Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris — the team that brought you the irrepressibly cheerful Little Miss Sunshine — are back with another blast of candy-colored confection, this one based on what is considered by many to be the most highly publicized tennis match in history. Steve Carell stars as former …
Unpalatable promo for California wines, more broadly a paean to good old American know-how and a chance, at the same time, to stick it to the French, the British, the Old World. A competitive wine tasting in the Bicentennial year of 1976, boiled down as “a bunch of hicks taking …
The coming-of-age rite with a distinct literary flavor: Richard Ford has pieced together the screenplay from a couple of his own short stories, and the resulting creation has an unorganic quality, a lurching, Frankenstein's-monster quality. Lili Taylor, as a young woman of dubious character who is on a mission to …
Milla Jovovich plays an Eastern European mostly-reformed grifter trying to raise an American boy in the American heartland. Bill Pullman plays an American heartlander.
Director Jonathan Kaplan cut his teeth on exploitation films for Roger Corman (The Student Teachers, Night Call Nurses), so it might seem only natural that he would get around to the women-in-prison genre. But by now he's serious and sensitive, the director of The Accused and Immediate Family, so the …
Ersatz Spielberg. (Meaning that the Great Man himself -- the Great Overgrown Boy -- the Great Escaped Inner Child -- was only a co-executive producer and was wise enough to leave the directing to an apprentice called Brad Silberling.) The titular "Friendly Ghost" resembles a fattened-up, but see-through, version of …
Characteristic piece of Wim Wenders deep-think, or deep-sulk anyway, about the decline of Western civilization, the ascent of Big Brother, the crass commercialism of the American cinema, and similar morsels. To get down to brass tacks: it tells of a successful Hollywood producer (Bill Pullman), specializing in violent movies and …
By day, Bob McCall (Denzel Washington, out for a walk), works for a home improvement retailer, but under cloak of darkness, the average Joe segues from Home Depot to lone despot, one Russian mobster at a time. Washington begins by saving the life of a young hooker (a badly miscast …
Reasonable facsimile of comic sophistication: a thirty-something housewife, still fantasizing about the high-school football hero whom she never went as far as sleeping with, sends her best single girlfriend on a romantic reconnaissance mission, and very soon lives to regret it. The essential middle-class propriety of the thing withstands some …
Fulsome tribute to the boys, the men, of the Lafayette Escadrille, the corps of American volunteers who flew for France in the First World War. A throwback, to some extent, to the aviation films of, for the prime example, William Wellman, except that Wellman had himself been a pilot in …
A remake of a Japanese film, Ju-On: The Grudge, which was not much good to begin with. Perhaps, there, a better-than-usual rationale for a remake, especially because the same man occupies the director's chair, Takashi Shimizu: a second chance to get it right. No change, either, in the Tokyo locale, …
Offbeat youth comedy, not offbeat to the exclusion of incessant pop songs on the soundtrack, but offbeat in the extremeness of family dysfunction, or human-race dysfunction -- out there on the path of Todd Solondz and Wes Anderson. First-time writer and director Burr Steers, nephew of Gore Vidal, shows off …
A conscious and conscientious throwback to the invaders-from-space fables of the Eisenhower era: simply and straightforwardly War of the Worlds with updated hardware. But it won't do to be too blasé over the derivativeness. Film, as we've all been instructed but haven't all yet learned, is a visual medium, and …
Independent from original thinking. Director Roland Emmerich and his band of four co-screenwriters waited 20 years to crap out a sequel, and this is the best they can come up with? Even the updated CG effects effects aren’t an improvement. If Independence Day was, as my predecessor Duncan Shepherd observed, …
Independent from original thinking. Director Roland Emmerich and his band of four co-screenwriters waited 20 years to crap out a sequel, and this is the best they can come up with? Even the updated CG effects effects aren’t an improvement. If Independence Day was, as my predecessor Duncan Shepherd observed, …