Broad, flat, leaden lampoon of teen Texas bimbos (and friends and families), into whose midst comes a French exchange student (Piper Perabo, with an awful accent), a natural beauty disguised as a mouse. Melanie Mayron, a veteran actress in homely-girl parts, has directed with a vengeance. A hatchet-wielding vengeance, to …
The going-nowhere relationship of a suicidal girl rocker and a roller-blading male street hustler. Gritty, grainy, youthy, "edgy" Argentinian film, featuring a lot of herky-jerky slow-motion and other optical tricks, a smolderingly attractive leading lady (Cecilia Bengolea), and a chillingly narcissistic leading man (Leonardo Brezicki). Tongue and coloring aside, the …
Redemption for Steven Soderbergh, after the crass commercialism of Ocean's Eleven (and, in lesser degrees of crassness, Traffic and Erin Brockovich), to say nothing of the self-indulgence of Full Frontal. Not that this one is without self-indulgence: a fifty-million-dollar science-fiction film devoid of action and sparse in special effects. Yet …
Another slice of naturalism from the Belgian brothers Dardenne, Jean-Pierre and Luc, who previously carved out The Promise and Rosetta. This one revolves around a vocational training facility, and more particularly around a stolid carpenter in coke-bottle glasses and six-inch leather girdle for back support. The camera crowds in as …
Next to most other David Cronenberg films (Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Crash, etc.), this one seems a model of restraint and decorum: a horror-free, effects-free excursion into the mind of a madman (a twisted, tortured, inarticulately muttering Ralph Fiennes), afflicted with an extreme case of Madonna-and-whore ambivalence toward women. …
Repulsively overhyped comic-book adaptation by Sam Raimi. (How would his lighter and livelier Darkman, of 1990, have been pushed a decade later?) The hype, which naturally took no notice of the actual product and its worth, is as de rigueur as the Danny Elfman musical score and the plasticky, elasticky …
Cancellation of the retirement of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, whose Princess Mononoke was a worthy valedictory to the traditional hand-drawn method. For this addendum to his career, he has made liberal, corner-cutting use of computer-generated backgrounds; and the clash of styles creates perhaps the most overt conflict in the entire …
A DreamWorks animated feature in the old hand-drawn style: a horse odyssey after the fashion of the thrice-filmed Will James novel, Smoky, with the four-legged hero falling into many hands on his roundabout way home (which looks to be in the vicinity of Monument Valley, nowhere near the vicinity of …
The surprise success of the first Spy Kids has meant more money for the followup, more computer animation in particular. More money, more mess. Steve Buscemi ("I'm no loon") shows up too late and too little to save the day. With Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara, Antonio Banderas, and Carla Gugino; …
Well-deserved and long-overdue tribute to the anonymous studio musicians, known collectively as the Funk Brothers, who shaped the Motown Sound in the 1960s. The visual material is a little thin: minimal archive footage (these men by definition were out of the limelight), bogus "re-enactments," and a sentimental but largely meaningless …
Tenth entry in the series, if, that is, you can regard the adventures of two distinct starship crews as somehow connected and continuous. The one episode of overlap, Star Trek Generations (thanks to a spot of time travel), makes it harder to argue for separation. But an argument could be …
The saga grinds on, in state-of-the-art digital video: crisp and detailed yet somewhat overcast, monotoned, seemingly covered in a sort of pinkish-complected skin, like an unboiled wiener. The particulars -- the diminished role of the reviled Jar-Jar Binks; the teen romance between Queen Padmé (now known as Senator Amidala) and …
Jason Lee, with help from best bud Tom Green (what a comedy team! Stiff and Stiffer), turns to crime -- bumblingly -- to fund his niece's college education. Forget Harvard. Podunk State would be beyond the wildest dreams of this dim bulb. Directed by Bruce McCulloch.
A diptych by Todd Solondz, composed of one part called "Fiction" and another part called "Nonfiction." (The first revolves around a Creative Writing class, the second around a documentary film: equally fictitious.) Both parts permit Solondz to re-echo some of the accusations -- an "ugly" comment in part one, a …
Cute, too. Too cute. This time the computerized mouse (not to be confused with the thing on your computer mouse pad) makes friends with a computerized canary, secret cohort of a Fagin-esque falcon. The avian aspect opens the door to some palm-moistening moments of acrophobic torture. (A clip of Vertigo …