Copycat serial-killer film. But let's be clear: it's not really the killer who's a copycat -- one of those diabolically clever, games-playing, wits-matching superfiends -- but rather the film itself, with its strained performances, transparent tricks, jack-in-the-box jolts, and palpable, sliceable, spreadable sense of dread. The big influence is Seven, …
Self-therapeutic autobiography of a thirtyish homosexual Texan, Jonathan Caouette, from a small-town dysfunctional family. Shuffling through the pile of still photos, home movies, video diaries, phone messages, pop songs, TV and film clips, etc., has something of the fascination of poking into other people's closets and drawers. The narcissism and …
Americanization of an unimported French farce written by Luc Besson: a bumbling white male cop (Jimmy Fallon) and a brassy black female cabbie (Queen Latifah, the new Whoopi Goldberg) on the trail of a bank-robbing gang of Brazilian bombshells (supermodel Gisele Bündchen, et al.). Undemanding and unrewarding. With Jennifer Esposito …
Nominally a Disney cartoon, but with more of an underground-comic style and sensibility: thick black outlines around the primitive figures, all of whom look like distant relatives of the Simpsons. The family dog, Spot, wants to be a boy, and thanks to his faculty of speech has been passing as …
The idea — as gleaned from the trailers on television and in theaters — of an anti-terrorist action film with marionettes, and animatronic faces for their closeups, seemed a good one: a hipper Thunderbirds. But just because a filmmaker — Trey Parker, in partnership with his South Park collaborator, Matt …
Tom Hanks, for the third time under director Steven Spielberg, as a monolingual visitor from abroad, forced to make a temporary home for himself in the International Transit Lounge at JFK Airport (amid numberless corporate plugs: Hugo Boss, Borders, Sbarro, etc.) when a military coup unsettles his fictitious homeland of …
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 …
Three tales of the macabre, extreme indeed, from three different Asian directors, Hong Kong's Fruit Chan, Korea's Chan-wook Park, Japan's Takashi Miike, in that order, roughly forty minutes apiece. The first man up sets the bar far too high for his successors. Chan's offering, titled "Dumplings," is evidently a condensation …
The coming of age of a superhero in a family of superheroes: the Tracys, a/k/a Thunderbirds, collectively International Rescue, headquartered on a secret South Pacific island. The British TV puppet show of the 1960s goes live-action and loses all individuality. With Brady Corbet, Ben Kingsley, Bill Paxton, Anthony Edwards, Sophia …
The source material is a story by Haruki Murakami, and its transition to the screen does not look to have been an easy one, never shaking loose from the omniscient third-person narrator. (At times the characters themselves will fill in the narrator's thoughts as if they were dialogue, a curious …
Roaring motorcycles, shrieking electric guitars, sneering bad guys, chillin' good guy. "Look," the last-mentioned points out, "this is my mess, not yours. You don't have to make this run." Advice best taken, sooner rather than later. Martin Henderson, Ice Cube, Monet Mazur, Jay Hernandez; directed by Joseph Kahn.
Kevin Macdonald's documentary cliffhanger — in the most literal sense possible — on the amazing-but-true story of Joe Simpson (based on his memoir), a British mountaineer who breaks his leg on the descent from a Peruvian peak in 1985, slips over a precipice at the end of a rope a …
Rhymes with That Touch of Mink. And on cue, Kyle MacLachlan essays a nervy impersonation of Cary Grant, an impossible assignment (almost the first words out of his mouth are misinformed: "I first died when I made The Pride and the Passion in '59," actually '57), but carried out well …
The second film from Khyentse Norbu (The Cup), and the first film ever to be shot in beautiful Bhutan (no irony), tells of a lowly government official who, posted in a remote mountain village, wants desperately to be elsewhere: "There's nothing here, no movies, no restaurants, and most of all, …
Big (two hours, forty minutes) old-fashioned (not to say ancient) sword-and-sandal epic, complete with the traditional Cast of Thousands (however many of them may nowadays be computer-generated) and the mandatory Wooden Horse, plausible in its physical appearance if implausible in its placement at the foot of a downsloping sandy beach …