Low-grade video documentary, by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, on a Baltimore educational experiment to send twenty "at-risk" black students per year to an all-male boarding school in Kenya. It's an interesting project, whether as education or as documentary, but the students and filmmakers alike are left high and dry …
Battle-of-the-sexes romantic comedy accurately hits numerous notes of stridency, nastiness, pain, and so on, and next to none of laughter. More of an unromantic uncomedy. (The screenwriters, Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender, and the director, Peyton Reed, are all male, so no equal representation.) Vince Vaughn, Mr. Glib, comes across …
Affected debut film from Rian Johnson, writer and director, a test-tube species of teen noir, a hard-boiled high-school hybrid, featuring a junior detective, a fille fatale, a small-time Mr. Big, and a brawny henchboy. Opaquely plotted, arcanely scripted, darkly photographed, and reverberantly recorded, incomprehensible on several levels. With Joseph Gordon-Levitt, …
First and foremost a marketing experiment, spearheaded by director Steven Soderbergh, in releasing a film simultaneously in theaters and on cable TV and DVD. Otherwise an exercise in frugality. An hour and a quarter in length. A strummy solo guitar for background music. A chamber-sized ensemble of nonprofessional actors in …
The Pixar people, director John Lasseter in particular, envision a world of cars without people (Mommy, where do cars come from?), but of course anthropomorphized cars, such that the windshields are eyes and the hoods, grilles, and front bumpers form noses and mouths. The vision focusses chiefly on a hot-shot …
Taking the title from Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel, the 007 franchise approaches the opportunity of a new James Bond as the opportunity of a new beginning. The new Bond, Daniel Craig, is not just another pretty face, in fact is a pretty craggy face (Craiggy face, perhaps that …
Sympathy for the terrorist. Not, heaven forbid, the Islamic terrorist, but the South African terrorist circa 1980, the hard-working family man who, falsely accused of terrorism, turns to terrorism for real. Parallels to other sorts of terrorists can be drawn all the same, and that would be the only avenue …
Microbudget suspense film of a Filipino-American brought back to his homeland for his father's funeral and dragged through hell to retrieve his kidnapped mother and sister from Islamic terrorists. The thrift affords small comfort to the paying spectator who has to peer through the haze of the video image and …
E.B. White's barnyard children's story, a friendship fable about the promise of a spider to save a spring pig from the smokehouse. Sweet sentiment soured by the cacophonous Cultural Diversity of the animal voices (British sheep, Southern cows, African-American geese, New York City rat, Julia Roberts spider, and so on) …
The basic idea — from a novel by P.D. James, a departure from her detective fiction — of a worldwide plague of female infertility, even though not at all original (see The Handmaid's Tale, as a prime example), remains nevertheless a potent metaphor for that science-fiction staple, the End of …
The official sequel can make no effort to match the scruffy integrity of its 1994 forerunner, least of all an effort to match the black-and-white photography. Not that the forerunner set any sort of mark to shoot for, but at least it accepted its limitations and worked within them. The …
Clunk. Patented Adam Sandler blend of juvenile misconduct and remorseful moralism. In the Beyond department at a Bed Bath and Beyond, an angel (Christopher Walken, looking more like a mad scientist) gives a "universal remote" to a harried workaholic, allowing him to mute the barking dog, fast-forward through a marital …
If you live in Colma, CA, the “graveyard capital of the world” where the dead outnumber the living 1500 to 1, there isn’t a whole hell of a lot to do but sing the blues. Might as well get it out on paper, which is exactly what screenwriter/lyricist (and lead …
A British brides' magazine runs a contest, with the grand prize of a half-million-pound dream home, for the Most Original Wedding of the year. The themes of the three finalists: Hollywood musicals, tennis, and naturism, i.e., nudism. Shot, plausibly enough, in the mockumentary style (the magazine would naturally want a …
Detroit streetball plus Sunday sermon. The scale of operations -- the volume of wagers, the population of cheerleaders -- is preposterous to begin with, and the climactic grudge match is nonsensical. With Anthony Mackie, Wesley Jonathan, Wayne Brady, Kristen Wilson, Alecia Fears; written and directed by Preston A. Whitmore II.