Creditable retelling of an early chapter in Texas history ("As goes the Alamo, so goes Texas"), not as cumbersome as the John Wayne version of 1960, perhaps even a little cursory. Director and co-screenwriter John Lee Hancock humanizes the central figures -- Crockett, Bowie, Travis, Houston, though not the ogre-ish …
From the Cormac McCarthy novel, a post-WWII cowboy movie, not quite a purebred Western, a little like The Hi-Lo Country. A little (including in that scope the scrumptious Penelope Cruz), but not a lot. And it is, whatever its constitution, more than director Billy Bob Thornton can chew. The opening …
Just two months after Earth was threatened by giant comet in Deep Impact, it gets threatened again by giant meteoroid. Too near in time; too distant in tone. The total focus of our attention here, to say nothing of our hopes and our prayers and our desire to identify with …
Even if you knew nothing else about it, the title alone would prevent you from getting sucked in by the film's opening image, a silhouette of a horseback rider on the crest of a hill at sunrise, an evocation of a complete screen mythology and a prompt of happy moviegoing …
The remake of The Bad News Bears, minus the definite article, plugs in Billy Bob Thornton in the Walter Matthau part, a former professional baseball player and current full-time drunk, enlisted to coach a team of Little League rejects (now sponsored not by Chico's Bail Bonds, though that establishment gets …
Sick and twisted (and goddam proud of it) Christmas comedy by Terry Zwigoff, whose Ghost World instantaneously takes on the appearance of a fluke. It was the characters, even more clearly now than before, who "made" Ghost World — them, and their literary or quasi-literary creator, the graphic novelist Daniel …
A crime-does-pay comedy, told in flashback, following the transparent bluff that the two bank robbers known as the Sleepover Bandits (Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton) have now been shot dead. Their getaway driver's sideline as a would-be Hollywood stuntman provides a dead giveaway to the "surprise" ending. Mid-spree, they pick …
A hard-working family man (Michael C. Hall, given a distinct mullet and Billy Bob Thornton makeover) kills an unarmed home invader only to face exacted terrible retribution from the boy’s recently paroled psycho-daddy (Sam Shepherd). Cape Fear meets 8mm in this thriller that never quite wrenches the gut enough to …
Freud may be out of fashion, but he shouldn’t be boring. Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Jung (Michael Fassbender) and their patient who became a brainy disciple and colleague, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), trade analytic ideas and furtive, sado-masochistic feelings. Knightley bravely uses her beauty, even jutting out her jaw a …
Political paranoia thriller so utterly preposterous that it has the opposite effect and reassures us we have nothing to worry about. (And so pell-mell in presentation that we can barely follow it.) Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan, as ordinary citizens under the eye, thumb, and puppet-strings of Big Brother, are …
Bruiser Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson really ought to share star billing with his equally muscle bound Chevelle SS, but instead it goes to a greasy, ruined Billy Bob Thornton as the druggie cop assigned to stop Johnson's mission of (mostly) righteous revenge. The story, almost Western in its spareness, wants …
Pedantic pigskin story, based on the well-regarded nonfiction book by H.G. Bissinger, set in football-mad West Texas: the pressures, the twisted passions, the bitter pills, the life lessons. Billy Bob Thornton, who appears to take more than just the overbite from G.D. Spradlin in North Dallas Forty, is the beleaguered …
It gives, first of all, a hefty central role to the deserving and appreciative but not effusive Cate Blanchett -- that of a widowed backwater Georgia fortune-teller ("I don't call myself that") with three young boys -- and it gives vivid and well-differentiated surrounding roles to the varyingly worthy Giovanni …
Directed by the consistently lightweight Harold Ramis, this incomprehensible embezzling caper, off-puttingly flippant in tone, nonetheless generates an atmospheric sense of weather and of environment: Christmas in Wichita, under a freezing rain, on skating-rink roads, around and about the seedy strip clubs and massage parlors, names like Tease-o-Rama, The Sweet …
The Coen brothers film with the widest, the broadest, the massiest appeal to date, or in the common phrase their "most accessible." Two glamorous A-list movie stars of opposite sexes, George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, looking their respective bests, sugar-cured and honey-glazed, and none of the Coen "regulars" -- no …