The male (and Hollywood) counterpart to Me Myself I, an alternative-reality switcheroo whereby a driven careerist, through the intervention of a magical mystical genie, gets to find out how life would have turned out if he had not gone off to London in '87 but had stayed home and married …
Sixty years after the original Fantasia, Disney carries on the inevitable and obvious and not necessarily good idea of animated flights of fancy taking off from well-known excerpts of classical music. The idea of a followup was itself inevitable and obvious and not necessarily good. (What took so long?) The …
The sexual initiation of two adolescent sisters, one kittenish, the other bearish ("No one would think we're sisters"), on a summer holiday. Very candid and detailed, with extended negotiations required of an older seducer. (The director, Catherine Breillat, doesn't strive to outdo her hardcore Romance, however; and the rudeness of …
Alex is boarding his plane to France on a school trip, when he suddenly gets a premonition that the plane will explode. When Alex and a group of students are thrown off the plane, to their horror, the plane does in fact explode. Alex must now work out Death's plan, …
Gus Van Sant, reverting to the vein of Good Will Hunting, goes all soft and squishy (don't be fooled by the scruffy surface) with the tall tale of another youthful genius, a black high-school athlete and closet littérateur (diffident newcomer Rob Brown) who finds a mentor in an irascible old …
A linked chain of tortured Torontonians, with an uneven distribution of sensibility among them: an eye doctor who's going deaf; a masseuse who's losing touch with her teenage daughter; a cake-maker who lacks taste; etc. A painfully serious, almost stricken, movie: "sensitive" as an open wound. With Mary-Louise Parker, Molly …
Live-action sequel (prequel, really: Fred and Barney meet Wilma and Betty, and a little green man from outer space visits Earth to observe), with an all-new, B-team cast of Mark Addy, Stephen Baldwin, Kristen Johnston, and Jane Krakowski, plus Joan Collins as a "guest star" in place of Elizabeth Taylor. …
Typical time-travel brain-twister, with a mere ham radio serving as time machine, enabling a thirty-something New York cop to converse with his late father, both of them speaking into the same microphone in the same house in Queens over a distance of three decades: "We gotta be talkin' off the …
A serious, even solemn, effort to do with the universal loss of innocence in a group of rural Southern playmates. (The precocious girl narrator sets, or matches, the tone: "When I look at my friends, I know there's goodness.") Crisply photographed; stiffly acted. Written and directed by David Gordon Green.
Muscle-bound, knuckleheaded remake of the 1971 British film by Mike Hodges: an old story (mobster in search of answers in the mysterious death of his brother), muddily plotted and modishly styled, with an overdose of semi-hallucinatory visual tricks. Michael Caine, the original Carter, is on hand in a small role …
It gives, first of all, a hefty central role to the deserving and appreciative but not effusive Cate Blanchett -- that of a widowed backwater Georgia fortune-teller ("I don't call myself that") with three young boys -- and it gives vivid and well-differentiated surrounding roles to the varyingly worthy Giovanni …
Empowerment trip for a hot-headed Latina high schooler, channeling her hostility into boxing lessons at the Brooklyn Boys' Club, and finding a channel for her hidden tenderness too: a fellow featherweight named Adrian. Trouble ahead: the two channels collide at the Gender-Blind Amateur Box-off. This rough-edged and gritty-surfaced "indie" never …
Rome's greatest general, Maximus, reduced to a slave (Minimus, that would be), then resurrected as a star of the sporting arena (not necessarily Circus Maximus). Throwback historical epic with all the modern amenities: overamplified digital sound, computer-generated sets, blue-rinsed and butter-basted photography, herky-jerky hallucinatory slow-motion, time-lapse clouds, music-video-style dream scenes, …
The first made-in-Japan monster movie in general release in the U.S. since Godzilla 1985, complete with bad English dubbing and a barrel of laughable lines: "Quit your bitchin'." "I guarantee it'll go through Godzilla like crap through a goose." "He's coming. Get going." "Did you see that flying rock go …
Hollywood imperialism in action: take a profitable little independent film (a car-chase thing from the speed-happy days of Vanishing Point, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, Sugarland Express, etc., etc.), take it over, make it into a much bigger and even more profitable studio film. Thinking big passes as imagination nowadays. The …