Jim Jarmusch's mainstreamiest film to date has a lot of laughs in it, despite the pretentiousness of the cinéma d'ennui pacing and deliberately dissatisfying ending. Laughs are laughs, nonetheless, and once they've fought through the pretentiousness, they cannot be wiped off the scoreboard. (Another impediment to be fought through, another …
None other than Jacob and Wilhelm, not yet world-famous folklorists, merely ghostbusting con men, whose ruses are not state-of-the-art magic circa the early 19th Century, but rather state-of-the-art FX circa the 21st. When they are recruited by the occupying French army, however, to investigate a case of missing children (a …
Well-chilled French thriller comparable in degrees centigrade to Time Out, With a Friend Like Harry, Merci pour le Chocolat, Red Lights, et al. An anonymous videocassette in a plastic bag is left without explanation at the doorstep of the civilized host of a book-chat TV show: a two-hour static surveillance …
Undisclosed chapter in the career of the 18th-century rake: his courtship of a protofeminist ghostwriter and swordswoman, the Ms. Right who can tie him down for keeps. The sort of romantic fantasy, in other words, that ruins real lives. A tiresome rompish costume party in antiquing golden light, under a …
Explorers of an underground river in Transylvania -- "the Amazon of underground rivers" -- find more than they bargained for: computer-cartoon parasitic flying amphibians. In the dark and under the water, the action is all but unfollowable, and outside of Piper Perabo's desperate last moments on a sheer rock face, …
Mongolian movie from one of the two directors of The Story of the Weeping Camel, Byambasuren Davaa. This one tells the story of a little girl and a stray dog, not a yellow dog, but white with a black face and a black spot on his back, hence his christening …
Tim Burton's consolation prize for losing out on the Lemony Snicket concession (surely that had his name written on it) is a remake of the fractured fairy tale by Roald Dahl, a spindly little framework freighted with production values, CG imagery, and dark dense bordello color, like some scrawny four-foot …
A family feud, over Labor Day at Lake Winnetka, between the twelve-kid Bakers and the eight-kid Murtaughs, or anyway between their hotly competitive dads (Steve Martin, Eugene Levy). Humor and sentiment every bit as cheap as Cheaper One. The only notable change is in the suddenly sculpted Hilary Duff, who …
The sky is falling, in Disney's computer-animated retelling of the tale, turns out to be a metaphor for an alien invasion, and the title character becomes a synonym of civic-minded vigilance. More basically, he and his styrofoamy chums -- the ugly duck, the fat pig, the fish out of water, …
The mythic children's book by C.S.Lewis makes for a good children's film, better, to pick a couple of nearby co-ordinates, than any of the Harry Potters, better than any third of The Lord of the Rings, albeit still rather longish at two hours and twenty minutes. In the first place, …
The story of heavyweight boxer James J. Braddock, the Bulldog of Bergen, the Pride of New Jersey, a working-class hero for real. It's something of a puzzle why his story had not been told on screen before, seeing as how we have it on the authority of Damon Runyon, who …
Teacherly sports film, the athletic equivalent of Stand and Deliver and Lean on Me (with Samuel L. Jackson every bit the equal of Edward James Olmos and Morgan Freeman), a salute to a real-life taskmaster by the name of Ken Carter, who demanded that his high-school basketballers sign contracts agreeing …
An adaptation of a John le Carré suspense novel, and a long stride for filmmaker Fernando Meirelles (City of God) from the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Le Carré, to be sure, has always had an elevated social consciousness, and a missionary zeal to match, and so the stretch for …
Soporific supernaturalism, notwithstanding some startling special effects, with Keanu Reeves as a cool-dude demonologist in a long coat, doomed to Hell for a momentarily successful suicide attempt, and ticketed to an early grave, even now, for a pack-a-day smoking habit. Tilda Swinton, of all people, is cast as the angel …