Juvenile adventure yarn about a treasure hunt for the legendary booty of the Knights Templar, handed down to their natural successors, the Masons, and squirreled away by the American Founding Fathers, with clues to its whereabouts written in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration of Independence. The Jerry …
Pretty good title for your basic black-folks-killing-black-folks panorama, stretched out to an hour and a half (or close to it) by flashbacks in illustration of a drug dealer's tape-recorded autobiography: "Payback's a motherfucker," he ruminates in DMX's hacksaw monotone: "The Hindus have a word for it. Karma." (DMX is not …
Inspired by actual events, proclaims the preface, though events of any kind are a little difficult to put a finger on. Set in today's Tokyo, it details the plight, through microscopic minutiae, of four young children left to fend for themselves when abandoned, first for a month and then for …
Young love relived in the old folks' home: James Garner, every day, reads to a memory-impaired Gena Rowlands the story of a different-worlds romance ("It was an improbable romance. He was a country boy, she was from the city"), the story -- you guessed it -- of their own romance …
Young love relived in the old folks' home: James Garner, every day, reads to a memory-impaired Gena Rowlands the story of a different-worlds romance ("It was an improbable romance. He was a country boy, she was from the city"), the story -- you guessed it -- of their own romance …
The gang of eleven, the ersatz Rat Pack, reconvenes (Clooney, Pitt, Damon, et al.); the newcomer, the apparent twelfth, is not a member of the gang at all, but a member of law enforcement (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Even the victim of the previous heist returns (Andy Garcia), rounding up each of …
Arch and artificial memory film about a hippie family outside Taos in the Seventies, during the time of the father's great depression (the adult daughter-narrator, looking back: "It was inescapable, my father's depression, like some fumigator's mist filling our lungs"), and about the IRS auditor who comes calling, gets laid …
An island getaway gets serious: two amorous scuba divers are abandoned for plausible reasons by a Caribbean pleasure boat (another diver goes back in the water with the requisite "buddy" and throws off the head count), and they're left literally swimming with sharks. Digital-video shoestringer works efficiently within very limited …
Third-rate thriller about the revenge of a Hollywood action star called Bo Laramie (overnight sensation of Adrenaline Force) on the bottom-feeding photojournalists who have made his life a living hell. The continual name-dropping (Clooney, Lopez, Kidman, Baldwin) and the big-name cameo appearances (Mel Gibson, who co-produced, Chris Rock, Vince Vaughn, …
A work of devotion, and a big gamble, for Mel Gibson, financed out of his own pocket, boasting no big-name stars (Jim Caviezel and Monica Bellucci, the biggest), not to mention English subtitles for ancient languages, graphic gore, and a firestorm of pre-release publicity on its latent anti-Semitism. A version …
Pandering teen caper film in which a motley crew of high-school seniors (pothead, jock, poor little rich girl, etc.) conspire for motley reasons to steal the answers to the SAT. ("Suck-Ass Test -- that's what that stands for," elucidates the annoyingly loud narrator.) A dab of nostalgia: Mike Jarvis, the …
Thanks (if that's the word) to the "revival" of the movie musical by way of Moulin Rouge and Chicago, the bombastic score of Andrew Lloyd Webber at long last reaches the screen, in a jewel-box production of flowers, candles, literal smoke-and-mirrors, under the direction of Joel Schumacher: an overstuffed and …
Neither an "instant classic" nor the polar opposite, but a middling addition to the holiday repertoire: computerized illustrations of the Chris Van Allsburg children's book about a little boy already too old to believe in Santa ("This is your crucial year"), snatched out of his bed on Christmas Eve for …
A Wisconsin farm girl faces tough choices. Can she go on loving the heavenly exchange student after she finds out he's really the Crown Prince of Denmark? (No wonder he knows what Hamlet's about!) Must she give up her dreams of attending Johns Hopkins and bringing medical relief to Latin …