difficulty of making it in traditional claymation was apparently too much of a burden for the filmmakers to bear, because it ends abruptly and wastes no precious seconds deviating from the simple plot. Why create such an enchanting world in a unique physical dimension and spend so little time there? The film does inspire laughs with some great sight gags, and damned if its little clay puppets don’t tug a heartstring or two, but ultimately the film is just too short to satisfy. –Scott Hardie
[Spoilers ahead.] It's a gory slasher-film remake from Tobe Hooper: If that information makes it sound appealing, you'll probably like it more than I did. It's not the killings that I minded, it's that they seemed disconnected from the rest of the movie. As the mystery centered on the building itself, I came to suspect the man who built it, which alas, that was just a red herring. Too bad, since it would have made a lot more sense than the villain who arrives out of left field with no explanation as to his identity or how he got there. Maybe they're saving that information for a sequel, but who cares enough to wait and find out? It's fairly obvious that Hooper and his creative team are trying to fashion a new horror villain for the pop-cultural pantheon, stealing elements of his character from the greats who came before him, but I've seen scarier monsters on boxes of children's cereal. The movie didn't miss every mark. I loved how the camera was frequently off-center in a shot, maintaining constant tension because of the expectation that something is going to jump into the empty space in the frame. And whatever location they found was a great one; this rathole is even dingier and more depressing than the much-vaunted set of "Dark Water." But the movie has a low-budget feel in a bad way (cartoonishly squishy sound effects during the kill scenes) and the killer defies all reason, especially with a body count that high over that long a period of time and never being suspected let alone caught. I appreciated the film's attempts at being something better than it was, such as thematically tying the young women's deaths to the way Hollywood chews up and spits out so many young actresses, but ultimately it was just another ho-hum slasher flick with a lousy script and an uninteresting villain. –Scott Hardie
By now the James Bond formula has become so rote that writers can apparently reproduce it in their sleep, which would explain this movie. There's the unflabbably cool hero and his European sports cars and fine attire, with the good woman and the bad woman dueling for his affections, and the colorful villain who combines the mad scientist with the cold strategist. Add a tacky musical number over the opening credits and you don't even need the Broccoli family. Jason Statham is every bit as electric a lead actor as Pierce Brosnan, but that may be the film's only strength; not even Bond movies with their corny one-liners and plastic sex kittens are this downright stupid. With dialogue so terrible that not one word need be changed to spoof it ("I'm afraid your flight's been canceled." "I'm afraid you've been canceled!"), the film contains not one single convincing moment between plausible adult characters; everyone is a brain-dead action figure and/or an ugly ethnic caricature. Perhaps the self-admitted lack of wit befits the film's orgy of physically impossible action scenes, but it makes the cartoonish original film look like a model of naturalism. The action scenes themselves are mostly satisfying, including a third-act battle that evokes Jackie Chan's show-stopping gang battle in "Rumble in the Bronx," as Statham improvises weapons out of fire hoses and pieces of scaffolding, but even this high point has no sense of pacing or blocking, becoming dizzying where Chan was dazzling. You'll find your action-spectacle fix in "Transporter 2" if that's what you're after, but you'll have to sit through wince-inducing dialogue and an avalanche of tired genre conventions to get it. (Note: This movie, with its close-up cinematography and B-movie plotline, might play a lot better on DVD than in theaters.) –Scott Hardie
premise: An American couple gets caught up in drug-trafficking intrigue while taking the Trans-Siberian railroad across Russia. Maybe if I had seen this movie in a different mood or with lowered expectations, I would have appreciated it more. It's beautifully shot, capturing the majestic tranquility of the Siberian winter (or is it summer?), and the acting is superb. But frankly, I found it dull as hell. It takes forever to begin introducing thriller elements, and the plot twists are all so carefully foreshadowed that they seem patently obvious when they arrive. Of course none of the characters are quite what they seem, and yet they are exactly what they seem under the surface, and what always happens in movies like this happens. The critics must have seen something in it that I didn't, because for one of the best-reviewed thrillers of this year, this was a real let-down. –Scott Hardie • January 4 2009, 4:45pm EST
Ben Stiller hasn't been funny in years, and keeps hoping big ideas can save him from mediocrity. Here he lampoons clueless, un-self-aware hotshot filmmakers by being one. Robert Downey Jr. is great, but he can't carry this sloppy mess by himself. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:25am EST
Another short film made from Watchmen leftovers, this fake documentary explores the uninteresting 1940s superheroes from the novel's backstory. It frequently gets in its own way with tv newsmagazine verisimilitude, often distracting from itself. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:24am EST
This tale of a Mexican boy who sneaks across the border to find his mother in Los Angeles loses points for being predictable and too overtly political, but it has scenes with real heart and its characters feel real. It's not great but worth a rental. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:25am EST
premise: Diane Lane plays an FBI cyber-crimes investigator on the trail of a murderous, "untraceable" web site. I don't necessarily mind a movie that criticizes America's lust for graphic bloodshed with two hours of graphic bloodshed; Natural Born Killers did it very well a decade ago. But I do mind a movie that takes such a bare-bones approach to it, providing a flimsy motive for its villain and no sympathy for its heroine beyond Diane Lane's natural likeability. Maybe the film could have worked better by taking place entirely on the web, a gimmick that would have echoed co-star Colin Hanks's turn in Alone with Her last year, or by showing many more of the people who choose to log into such a disturbing site, instead of one skateboarder and a chorus of obscene morons posting comments. Instead, it dramatizes the search for a moralizing killer through the perspective of a law enforcement agent who, though disgusted by his methods, registers virtually no opinion of his message. Without a proper vessel for its ideas, the film becomes an empty torture-porn knockoff with little entertainment value. The plot turns are telegraphed well in advance, the killer's abilities exceed the suspension of disbelief, the archetypical clueless police-chief character is as dumb as ever, and the surprises are revealed with little ceremony, such as the killer's identity. This movie is worse than a thriller-by-numbers, because it can't even follow the numbers correctly. It gets points for a semi-plausible explanation of how a website could be made untraceable, and throws them away with such careless errors as a hacked car computer and a desktop computer that can serve tens of millions of hits in a minute. To paraphrase its chief idiot, any American who views this movie is an accomplice to crap. –Scott Hardie • February 6 2008, 11:25pm EST • 4 replies
Like WALL-E, this feels made for fans of smart, offbeat animation first and kids second. It's full of lively visual design and packs a powerful emotional prologue. Who expects the talking animals to be the best part of a great Disney movie? –Scott Hardie • May 30 2009, 6:12pm EST
This quick-witted 2009 indie drama had perfect timing, being about finding your soul amidst corporate downsizing. George Clooney and Vera Farmiga are possessed of superhuman charm and use it. It has a somewhat predictable story, until the bold ending. –Scott Hardie • April 10 2010, 12:46pm EST
Revered masters of sketch comedy, the UCB crew gets to show off their lightning-quick timing and groupthink in this recording of their live show. Funnier and sharper than their Comedy Central series, this is some hilarious 90-minute improv by solid pros. –Scott Hardie • August 30 2009, 2:06pm EST
How many big-budget spectacles get more interesting the longer they run? The Wachowski brothers' talky, overly cerebral approach to action filmmaking has its fans and detractors, who will love and loathe this film in predictable proportions, but here they put their big brains behind a story that's actually about something other than itself. Watching V's masterful plan unfold is a pleasure if you're not familiar with the source, and the spirited allusions to Guy Fawkes and political theory grant a deft touch to what have could have been a heavy film. Because its terrorist hero is never wrong, it would not seem to want audiences to think about its subject, but I think it does: It treats V with complete moral rightness because our society treats terrorists with complete moral wrongness, the only way to challenge our preconceived notions about the certainty of our values. Would we still root for V if the film were the same but took place in America? If the villain were named President Bush and looked just like him? Suddenly the patriots and the principled would be divided, exposing our hypocrises; liberals who claim to love America would root for her corrupt government's overthrow, and conservatives who claim to despise moral relativity would shift allegiance to a character depending on whose government he was blowing up. This is a lot to think about for those viewers who just want some pretty explosions, but the movie will satisfy that demographic just as well as it flatters our inner poli-sci major. I'd be inclined to like it better if it didn't have a number of technical irritations, chiefly the poor sound editing by Ben Barker (or maybe just the speaker system at the theater where I saw it). Several critical pieces of dialogue, including a threat whispered from V to an enemy, were virtually inaudible underneath Dario Marianelli's score and the ambient sound. But the film is more for the eyes than the ears anyway, with the art direction standing tall on the shoulders of previous gothic-deco comic adaptations before it, and excellent final work from the late cinematographer Adrian Biddle. I loved the visual boldness of the film that extended even to its gorgeous poster. It's a striking, challenging film for anyone who likes their action films brainy. –Scott Hardie
It's not a new story in Hollywood, the old lech pursuing the young maiden, both of them revealing hidden dimensions as the story turns. What makes this movie so good is Peter O'Toole's charm and exuberance. This is man you'd like to spend two hours with. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:41am EST
Expounding on a theme over and over is not the same thing as being deep about it. Pedro Almódovar is rightly praised for his vivid photography and his sensitivity to women's issues, but unless I was just on the wrong wavelength, his tone is all wrong. The characters greet some shocking developments with minimal reaction, and tension and humor miss their mark. Things pick up better in the second half, but even then, the "surprising" revelations are not exactly hard to predict. –Scott Hardie • June 17 2007, 10:39am EST
premise: Keri Russel stars in this bittersweet comedy that reminds when life makes lemons, make lemonade. Or rather, lemon meringue pie. If you saw and liked Juno but could do without the copious sass, you'll really be charmed by Waitress. Keri Russel plays Jenna, a small town waitress who is rather gifted when it comes to making pie, but that is about the only happy thing in her life. She hates her controlling idiot husband and has been saving her tips for the day when she can leave him. However there is a barrier at every turn, especially when she finds out that she is pregnant. This really is a movie about women, but it's real underlying themes are universal. It celebrates life's little joys, amid the ups and downs and does so in a comical way. It's female characters are working class heroines. One living with a controlling self absorbed husband who she has no love for. Another with a bed ridden crippled husband who she is taking care of. The third is single and lonely. Whenever Jenna is feeling a strong emotion, be it diappointment, joy, sensuality, she closes her eyes and dreams up a new pie recipe to fit her feelings, a running symbol througout the movie which is quite charming. Which is probably what I liked so much about this film. It doesn't over complicate. It's characters prove that artists exsist everywhere, even if the medium is mundane and work related. The pie is an outlet for expression in a world where she doesn't have much of an option to express herself in other ways. And that art, be it born from pain or joy, can bring happiness to others. However this movie isn't simply about existence, there is a larger theme as well..... Spoilers ahead!, skip to last paragraph... The ending was perfect for the story line. Going through the whole movie just wanting happiness for herself for a change and not caring for the baby growing inside her, Jenna gets a nice surprise when she realizes what she actually wants and realizes her true path to happiness in the end. It's also a good answer to the movie's other theme, that the main 3 women (representing basic personality outlines that all women can pare themselves down and fit into) judge their self worth based on what men think of them or feel about them. The idea that all women need a man in their life to love them, or make them feel sexy, or notice them. A theme that is treated in an unbiased fashion in both negative and positive lights. Seeing the main character finally choosing to love herself first, despite how the two men in her life made her feel during the duration of the film, makes for a good lesson taught and buttons up the story as sweetly as the symbolic pies throughout. /end spoilers It would seem by the front cover that this is a chic flick directed at groups of women sitting around eating popcorn together and crying but it really is a story about respecting self and finding self worth. For the male characters struggle with this same basic problem even if they aren't the main focus. Again, making it universal. I recommend it to any gender. –Jackie Mason • January 30 2009, 11:35am EST
[excerpted from Ten Best Films feature] I don't know Johnny Cash, but I do know an actor playing Johnny Cash very well. Joaquin Phoenix doesn't just transform himself into the beloved singer, he plays the role with subtle clues that help us understand the man better. Arguably the most crucial scene in the movie is Cash's audition for Sam Phillips, where he uneasily mumbles through hymns until Phillips convinces him to play one of his own songs, and in three minutes he changes from a simpering, self-ashamed amateur to a confident, sexy, deep-voiced pro. It's that kind of close-up look at the making of a legend that fuels biopic musicals like this, and though this one suffers from a bad case of "Behind the Music"-itis (an overemphasis on the drugs & booze that seemed like fairly minor parts of his life), it's just as riveting as any expose of a complicated and charismatic celebrity. And it benefits from having some of the best damn music in any film this decade. –Scott Hardie • September 24 2006, 9:22pm EST
premise: Garbage collecting robot uncovers plant that sends signal to humans, who have abandoned the planet, to return. So I take the girls to the AMC Theater for the monthly showing of a movie specifically for autistic children. The movie itself is not for autistic children but the theater is adapted for the population. The lights are dimmed but not darkened. The sound is lower. There are no previews. The kids often display rocking behavior and are often noisy. This distracts patrons of regular showings when your kid is the only one doing it and, in fact, is what started these special showings in the first place. A woman and her autistic child were actually thrown out of a theater because her child was considered disruptive. This audience is full of these types of kids and the parents are obviously tolerant. Thank you AMC and its nationwide campaign to set aside these times for special shows. As for the movie, Wall-E was a drag for me. Like watching a silent movie with no dialogue cards. The only voice coming from Fred Willard for the most part. I don’t get emotionally attached to cartoon robots regardless of how high they might rate in the cuteness factor. The love interest in the sleek Jolie-esque robot, Eve, kinda bummed me out when she turned out to be such a bitch. The Jabba humans were largely unlikable, hedonistic blobs of pudding and the concept of a ruined Earth incapable of sustaining life doesn’t fit with my own views of apocalyptic Earth. A roach survives! Hah! I get jokes. Not funny. This supposedly takes place 700 years after Earth abandonment yet we see only one roach! What has it been eating for 700 years? Where are all the other robots for that matter? Suspension of belief for a cartoon, I understand. But there seems to be a serious ecological message attempting to be sent here. If you’re offering a serious point, you need to back it up with facts not just fantasy. Too harsh? Perhaps. But from my end of the aisle, the movie just didn’t deliver. My daughters will still want a copy and I’ll be sure to get it. But it’s destined to gather dust next to their copy of Fox and the Hound. –Steve West • November 15 2008, 7:37pm EST
The recent Pixar films are hit-or-miss depending on your personal tastes. WALL-E turned some people off with its lack of dialogue and unpromising premise, but I loved its sense of joy in the possibilities of animation. I watched this with a grin. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:25am EST • 1 reply
The latest short film in the series doesn't achieve the spirited zaniness of The Wrong Trousers, but it tries. The sight gags provide a little fun, and it's nice to see the old pair again after all these years. –Scott Hardie • June 18 2011, 11:45pm EST
Zach Snider's ultra-faithful adaptation of the legendary graphic novel is nearly perfect, fascinating for scene after scene until the overlong final confrontation. It keeps the rich character development and complex themes of Alan Moore's masterwork. –Scott Hardie • April 7 2009, 1:20am EST • 3 replies
If the producer credit for Brian Robbins isn't sufficient warning, let me be clear: This movie is another dumbass two-hour sitcom episode trying too hard to convince you it's funny, the sort Hollywood lazily tosses out every spring starring formerly well-regarded stars now available at cut-rate salaries (Marisa Tomei, William H. Macy, Ray Liotta) and awkwardly cramming a life lesson into each character's lame-brained arc because their IQ has nowhere to go but up. To be more specific, Wild Hogs pretends its a biker comedy for suburban dads, but it's actually targeted squarely at women, because in his heart no man is interested in seeng a cutesy furtive romance stalled by a stammering loser's nerves, or jokes about how a husband and father is so emasculated that he "hilariously" chokes after gulping down too much mashed potatoes and gravy in a feeble attempt to prove his manhood, or (I swear I'm not making this up) a scene set in Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Yeah, this movie was made for guys. Totally. –Scott Hardie • June 17 2007, 11:05am EST
premise: The daughter of an eccentric novelist returns home to collect his love letters to his late wife so she can sell them. I can understand Will Ferrell sticking his toe into the indie-drama waters to see if there's a future career for him beyond zany comedies, but he's chosen a particular frigid pond to try it. This bleak little character movie is joyless and mostly actionless, which wouldn't be a problem if it were halfway good. Ed Harris seems cramped in his portrayal of an aging eccentric, caged in by the awkward character, while Zooey Deschanel does her best to act at home in a despicable heroine who permanently extinguishes audience sympathy with an act of animal cruelty early in the film. When Ferrell gets a big showy scene near the end, it seems way out of character. Writer-director Adam Rapp has a lot he wants to say about makeshift families and the way we allow ourselves to suffer quietly rather than reach out, but he hasn't figured out how to say it in a way that anybody would want to hear. –Scott Hardie • December 15 2007, 10:24am EST
[Vague ending spoilers ahead.] You know that feeling you get when you're disappointed by a movie that extends a tv show franchise, like say Star Trek, when you wonder why you just paid ten bucks to see something you usually see for free in your living room? That's the problem with a series: Unless they pull out all the stops to make a great entertainment, you know they're just phoning it in because the next installment is inevitable. The Last Stand has been marketed as the final X-Men film but there's approximately zero people who believe it; the film has been a big success and most of the cast is enthusiastic about returning again. (As for Halle Berry, she shouldn't let the screen door smack her ass on the way out.) The effect of knowing it's just another link in the chain is that there's no reason to care. The two big plot developments of the picture are both erased with a big ol' slap of the reset button at the end. The actors sleep through their performances and are given interchangeable lines so it doesn't matter anyway. The best script innovation I can think of is that both Angel and Beast are given complete arcs with endings, so they can sit out the next picture without wondering like we now must with Nightcrawler. I don't want a lot from an X-Men movie, but one thing I do want is that it stays true to the characters. That shouldn't hard; each only has one dimension anyway. But with the exception of a brief fight in the woods, Wolverine here behaves like somebody's dad on a sitcom, warm and fuzzy and completely devoid of his charming gruffness. Magneto flies wildly out of character, cold-dissing one fallen comrade and making such a slow, grand entrance into the final battle that UN peacekeepers could be dispatched from other continents in time to stop him before he arrives. (Speaking of Magneto, can we please get a different villain already? The Batman movies would be awfully boring if he just kept facing the Joker over and over.) I'm being hard on the movie because Bryan Singer made it look so easy the first two times. The studio wanted their big summer blockbuster and they got it, but there's nobody piloting the ship into more interesting territory. That said, for what it is, it's got some great special effects, fun action scenes, and some good jokes (especially from Beast), and the writers at least had the sense to give us character showdowns that make sense, like Iceman vs. Pyro and Juggernaut vs. Shadowcat. There were fifty people in the makeup department, so I don't know who to credit for the genuinely frightening look of Dark Phoenix, but whoever it was did a great job. John Powell's stylish pseudomilitary score even made an impression amid the chaos. 20th Century Fox is definitely going to make another sequel – they're the real juggernaut, bitch – but I hope they get someone like Bryan Singer who's going to give a damn whether it's done well or merely done. –Scott Hardie • August 13 2006, 6:36pm EST • 1 reply
I found this more fun than X2, and easier to follow. It is true, I am pretty dumb about movies, and I found X2 confusing. But X3 was pretty cool. A funny note: Darrell and I didn't know Kelsey Grammer was playing Beast and somehow we got through the entire movie without becoming aware of this fact. Upon seeing his name in the ending credits, we reversed back to a scene near his introduction and laughed wondering how in the world we could have missed that. I mean it is completely obvious, especially if you don't look at the guy :P. A TINY SPOILER: if this was "The Last Stand" then why do we need that last 2 seconds before the credits? Oh yeah... and a quick web search indicates that we missed more justification for a sequel by not watching to the end of the credits. EDIT: Sorry,. this has been a shameless attempt to get $R. I did wanna talk about the movie but my uninformed opinion is pretty worthless when we already have Scott's review. –Denise Sawicki • August 8 2007, 7:59am EST
A nifty independant superhero flick that has lots of comedy. Sort of like Spider-man meets Podpeople -only without a radioactive spider and with a cosplayer school teacher longing for excitement instead. Pretty Cool. (2005) –Lori Lancaster • April 7 2009, 9:20am EST
premise: A decade in the lives of three investigators of Zodiac, a San Francisco serial killer active in the early 1970s. This is a filmmaker's film, excelling in technical areas like cinematography and sound editing, but lacking in the human warmth that would give it wider appeal. David Fincher avoids pumping up the film with artificial suspense like in his previous Panic Room, and sticks obsessively to the plain facts of the investigation, spelling them out one by one... except during one brilliant sequence, when he shows what kind of tension he's capable of generating. [Ending spoilers ahead.] I'm disappointed by the final scene featuring the main character, because it provides a reward for his obsession that flies in the face of the movie's apparent premise that there can be no happy ending to this kind of obsession; it's like making a grim drama about a gambling addict who slowly loses everything he has, but finally wins big money in his final scene. (Yeah, the story is true, but the filmmakers structure their narrative by picking and choosing which true events to portray.) Overall, it's a very good movie that rewards rapt attention and appreciation of Fincher's visual style. –Scott Hardie • November 5 2011, 11:23am EST
Hands-down, the best horror comedy, and quite possibly regular comedy film of the year (all time?). Clever, sarcastic, and original humor combine to make this film gut-bustingly hilarious. –Erik Bates • October 4 2009, 12:02pm EST
A very funny horror-comedy that spends little time on zombies, preferring to develop its misfit quartet of main characters. Woody Harrelson and a surprise guest star deliver (improvise?) the biggest laughs, but there's good material here for everyone. –Scott Hardie • January 15 2011, 9:44am EST |
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