A fractured fairy tale, the Red Riding Hood tale, told in a fractured narrative after the fashion of stuff like Pulp Fiction, Go, Snatch, Sin City, with a dash of Rashomon, a whisper of Citizen Kane. The intersections of four narrative lines, from four differing points of view, are fun …
South Korean creature feature, a tad overlong and a bit wavery in tone, yet very well made on the whole, and especially well made in its computer-animated creature, a two-legged, amphibious, carnivorous, whale-scale fish, with a toothy Venus-flytrap mouth. (Blame it on the Americans, Scott Wilson specifically, dumping toxic chemicals …
Sophomoric gore, "presented" by Quentin Tarantino but directed by Eli Roth. Youthful backpackers interrupt their tour of Amsterdam (a cannabis cafe, a disco, the red-light district, no time for Anne Frank House) in order to pursue the promise of beautiful and easy girls in Slovakia, where indeed a couple of …
A callous American doctor stationed at a military facility in Seoul orders an underling to dispose of formaldehyde by pouring it down the sink, never once stopping to consider the havoc it might wreak once the toxic chemicals reach the water system. It’s on this basis of fact that Bong …
More straightforwardly, Ice Age: The Sequel. Our three inseparable prehistoric mammals -- woolly mammoth, sloth, and saber-toothed tiger -- face global warming (as they are already calling it) and the impending inundation of their frozen valley. Even if they can escape the flood, outrun the rapacious sea beasts, and catch …
Set in the Deep South in the Deep Depression, an all-black musical from the hip-hop duo OutKast and their sometime music-video director, Bryan Barber. One of the two (André Benjamin, alias André 3000) plays the introverted son of a mortician and the spotlight-shunning pianist at a jerkwater juke joint, while …
The writing and directing debut of Ol Parker is a lightweight love-at-first-sight lesbian romantic comedy about the instantaneous connection between a bride midway up the aisle and the nuptial flower arranger. Piper Perabo and Lena Headey are attractive, sympathetic figures from any sexual perspective; and Matthew Goode as the bridegroom …
A documentary for the Don't-Blame-Me-I-Voted-for-Gore crowd. It has a nominal director, Davis Guggenheim, but it's Al Gore's show, a self-described "slide show," or illustrated lecture, and not really a movie, to do with the causes and effects of global warming. This is laid out explicitly as less a political issue …
Substantially the same story as Capote a year earlier, an uncomfortable proximity that brings to mind the competing Columbuses of 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Christopher Columbus or the competing Earps of Tombstone and Wyatt Earp. A second account, written and directed by Douglas McGrath, of the birth pains of …
David Lynch never envisioned it as a feature. Initially wanting nothing more than to tinker around with digital video, he picked up a high end consumer DVcam and began shooting a series of unconnected stories. Working without a script, the director noticed an interrelation between individual scenes beginning to form …
Unabashedly commercial enterprise from Spike Lee, a lightweight heist-and-hostage caper with a heavyweight cast: Clive Owen as the bank-job mastermind, Denzel Washington as the New York cop who catches the call, Jodie Foster as the smugly enigmatic free-lance troubleshooter with friends in high places ("My bite's much worse than my …
Philip Gröning's nearly three-hour documentary on a Carthusian monastery in the French Alps, covering a space of time from winter to winter. (Since the German filmmaker, a one-man crew, spent but five months in the monastery, one must presume a bit of editing-room illusionism at work.) Evocative rather than instructive, …
From the busy Disney sports department, an implausible but true story made more implausible and less true (and not made "better" in the process), the football equivalent of baseball's The Rookie, wherein a thirtyish laid-off schoolteacher, part-time bartender, and abandoned husband in South Philly, name of Vince Papale, earns a …
The title refers to a Russian orphan, aged six, upon whom his fellow orphans confer the nickname "Italian" as soon as he is tabbed for adoption by a couple of that origin. During the waiting period prior to his departure for the sunny South, he, to the disbelief and dismay …