Reviews
Dan in Real Life: From comedy to crap
What's wrong with Steve Carrell?
By: PETER KEOUGH
Lake of Fire: Seeing choice, in shades of gray
We still have the right to choose, Kaye seems to say, but we should know what that choice looks like.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
The Comebacks: Racking up penalty yards
Long before the big game rolls around (the Toilet Bowl, I shit you not), and the film shows a touch of heart, the clock has run out.
By: TOM MEEK
Music Within: A squad of sharply drawn outcast vets
Richard Pimentel has a lot put upon him: born to an interracial couple in the ’40s, he’s “the eighth miscarriage that lived."
By: TOM MEEK
O Jerusalem: Buddy story meets History Channel remake
In its attempt to cover the 1948 war that kicked off modern Israel, Elie Chouraqui’s O Jerusalem forges a regrettable two-state solution.
By: CHRIS BRAIOTTA
Pleasures still unknown: Conventions take Control of Ian Curtis
Ian Curtis (Sam Riley) of the Manchester band Joy Division wrote songs that evoke, with incantatory inevitability, terror, delight, and ecstasy.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Black Irish heartbreak: Neighborhood themes, or cliches?
You know there’s going to be a big game somewhere in this, as well as reconciliations in the intensive-care unit.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Aviva My Love: Audience pleasing pabulum
Given all these stereotyped woes, what choice does she have but to transform them into even more-cliché’d stories, narrated in voiceover and dutifully illustrated by the filmmaker?
By: PETER KEOUGH
Lars and the Real Girl: Resolutely weird
To see how a similar premise can actually touch the heart, check out Peter Cattaneo’s lovely, neglected 2005 film Opal Dream.
By: LARS AND THE REAL GIRL
King Corn: On a diabetic throne
We spend less money on food than any generation before us, but King Corn asks, at what price?
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
Sleuth: Michael Caine remaking Michael Caine
Think Carlton Fisk and Thurman Munson.
By: MARK BAZER
Reservation Road: The Honda Accord of movies
Director Terry George redefines the word “thriller” by indulging in endless scenes of Ethan looking at Web sites.
By: CHRIS BRAIOTTA
The Final Season: Unintentional sports comedy
Sean Astin’s latest starring role finds him aiming to hit the emotional high he achieved in 1993’s Rudy.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Things We Lost In the Fire: Haunting agony and angst
Too bad the bigger melodrama doesn’t equal its piquant parts.
By: TOM MEEK
30 Days of Night: Hoary high-camp clichés
Poor Danny Huston leads them; his hissed Nietzschean ripostes are tiresome and laughable, leaving him about as scary as Count Chocula.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?: Another African-American life lesson
Janet Jackson as the staid academic “Perfect Patty” delivers a smoldering nugget that lingers on screen long after the moment has passed.
By: TOM MEEK
Cama Adentro/Live-In Maid: Wry desperation in Buenos Aires
Both actresses embody their roles with subtlety and subdued emotion — Aleandro especially, pride, humiliation, and desperation palpable in her regal face.
By: PEG ALOI
Bad will hunting: Ben is back with Gone Baby Gone
Films about Boston tend to be no better than their worst Boston accent.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Faithless Rendition: A soapy plot tortures the truth
It’s ironic, and probably auspicious for its box office, that Rendition comes out a week after the Supreme Court refused to hear the case of Khaled el-Masri.
By: A.S. HAMRAH
My Kid Could Paint That: A layered art-world exploitation
Marla Olmstead, the subject of Amir Bar-Lev’s absorbing documentary, at once reveals an artist’s temperament: dark moods, fits of inspiration, a reticence to discuss her work.
By: ALICIA POTTER
Ira and Abby: Kitch, clichés, and neurosis — a fatal combination
Robert Cary is not up to even latter-day Woody standards.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Feel the Noise: Introducing reggaetón
Argentine director Alejandro Chomski wastes little time setting up this generic exercise.
By: BROOKE HOLGERSON
We Own the Night: Gritty, macho, and lacking in grace
James Gray’s film is in dire need of plausibility.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Bogus Bess: Elizabeth: The Golden Age is leaden
“History,” Winston Churchill told us, “is written by the victors.”
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
For the Bible Tells Me So: Homosexuality in the Bible
Daniel Karslake’s earnest documentary offers a string of familiar but poignant true-life stories of young gays and lesbians being alienated from mom and dad.
By: GERALD PEARY
British Advertising Films of 2007: Vaseline and sock monkeys
Each year these commercials show an engagement with global culture and commerce.
By: PEG ALOI
The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising: A smirky and sore temptation
It’s never a good idea to judge a movie by the book it was adapted from.
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: One of the year's best movies
In Andrew Dominik’s revisionist Western, Jesse James is not a character.
By: RICHARD BECK
Angels in the Dust: A documentary of differences
Amid it all, the kids are kids: they dance and play and laugh, while not far from their mini-village lie acres and acres of graves.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
Tourist attractions: Darjeeling is limited but rewarding
Halfway through Wes Anderson’s picaresque train ride through India, everything stops.
By: PETER KEOUGH
And justice for one . . .: Clooney cleans up as Michael Clayton
“I’m not a miracle worker, I’m a janitor.”
By: BRETT MICHEL
Ang time: Lee approaches Lust with Caution
“Yeah, it’s very hard,” says Ang Lee — with no apparent double entendre in mind — about shooting the sex scenes in his NC-17-rated Lust, Caution.
By: PETER KEOUGH
In the mood for Lust: Ang Lee goes NC-17
During one of the sex scenes that have earned Ang Lee’s adaptation of Eileen Chang’s short story its notoriety, I had to ask myself: how did that foot get there?
By: PETER KEOUGH
The Heartbreak Kid: Dragging out funny
The only honor the remake is likely to vie for is “most athletic sex scene” at the MTV Movie Awards. That, or “most audible queef.”
By: BRETT MICHEL
Milarepa: Magician, Murderer, Saint: Plays like a Wikipedia page
All mountains, monks, and a soundtrack of wailing women, Neten Chokling’s film opens with the announcement of a birth.
By: NICK MCCARTHY
Feast of Love: Raves from Mr. Skin
Feast of Love is a title that promises either extra helpings of the mysteries of the human heart or a smorgasbord of multiple positions.
By: MARK BAZER
Into the Wild: A tale of a megalomaniac as told by a narcissist
As I see it, Penn and Chris are both self-indulgent bores.
By: PETER KEOUGH
King of California: A surreal oddity that jells
And so as dad persists in scuba-diving in shit, Miranda surrenders her childhood for her father’s delusional shenanigans.
By: TOM MEEK
The Last Winter: The big ideas get out, despite clumsy dialogue
Modern American psychotronica needs Larry Fessenden.
By: MICHAEL ATKINSON
Trade directed by Marco Kreuzpaintner: Aching with ambiguity
It doesn’t shy from the facts or the complexities but might still attract viewers with its genre dynamics and appealing performances.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Pete Seeger: The Power of Song: Exploring saintlike passion
This documentary by Jim Brown offers an inspiring portrait of America’s most enduring folk artist.
By: PEG ALOI
The Rape of Europa: Art-love tunnel vision
The filmmakers are assuming that after so much documentation of murder and torture we could stand to consider instead the material and cultural losses.
By: MICHAEL ATKINSON
Resident Evil: Extinction: A nail in the RE coffin
Meanwhile, the deep-pocketed Umbrella Corporation continues its nefarious schemes — puzzling, given the lack of commerce in an undead society.
By: BRETT MICHEL
The Kingdom: Let the carnage begin!
Revenge has taken over the screen lately.
By: PETER KEOUGH
The Game Plan: Sweet in its misguided mawkishness
Come for the end-around blitzes, stay for Rock’s dance as an enchanted tree, complete with tights.
By: RICHARD BECK
The Bubble: A gay, Middle Eastern Romeo and Juliet
“If a gay suicide bomber goes to Heaven, does he get 72 virgin boys or 72 muscular men?”
By: TOM MEEK
Dragon Wars: D-War: Monumental clunk
I’ll take weird, surprising crap over slick any day.
By: CHRIS BRAIOTTA
The Jane Austen Book Club: Jane would find another movie
Robin Swicord’s film posits a book club of six Californians meeting once a month to discuss Jane Austen’s novels.
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
Fierce People: Poor city-kid meet plain ridiculous
Griffin Dunne’s 2005 film is like The Great Gatsby with Jay as an old coot whose grandchildren attack the help with spears.
By: JENNY HALPER
Sydney White: An obvious, labored fairy tale
Joe Nussbaum’s created a genre mash-up, grafting on the plot of Revenge of the Nerds and . . . the climax of Spartacus?
By: BRETT MICHEL
Vanaja: Artful and satisfying, if overlong
The colors — ocher and rose and royal blue — and the cast, unprofessional actors all, heighten the sensuality.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
Dedication: What it takes to warm up to sociopathic leads
The solid performances and edgy touches by actor Justin Theroux go far, but it’s all wasted on a Grinch.
By: TOM MEEK
December Boys: Daniel Radcliffe's non-wizard cinematic vehicle
The Year My Voice Broke meets Stand by Me? If only.
By: PEG ALOI
Good Luck Chuck: Crass and crude and mostly annoying humor
The only plausible scenario in this movie is the idea that a woman would be so annoyed by Dane Cook, she’d be willing to put a curse on him.
By: BROOKE HOLGERSON
In the Valley of Elah: A 90-minute Oscar wanna-be
Few will deny that the war dehumanizes, but Haggis’s suggestion that everybody who comes back is a sociopath won’t win many friends.
By: PETER KEOUGH
In the Shadow of the Moon: Gorgeous high-def space
For a moment, the Earth was unified: “we” had gone to the moon.
By: MIKE MILIARD
The Hunting Party: Confident wits collide
Writer/director Richard Shepard knows how to make a movie a good time, even one set in the physically and psychologically wrecked post-war Balkans.
By: MARK BAZER
Chalk: Funny but undecidedly pendantic
Mike Akel’s film chronicles a year at a fictitious Texas high school from the point of view of its misfit teaching staff.
By: PETER KEOUGH
The Brother Solomon: Adding to Odenkirk's cinematic slump
We’re past the point of blaming the system.
By: CHRIS BRAIOTTA
The Brave One: A vigilant film lacking courage
The Brave One is director Neil Jordan’s attempt at a thinking man’s vigilante flick.
By: RAFER GUZMAN
Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place: The best film about an American poet ever made
Ferrini and Riaf present the complex American literary figure Charles Olson in a clear way by focusing not on the facts of his life but on the facts of his work.
By: WILLIAM CORBETT
I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With: Deadpan that just feels dead
Just in case any insensitive pricks forgot, Jeff Garlin is around to remind them that fatties get picked on long after junior high.
By: NICK MCCARTHY
Manda Bala/Send a Bullet: Slyly persuasive Errol-Morris-style
Brazil reels from corruption, poverty, and violence, but it remains perversely functional.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Mr. Woodcock: A messy sado-school movie
Thornton chucking balls at kids is funnier — until it just feels cruel.
By: MARK BAZER
Shoot 'Em Up: Screwing America one gun-slinger at a time
I had hoped, America, that you and I had outgrown a knife in the face and a one-liner coup de grâce equal parts Elmore Leonard and Bruce Vilanch.
By: CHIRS BRAIOTTA
Notre ami Pierrot: Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 omnibus rides again
“Film is like a battleground,” American director Sam Fuller pronounces famously at the cocktail party in Pierrot le fou.
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
Promises kept: David Cronenberg revises History
Eastern Promises begins with uncanny images of birth and death, equally raw and bloody.
By: PETER KEOUGH
23 skidoo?: The Boston Film Festival: work in progress
As of press time, the 23rd Boston Film Festival was still shaping up.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Musical mystery tour: Julie Taymor reinvents the Beatles
What would the world be like with Beatles music but no Beatles?
By: PETER KEOUGH
Death Sentence: They don't get much worse than this
An all-out war between Hume and his gangland prey culminates in a ridiculously over-the-top shootout in an abandoned mental hospital.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Halloween: Oh, the horror
I have seen the origin of evil, and it’s feral, yet strangely . . . adorable.
By: BRETT MICHEL
The Hottest State: A bad break-up movie
Maybe this effort is just an awkward patch in a filmmaker’s development.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Shadow of the House: Photographer Abelardo Morrell: Unfamiliarizing the most familiar
Allie Humenuk’s quiet documentary follows Morrell, who’s a professor at MassArt, over seven years in an examination of his process.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
Hatchet: A classic slasher eye roller
One misshapen maybe-man/maybe-ghost stalks a group of pretty young things and rips their limbs off with generous plumes of blood spray and strewn entrails.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
3:10 to Yuma: Claustrophobia
It seeped like a cancer into his modestly expanded take on Elmore Leonard’s short two-hander set within the confined time and space of a hotel room.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Trade: A dénouement aching with ambiguity
The scandal of the sex-slave market pops up on the news long enough to titillate, but who wants to go into depressing and complex details?
By: PETER KEOUGH
Hannah Takes the Stairs: And they don't go anywhere
Nonetheless, certain images, like two people in a tub playing the 1812 Overture on trumpets, are worth the visit.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Deep Water: Isolation in the swollen seas
The challenge: sail around the world single-handed without stopping, 33,000 miles and 10 months of solitude, waves, and horizon.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
War: The dumber the better
Despite the stilted dialogue, the porn-star-quality acting, and the incoherent stitching together of action sequences, War does stir some interest.
By: TOM MEEK
Illegal tender: Ineptitude and idiocy
Let’s just say Brian De Palma’s Scarface has a lot to answer for.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Ils/Them: Point-of-view mayhem
Rapid cuts and a hand-held camera jumble the image — something can be discerned, but what?
By: PETER KEOUGH
Self Medicated: Corny rehab clinic conventions
Seventeen-year-old Drew is so smart and talented, why does he screw up?
By: PETER KEOUGH
Balls of Fury: A comic mish-mash
Credit in part Christopher Walken’s evil Feng, a screwy triad boss sponsoring a death-match ping-pong tourney in South America.
By: TOM MEEK
Triad Election: Johnnie To's flourishing payoff
Sometimes you have to see a lesser movie to enjoy a better one.
By: BETSY SHERMAN
Election: No Godfather — but it warrants the comparison
Election’s oldsters have heads filled with loyalty oaths and arcane traditions.
By: BETSY SHERMAN
Duck: A beguiling and disappointing debut
Hall, who musters up so much emotion within a narrow role, deserves better, though the Aflac duck is all he’s quacked up to be.
By: PAUL BABIN
The Invasion: Another soulless copy
This latest incarnation from Oliver Hirschbiegel also has a lot of anxiety to work with.
By: PETER KEOUGH
The Last Legion: A load of poppycock
The battle scenes look ho-hum in the wake of 300, as director Doug Lefler sticks stolidly to the old school.
By: TOM MEEK
Mr. Bean's Holiday: An uncalled-for sequel
He appears to be on a holiday of his own — from any faintly realistic notion about his audience.
By: CHRIS WANGLER
The Nanny Diaries: A shrill disappointment
The rich may be different from you and me, but they’re probably not much like the grotesque stereotypes in this adaptation of the glib bestseller.
By: PETER KEOUGH
The 11th Hour: Global warming made boring
Remember the “myth” of global warming?
By: BRETT MICHEL
Half Moon: Miraculous things with an amateur cast
Bahman Ghobadi’s new feature returns to the severe locale of many of his acclaimed earlier movies.
By: GERALD PEARY
Resurrecting the Champ: Gritty enough
The maudlin turns near the final bell mute Champ’s resonance.
By: TOM MEEK
Right at Your Door: Chris Gorak's got a point
Sometimes the government response to terrorism is worse than the terrorism itself.
By: PETER KEOUGH
September Dawn: A descent into caricatures
The violence, when it comes, is shot in slow, luxuriant detail that feels almost pornographic.
By: ADAM REILLY
Annie Hell: Julie Delpy’s infernal, funny 2 Days in Paris
There’s nothing like love in Paris — in French movies, at least, it’s the city where romance goes to die.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Monkey business: Champ versus chump in The King of Kong
Florida lawyer/video game scapegoater Jack Thompson has it all wrong.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Alice Neel: An unexpectedly complex documentary
The true artist, so goes the myth, labors in bohemian obscurity in search of truth and beauty.
By: PETER KEOUGH
The Cats of Mirikitani: The self-appointed co-star needs to be cut
Jimmy Mirikitani is a homeless Japanese-American artist living on the streets of New York’s Lower West Side.
By: RICHARD BECK
Death at a Funeral: A lively boneyard romp
But gags involving excrement and gay dwarfs from the deceased’s past don’t do justice to the cinematic funeral tradition.
By: TOM MEEK
Rocket Science: An authentic script on teen angst
Blitz knows his adolescent cruelty and his adult misbehavior, and he details them with barbed wit and compassion.
By: TOM MEEK
Rush Hour 3: Increasingly silly skits
Even those famous outtakes that play during the credits appear labored.
By: CHRIS WANGLER
Comic relief: Superbad respects teens and comedy
I know it hasn’t escaped you how terrible comedies have gotten.
By: CHRIS BRAIOTTA
Stardust: A visually lush adaptation
Who knew that Matthew Vaughn had an inner Narnia?
By: TOM MEEK
Underdog: Lacking the orginal bite
The My Name Is Earl star sounds scruffy enough, but it just doesn’t fit.
By: TOM MEEK
Molière: The legendary playwright is better
There is a burgeoning trend whereby the work of a legendary writer is attributed to some spurious personal experience.
By: BROOKE HOLGERSON
Daddy Day Camp: Predictability ensues
Because even Eddie Murphy had better things to do, Cuba Gooding Jr. stars in this mess of a sequel.
By: BROOKE HOLGERSON
Bratz: Oh my god, this movie totally sucks
Bratz is based on those slutty dolls people inexplicably buy for their kids.
By: BROOKE HOLGERSON
No End in Sight: Three years too late
What we could use now is a documentary that gets it right before it’s too late to mean anything.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Nick Drake: A film about an enigma
Thus the paradox of a man who left three albums of eloquent songs about his inner life and little else.
By: DAMON KRUKOWSKI
The Last Atomic Bomb: Terror on repeat
It’s difficult to criticize a documentary about the horror of nuclear warfare and how to prevent it from happening again.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
El cantante: Cookie-cutter bombast
Unlike Lopez, he digs beneath the soap-opera dialogue and bares his character’s soul.
By: BETSY SHERMAN
Who's Your Caddy?: The gamut of taste
In this big-screen vehicle for pop sensation Antwan Andre Patton, nearly every element of the plot rips off the mangy 1980 comedy Caddyshack.
By: TOM MEEK
The Ten: Hallelujah the hodgepodge
Winona Ryder, for example, plays a newlywed who gets sexually liberated by a dummy (the wooden kind).
By: TOM MEEK
Arctic Tale: Whisker-close footage
All the same, this effort soundly delivers the inconvenient truth to the generation who’ll inherit it.
By: ALICIA POTTER
I Know Who Killed Me: Lindsay Lohan's robotic reel life
Lohan’s virgin/whore dons a robotic hand, the perfect prop to match her performance.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Hot Rod: Barely worth an illegal download
Andy Samberg and his SNL Digital Shorts cohort stepped in to recapture some of that “Lazy Sunday” magic.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Becoming Jane: Reinventing Austen's bio
Anne Hathaway is game enough as Jane, though she has to spend an awful lot of time on the verge of tears.
By: GARY SUSMAN
Covert action: The Bourne Ultimatum possesses central intelligence
Some talented filmmakers try to play a Hollywood game, churning out a big-budget commercial product in exchange for a smaller, more personal and artistic venture.
By: PETER KEOUGH
An inconvenient poop: The Simpsons Movie craps out
Maybe 18 seasons is too long to remain topical and funny, especially in prime time on Fox TV.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Vitus: Slips toward mediocrity
A cute and exceptional little boy, a lovable old geezer — you don’t have to be Pauline Kael to realize this formula is a winner.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Punk's Not Dead: Or is it?
Wasn’t punk about being independent?
By: PETER KEOUGH
No Reservations: The side dishes make the feast
The give-and-take among the three leads takes the cake.
By: TOM MEEK
I Now Pronounce You Chuck + Larry: Mainstream gay-marriage endorsement
Who knew that Adam Sandler had a political movie in him?
By: TOM MEEK
Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap Box: Sort of like a soap opera
Once the suds of choice for dirty hippies, Dr. Bronner’s is now a staple of the Whole Foods set, and Sara Lamm’s documentary looks at Dr. B's “All One God Faith” mission.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
Interview: Where's the sex?
Steve Buscemi probably felt morally compelled to remake Theo van Gogh’s Interview.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Goya's Ghosts: Hauntingly awful
It’s the looming specter of a once-great filmmaking talent rising after an eight-year silence.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Sound bites: Sunshine sheds little light on the sci-fi genre
In space, so the tag line for Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi thriller Alien goes, nobody can hear you scream.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Lady Chatterley: English literature is sexier in French film
Hands and Coulloc’h are marvelous together, their nearly wordless love scenes genuinely, stunningly erotic.
By: PEG ALOI
Joshua: Eschewing supernatural hysteria
Something sure to please fans of Ratliff’s documentary Hell House.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Introducing the Dwights: A miserable family to watch
Into this mess wanders Jill (Emma Booth), cute and self-assured, so you know she’s in for it.
By: BROOKE HOLGERSON
Talk to Me: Giving Petey Greene his due
Not only do the two actors play off each other with perfect synergy, they also take on the eccentricities of the era and the politics of race.
By: TOM MEEK
Missing in action: History escapes Herzog in Rescue Dawn
In his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly, Werner Herzog told the story of Dieter Dengler.
By: CHRIS FUJIWARA
Hairy Potter: Hormones submit to dreary Order
Whatever else it may be, the Harry Potter Edda is surely the most popular narrative about the dawning of pubertal awareness ever created.
By: MICHAEL ATKINSON
Evening: Platitudes and mediocrity
Some of the best actresses working in movies today pack the cast of Evening, and all I can say is, was this the best thing available?
By: PETER KEOUGH
Everything's Gone Green: Silly, and seen before
It's just another story about a befuddled, underachieving twentysomething whose yuppie girlfriend kicks him out.
By: GERALD PEARY
Broken English: A safe ticket seller
Possible explanations include drinking, pills, low self-esteem, and her inability to resist jumping into bed on the first date.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Fido: Dark, potent, gory
It may sound silly, but director Andrew Currie stews together gore, social commentary, screwball camp, and dark comedy with savory potency.
By: TOM MEEK
License to wed: Sniveling toady of a film
From its anonymous title down to every last moment of its pleading humor and shoehorned uplift,
License To Wed
is soaked in sloth and cowardice.
By: CHRIS BRAIOTTA
Mon Meilleur Ami | My Best Friend: Yet another mismatched-buddy pairing
The set-up is so labored and unconvincing that it hardly matters when our hero latches onto Dany Boon’s trivia buff/cab driver.
By: MICHAEL ATKINSON
Moore of the same: Sicko diagnoses American health care
I suspect that Moore had altruistic motives in presenting the case studies of victims of HMOs, hospitals, and drug companies in his movie.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Bon appétit: Brad Bird cooks up a masterpiece
Family. We spend lifetimes breaking away from them, forging our own path, only to discover it leads back to the same place.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Labyrinth: David Bowie in tights
Of course I imagined I was Jennifer Connelly.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
1408: The Shining gets squeezed
If you know your Stephen King, then you know haunted hotels have killer pasts.
By: TOM MEEK
Live Free or Die Hard: The franchise proves aptly named
The Die Hard series was about as animated as Rocky’s face until director Len Wiseman restored it to its kinetic essence.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer: A summer wipeout
Even as a 10-year-old Marvel Comics fan, I knew that the Silver Surfer was a dumb character.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Evan Almighty: The movie of the summer for the timid Christian paranoiacs
Finally, the 21st-century redo of the Oh, God!
By: MICHAEL ATKINSON
Eagle Vs. Shark: Passion ignites at an animal-themed costume party
Love means never having to admit you deserve better than a dour dork with nunchucks.
By: ALICIA POTTER
Ten Canoes: A Cain-and-Abel style story
The film's humor and warmth are as natural as its actors’ exposed genitals.
By: BRETT MICHEL
10 Questions for the Dalai Lama: A new-age vanity project
Ray’s smug smile tells us that “I’m sitting with the Dalai Lama!” is all that’s running through his head.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
Terror incognita: Winterbottom, Jolie lose Heart
No one will know what Danny Pearl felt as he was kidnapped, held prisoner, and beheaded by jihadist fanatics.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Nuovomondo|Golden Door: A vast but uneven period piece
The lack of focus on the main characters and some bad artistic choices cause the film to slip beneath the waves of its own ambitious vision.
By: PEG ALOI
La Môme|La Vie en Rose: A wonder of a bio-pic in lush, matted reds
As Piaf, Marion Cotillard is a lioness in the guise of a bird, with large, luminescent eyes that serve as windows into the singer’s troubled soul.
By: TOM MEEK
Four Weeks in June: A same-sex Harold and Maude
Who would have thought that happiness was just a leap across the generation gap?
By: PAUL BABIN
Hostell: Part II: Ocean's Thirteen is the better sequel
Cut a guy’s dick off and feed it to a dog? Just more leftovers.
By: TOM MEEK
Buddy: A chronicle of Vincent "Buddy" Cianci's chaotic career
Buddy is as irresistible as its subject, and an essential primer of American politics.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Retro rocket: Nancy Drew lifts off on screen
Andrew Fleming’s Nancy Drew kicks off with a mystery that eluded even our supersleuth.
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
Surf's Up: Surf's Up wipes out
Is it coincidence or homage that a fat, sullen penguin in this animated dud resembles Michael Moore?
By: ALICIA POTTER
Steel City: A warm and fuzzy film
Brian Jun’s film owes more to the family values of the Reagan era than its anarchic characters and hardscrabble style would indicate.
By: PAUL BABIN
Day Watch: Anything but predictable
Like its predecessor, Timur Bekmambetov’s Day Watch is a muddled fantasy epic.
By: CHRIS BRAIOTTA
La Maison de Nina/Nina’s Home: A precise and weighty drama
More than anything, the film is a portrait of how children deal with such grief, through violence, silence, music, and prayer.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
Angel-A: Frank Capra’s classic loses its class
Could this be Besson’s directing finale, as rumored? Ouais, s’il vous plaît!
By: BRETT MICHEL
Flotsam and jetsam: The tars are adrift in Ocean’s Thirteen
Steven Soderbergh’s third “Ocean” film is a pastry of a movie, airy, insubstantial, and meant to fill in the gaps between heartier meals.
By: MICHAEL ATKINSON
Severance: Not the usual sado-masochistic porn
Everyone hates arms manufacturers, but maybe they won’t after seeing Christopher Smith’s tart, funny, and relatively ungory slasher/thriller.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Gracie: A familiar girl-power tale
Gracie treads territory familiar to anyone who’s seen a sports movie in the past 10 years.
By: BROOKE HOLGERSON
Mr. Brooks: A film with a split-personality
The press notes for Bruce A. Evans’s thriller begin with a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
By: BRETT MICHEL
The Boss of It All: Since when do we believe Lars von Trier?
The Boss of It All reflects on the mysteries of identity, responsibility, globalization, and Gambini’s æsthetics of theater.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Mother of convention: Women get screwed in Knocked Up
Having laughed more at The 40-Year-Old Virgin than at any other film in 2005, I expected much the same from Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Dream girl: Satoshi Kon’s got your ticket
Do films hold the power of dreams?
By: BRETT MICHEL
Snow Cake: Marc Evan's mawkish soap opera
The real Oscar candidate here is Alan Rickman as a restrained and sardonic stranger with a mystery past.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Paris je t'aime: A whirlwind tour of 18 arrondissements in 120 minutes
The concept for this anthology was a short film representing each of Paris’s 20 arrondissements, from the Jardins des Tuileries (#1) to the Cimitière du Père Lachaise (#20).
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
Bug: Don't believe the horror hype
“From the director of The Exorcist!” goes this film’s marketing campaign.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Once from the heart: The musical takes to the streets
Some people are confused when they talk about musicals.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Hell is other sequels: Pirates 3 offers buried treasures
At first, At World’s End doesn’t seem to differ much from the world outside.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Georgia Rule: An extension of Lohen's bad girl persona
Abusive sex with a minor is no trite matter, yet in Georgia Rule it’s bandied about like a tennis ball on a summer day.
By: TOM MEEK
Swamp gas: Shrek the Third gets bloated
Shrek has metastasized into a symptom of and metaphor for the entertainment industry and modern culture in general.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Jindabyne: Raymond Carver's human tragedy in near perfect form
If you’ve seen Short Cuts, you’ll recall the fishing-trip segment in which Huey Lewis pisses into a stream.
By: TOM MEEK
Provoked: A caricature of good and evil
Last week I complained that Stephanie Daley was a little obtuse about the issues involved in its subject, teen infanticide. This film demonstrates how the opposite can be worse
By: PETER KEOUGH
The Ex: The pratfalls of yuppiedum
The premise here is flawed.
By: CHRIS WANGLER
Delta Farce: Blue-collar comedians mine the War on Terror for jingoistic laughs
Blue Collar Comedy mines the War on Terror . . . for laughs?
By: BRETT MICHEL
Brooklyn Rules: Smile, you're in a badly done Martin Scorsese rip-off.
Marty should whack this guy with his new shiny Oscar.
By: RICHARD BECK
Day Night Day Night: Oddly inert chronicle of a day in the life of a doe-eyed suicide bomber
Julia Loktev keeps you guessing about the motives of her heroine and the identity of the organization.
By: PETER KEOUGH
28 Weeks Later: A bloody fine sequel to a bioterror classic
A repeat outbreak is 20 seconds and one bloody kiss away, and the Yanks are taking no prisoners.
By: PEG ALOI
Lost in space: Alain Resnais’s dazzling Private Fears In Public Places
Alain Resnais’s ineffable film has the hallmarks of his marvelous late style.
By: CHRIS FUJIWARA
Fay Grim: Love conquers all, except when it doesn't
This effort by the hoary dean of American Independent Film, Hal Hartley, is the freshest and most accomplished thing he’s done since the film it’s a “sequel” to.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Belle Toujours: Quel dommage!
Manoel de Oliveira made this long-range sequel to Buñuel’s 1967 fetish classic Belle de jour.
By: MICHAEL ATKINSON
Waitress: Serving happy endings
In this posthumous release from writer/director/actress Adrienne Shelly, Andy Griffith is still presiding over small-town America.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Stephanie Daley: A morally confused problem movie
Starting with the early shot of bloody footsteps in the snow, Hilary Brougher shows herself the master of the self-consciously telling detail.
By: PETER KEOUGH
The Odyssey: A queer take on the Dead White Male
As far as Dead White Males go, Homer ranks as grandfather to them all.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
Zoo: Tasteful bestiality
Robinson Devor’s documentary about a Boeing engineer who died after having sex with a horse is concerned more with the why of the act than with the how.
By: IAN SANDS
The Hip Hop Project: A project in opportunity
Like basketball, hip-hop offers a way out of the inner-city cycle of violence and poverty.
By: TOM MEEK
The eyes have it: Surveillance thriller Red Road experiences peek activity
We’ve come a long way from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Red, in which a retired judge falls into disgrace for listening in on his neighbors.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Away from Her: Unforgettable performances in a forgettable debut film
Sarah Polley’s feature-directing debut boasts outstanding performances, but she’s confused Alice Munro’s elegantly straightforward structure.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Lucky You: Hanson puts his money on Hollywood clichés
Curtis Hanson’s latest directorial effort sat on a shelf for two years, emitting a whiff of failure.
By: BROOKE HOLGERSON
In Search of Mozart: Looking in all the usual places
Phil Grabsky had Amadeus squarely in his sights when he set out to make this documentary celebrating the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth.
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
The Invisible: Visibly just too bad
In this retooling of the 2002 Swedish film Den Osynlige, David S. Goyer pipes the high-school halls full of class division, bullying, and trendy tunes.
By: TOM MEEK
Kickin' It Old Skool: Revenge of the Nerds did it better
Eighties nostalgia and breakdancing get sent up in this feeble Jamie Kennedy comedy.
By: TOM MEEK
Next: A pendantic thriller
If you know your Philip K. Dick, you know screen adaptations of his work are all over the map.
By: TOM MEEK
The Flying Scotsman: An exhilarating non-stop flight
In 1993, Scottish cyclist Graeme Obree built a bike out of old washing-machine parts and broke the one-hour distance world record.
By: RICHARD BECK
Civic Duty: Stylishly silly stuff
Falling Down takes a post-9/11 turn in this psychological thriller from Canadian filmmaker Jeff Renfroe.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Tangled web: Spider-Man 3 spins too many tales
Those behind the franchise appear to have decided they had to cram as many sequels as possible into Tobey Maguire's last movie.
By: PETER KEOUGH
The Condemned: A sleeper hold even Stone Cold can't break
Like SNL alums, star wrestlers on their way out get a big-screen vehicle — sort of a retirement gift, no matter how much of a jalopy it is.
By: TOM MEEK
Offside: A game of universal humanity
The Iranian government has banned Jafar Panahi’s latest contemplation of the oppression of women in Iran.
By: TOM MEEK
Fracture: Inspired, even if preposterous
It’s manipulative artifice for sure, but the stacked aces make it a rapt jury-rigging.
By: TOM MEEK
Sing Now or Forever Hold Your Peace: Cheesier than a capella Coldplay
It’s not so much the music that’s annoying about college a cappella (though it’s that, too).
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
Vacancy: How's that for a twist?
What’s happened to the horror film?
By: BRETT MICHEL
La Doublure|The Valet: Deeper than it appears
Have the French cornered the market on light comedy?
By: TOM MEEK
Slow Burn: Ridden with awful lines
A film that’s more of a frustrating near-miss than a disappointment.
By: RICHARD BECK
The TV Set: Prime-time pilots are better than this
I can hear the pitch: “It’s like For Your Consideration with the hipness of The Player and the edginess of Network!”
By: PETER KEOUGH
Pathfinder: Tossing continuity to the wind
The sexual tension and transcendental tones of Terrence Malick’s The New World and the graphic, balletic carnage of 300 meet in Marcus Nispel’s Pathfinder.
By: TOM MEEK
In the Land of Women: A tidy suburban melodrama
If Mrs. Robinson had been played by Martha Stewart and had suffered breast cancer, The Graduate might have played out like In the Land of Women.
By: TOM MEEK
La Tourneuse de Pages|The Page Turner: Something sinister is brewing
A girl needn’t go to the trouble of losing her leg and replacing it with an assault rifle, à la Grindhouse, to get even.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Year of the Dog: Not too mangy
There’s almost nothing sadder than neglected dogs awaiting their fates.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Hot Fuzz: Laughs and piles of bodies
Picture Agatha Christie buggered by Michael Bay, with (old-school) Peter Jackson administering lube.
By: BRETT MICHEL
After the Wedding: Supreme human drama
Subtle direction from rising star Susanne Bier should keep you guessing about the high cost of family secrets.
By: CHRIS WANGLER
Grindhouse: A woman's foot in every scene
Tarantino is aging badly.
By: PETER KEOUGH
The Reaping: Over-serious eye candy
Mixing CSI talk with a lot of evangelical mumbo-jumbo, this over-serious eye candy keeps you on the edge of your seat but never freaks you out.
By: CHRIS WANGLER
Situation: Too cartoonish for truth
That situation in Iraq sure is something.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Adam's Apples: Black humor and handguns
Before fundamentalists hijacked it, faith was as much mystery as absurdity.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Secrets and spies: Black Book’s mismatched conventions
Paul Verhoeven has made a brilliant study of the origins and consequences of Fascism.
That film, of course, is Starship Troopers.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Perfect Stranger: Worse than a root canal
Hell, after Catwoman and now this, the Academy should demand that Berry return her Oscar.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Disturbia: A Rear Window redux
What happened to D.J. Caruso?
By: BRETT MICHEL
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters: A bit small-screen
After the infamous guerrilla advertising campaign, the movie version of the irreverent, South Park–esque series arrives with little fanfare.
By: TOM MEEK
The First Basket: A century of social change
How many active Jewish players in the NBA can you name?
By: PETER KEOUGH
Glastonbury: David Bowie returns
Julien Temple’s documentary traces the evolution of the world’s most iconoclastic music festival.
By: PEG ALOI
First Snow: A moody debut
When slick salesman Jimmy struts into a fortune teller’s trailer, his fate is sealed.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Firehouse Dog: Tear ducts or belly laughs?
It' s a clunky coming-of-age standard.
By: TOM MEEK
Are we done yet?: A brain-dead sequel
Is there a slapstick conspiracy in Hollywood?
By: CHRIS WANGLER
Operation Homecoming: Good literature, spotty film
If you want to find out what war is like, ask those who fight it.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Macbeth: Where were Ian McKellan and Judi Dench?
Roman Polanski in his 1971 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Scottish play opts for grim, sodden, literal realism.
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
Con but not forgotten: The Hoax pushes Hughes goods
The traditional Hollywood bio-pic reduces a famous life to a couple of platitudes, a two-hour narrative, a big-name star, and a few Oscars.
By: PETER KEOUGH
The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair: Underscoring the insanity
Up to now the War in Iraq has differed from Vietnam in one respect: no black comedy.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Meet the Robinsons: The Jetsons all over again
A few decades from now, Canada will be Northern Montana, people will float through cities in soap bubbles, and frogs will sing Sinatra.
By: TOM MEEK
The Lookout: Noirish notes
Chris Pratt has it made: he’s a stud, he has a rich father, and he can score a goal from anywhere on the ice.
By: TOM MEEK
Live Free or Die: New Hampshire deserves better than this
Seinfeld writers Gregg Kavet and Andy Robin conceived this project as a TV series, which is where it should have stayed.
By: TOM MEEK
The Hills Have Eyes II: They should keep 'em closed
This quickie sequel to last year’s remake of The Hills Have Eyes promises that “the lucky ones die fast.”
By: BRETT MICHEL
The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down: Get out of the theatre with your bad self!
Sex, drugs, and stupidity become the stuff of sociological study in this simple-minded parody of the LA party scene.
By: PAUL BABIN
Blades of Glory: Will Ferrell's glory days are over
Will Ferrell plays a redneck star athlete who’s dumb and adored and loses his trousers a lot and meets his match in an effete competitor.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Beyond the Gates: It's weepy on the other side of the fence
As the end credits roll on Michael Caton-Jones’s film, the latest to deal with the Rwandan genocide, it’s hard not to tear up.
By: BRETT MICHEL
TMNT: Turtle power!
Cowabunga, dude!
By: TOM MEEK
Reign Over Me: Rewrite!
It’s a commonplace that real-world ugliness is the best kind of fodder for artistic beauty.
By: RICHARD BECK
Pride: Hope floats, and so does Terrance Howard
Predictable and rickety, yet heartfelt, Pride dips into the rage of civil rights.
By: TOM MEEK
Premonition: False reading
Sometimes you wake up and life seems like a badly edited movie.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Mafioso: Little-seen 1962 romp gets second shot at stateside release
Many American film buffs know the names of the leading Italian neo-realists, but few would recognize that of Alberto Lattuada.
By: TOM MEEK
Maxed Out: Drowning in debt
James Scurlock’s chilling documentary will up the anxiety of even the most responsible bill payer.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
The Last Mimzy: Too complicated and precocious to appeal to kids or adults
An eclectic mix of family drama, aliens from the future, and Tibetan mysticism, The Last Mimzy never coheres.
By: BROOKE HOLGERSON
Dead Silence: Like Saw, only with puppets
You could call this a hacked version of the Saw series, but its filmmakers, James Wan and Leigh Whannell, are the two hacks behind that macabre franchise.
By: TOM MEEK
Ice Cream, I Scream: We all run away!
Far too much screaming, if you want my opinion.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Building the Gherkin: Promotional mumbo-jumbo
What begins as a hard look at a new skyscraper winds up as a promotion for Sir Norman and Swiss Re.
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
The Dead Girl: Too bad she's a feminist
Wrapping together several shorts linked by a common theme and calling it a feature seems to be the trend du jour in indie filmmaking.
By: TOM MEEK
Color Me Kubrick: Alan Conway gets krunked
In the 1990s, British grifter Alan Conway posed as director Stanley Kubrick and bilked the ignorant out of small change or sex acts in sordid scams.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Bamako: Kill the white characters
Maybe it’s progress that studios are making movies about Africa such as Blood Diamond and Beyond the Gates.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Shooter: Republicans get gunned down
It was only a matter of time before the Democrats had a version of Rambo to call their own.
By: BRETT MICHEL
The Ultimate Gift: Pretty hoky stuff
Stingy are the rich, as we know from Ebenezer Scrooge and even Bill Gates before he became a crusading philanthropist.
By: TOM MEEK
The Wind that Shakes the Barley: Shakes class lines
The Palme d’Or winner at Cannes 2006, Ken Loach’s drama explores the tensions within an IRA guerrilla unit during the rebellion of 1920-’21.
By: CHRIS WANGLER
Two Weeks: And a Lifetime saga
The harrowing indignity of watching a loved one fade at the hands of a terminal illness gets a vivid look in Steve Stockman’s soul-scratching melodrama.
By: TOM MEEK
The Namesake: No such luck
Many local fans of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake especially enjoyed the details of its Cambridge setting.
By: PETER KEOUGH
I Think I Love My Wife: It'd take a miracle
Chris Rock as a sensitive Manhattan investment banker with two kids?
By: CHRIS WANGLER
Die Große Stille|Into Great Silence: 16 years in the waiting
In 1984, documentary filmmaker Philip Gröning asked the Carthusian monastic order for permission to film at one of the world’s most ascetic monasteries.
By: RICHARD BECK
It came from the sink: Bong Joon-ho stirs up the muck in The Host
Drainage spawns a genetic mutation — part salamander, part fish, part . . . vagina dentata? — that emerges from the Han’s banks.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Life, truth, and Jean-Luc: 2 or 3 things we know about Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is 76 now, of fading productivity and perhaps fading health, and so we’re faced with the unfathomable prospect of no longer living in the Age of Godard.
By: MICHAEL ATKINSON
300: So much testosterone...
Outside a Chippendale show you’ll never see this many half-clad beefcakes in a single gander.
By: TOM MEEK
Kettle of Fish: Unmemorable, unlikable
Even New York City looks dull here.
By: RICHARD BECK
Grbavica: Power and restraint
Although the war has been over for years, the air in Grbavica, a neighborhood in Sarajevo, hangs heavy with menace and dread.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Wild Hogs: Running on empty
Four suburban males in the throes of midlife crisis decide the remedy is to don leather, saddle a Harley, and cruise across the county — with no rules.
By: TOM MEEK
The Situation: Love in the Sunni Triangle
That situation in Iraq sure is something.
By: PETER KEOUGH
The Number 23: A zero
A flashy, predictable, incomprehensible piece of dreck that can’t even be saved by its fine actors.
By: PEG ALOI
Reno 911!: Miami: Unconstrained by the small screen
It remains true to form by focusing on the little things, like thongs, of which there are more than in any other movie this year.
By: BROOKE HOLGERSON
Close to Home: Absorbing, informative
The front lines are not on battlefields but on buses, street corners, and crowded Jerusalem marketplaces in this drama.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
Chlotrudis Short Film Festival: A well selected bunch
It's a well selected bunch that range from Chekhovian revelations of the everyday to exercises in narrative stillness.
By: RICHARD BECK
Black Snake Moan: Bluesmen and nymphomaniacs
Craig Brewer seems to harbor a need to exorcise his white burden through films centered on black music.
By: TOM MEEK
Eden: Paradise can still be found
Maybe it’s a stretch, but I’d call German director Michael Hofmann’s three features, which are screening in a retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, a kind of Mundane, as opposed to Divine, Comedy.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Amazing Grace: Polite under fire
Michael Apted’s stirring if conventional bio-pic of 18th-century British abolitionist William Wilberforce offers rum, funneled into anti-slavery PM William Pitt the Younger, and sugar, in the form of the hero’s adoring wife, Barbara.
By: JUSTINE ELIAS
The Astronaut Farmer: 99 minutes too long
Mark and Michael Polish showed a surreal eye in Twin Falls Idaho, and their The Astronaut Farmer has one dreamlike scene to recommend it.
By: PETE KEOUGH
Daddy’s Little Girls: Not for real life
Tyler Perry secured two likable leads for his new film, and they make Daddy’s Little Girls more enjoyable than it has any right to be.
By: BROOKE HOLGERSON
Ghost Rider: Without Cage, an infernal flame-out
If Nicolas Cage weren’t a goofball with a hunky physique and droll wit, this Marvel-comic-to-big-screen adaptation would have no torque at all.
By: TOM MEEK
Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis: It's hard not to be moved
Even if Andy Warhol did call filmmaker Jack Smith “the only person I would ever copy,” Mary Jordan’s portrait of the avant-garde anti-hero goes a little far in asserting his importance.
By: RICHARD BECK
Why spy: Chris Cooper’s grasp exceeds his Breach
Remember those moody espionage thrillers of the ’60s?
By: PETER KEOUGH
Epic Movie: No remorse
Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the brain warp behind the Scary Movie franchise and Date Movie, again take their tired and not-so-true formula and spoof a list of semi-recent theater fillers).
By: TOM MEEK
Disappearances: Peacocks, prognostication, potatoes
The misty fields and forests and the rolling hills and twisting creeks of Kingdom County in Vermont prove to be as much a character as Kris Kristofferson’s feisty, headstrong Quebec Bill in the third installment of Jay Craven’s trilogy based on novels by Howard Frank Moser.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
Danielson: A Family Movie: Do I have to wear a nurse's outfit?
J.L. Aronson’s documentary about Daniel Smith’s religion-inspired family rock band, who made a point of playing in nurse uniforms, has a lot going for it: a cast of cuties, cool cameos, fun costumes.
By: IAN SANDS
Opal dream: A semi-precious gem
Peter Cattaneo hit paydirt in 1997 with The Full Monty, a crowd pleaser about blue-collar dreams.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Blood and Chocolate: You'll howl
Shape shifters or werewolves have always required crafty cinematic sleight of hand.
By: TOM MEEK
Venus: Not to be missed
Perhaps the dream of every hard-living British acting legend is to live long enough to play the role of a hard-living British acting legend and win an Oscar for it.
Watch the trailer for Venus
(QuickTime)
By: PETER KEOUGH
Stomp the Yard: West Side Story with a new dance
“Step,” the old-school group dance that has its origins in African gumboot and has been perfected by fraternities in Southern black universities.
Watch the trailer for Stomp the Yard
(QuickTime)
By: TOM MEEK
God Grew Tired of Us: A devastating and uplifting documentary
Back in the ’80s, long before Darfur became a word linked with genocide in the Western media, the Islamic north waged a bloody campaign against the Christian farmers.
Before there was darfur: Around the world. By Tom Meek.
By: TOM MEEK
Primeval: Action more tired than tense
The trailers promising a movie about a serial killer in the vein of Jack the Ripper are a croc.
Watch the trailer for Primeval
(QuickTime)
By: TOM MEEK
Eating Out: Sloppy Seconds: Awful, awful, awful
Some movies are so bad they’re good — the Evil Dead trilogy comes to mind. Other movies are so bad, they make you want to jam sharp-pronged tools into your eyes.
Watch the trailer for Eating Out: Sloppy Seconds
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
Arthur and the Invisibles: Doesn't dazzle
This, the latest movie from “the creative mind of talented filmmaker Luc Besson," screened for critics last month, in the usual way.
Watch the trailer for Arthur and the Invisibles
(QuickTime)
By: BRETT MICHEL
King and the Clown: A perfect blend of comedy and tragedy
Based on the popular play Yi, Lee Jun-ik’s sumptuous King and the Clown mines the exhaustive diaries of the Chosun Dynasty for inspiration in depicting its tyrannical 16th-century despot.
By: BRETT MICHEL
The Host: A monster movie with a splash of muckraking
Running a rubber-gloved finger across gallons of dust-covered bottles of formaldehyde, a US military official orders a Korean morgue attendant at a US Army base in Seoul to “empty every bottle to the very last drop.
By: BRETT MICHEL
Red Doors: A threshold worth crossing
The doors are crimson, a color said to bring good luck, and when they open, multiple melodramas of the Chinese-American Wongs are exposed.
Watch the trailer for Red Doors
(QuickTime)
By: BRETT MICHEL
Happily N’ever After: Coulda-been enchantment
The hook to Paul J. Bolger’s alluring animated Neverland is its dicy deconstruction of cherished childhood fairy tales.
Watch the trailer for Happily N’ever After
(QuickTime)
By: TOM MEEK
Code Name: The Cleaner: Still dirty
Cedric the Entertainer has it tough.
Watch the trailer for Code Name: The Cleaner
(QuickTime)
By: TOM MEEK
The Animation Show 3: The height of animated art
The best of these 10 shorts will bust open conceptions of what it means to be a “cartoon.” In other words, Ducktales this ain’t.
Watch the trailer for the Animation Show 3
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
Alpha Dog: An odd docu-tabloid hybrid
Writer/director Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook) adapts the story of teen drug dealer/FBI Most Wanted fugitive Jesse James Hollywood.
Watch the trailer for the Alpha Dog
(QuickTime)
By: PEG ALOI
The Painted Veil: Paints blissful, empty montages
Somerset Maugham might have inspired more movie adaptations than any other author, but not because his perversely realistic view of human behavior follows Hollywood formula.
Watch the trailer for The Painted Veil
(QuickTime)
By: PETER KEOUGH
Notes on a Scandal: A perfect fit for the British
Patrick Marber adapts Zoë Heller’s dark, satirical novel for the screen, and the film directed by Richard Eyre, with a juicy Brit Pack cast.
Watch the trailer for Notes on a Scandal
(QuickTime)
By: PEG ALOI
Night at the Museum: Matinee worthy, but not a dime more
“This is not worth $11.50 an hour,” blurts exasperated dreamer Larry Daley when his night-watchman job at New York’s Museum of Natural History takes on a life of its own.
Watch the trailer for Night at the Museum
(QuickTime)
By: BRETT MICHEL
Dreamgirls: No-town Motown
The chorus has been singing for months now: Bill Condon’s can’t-miss adaptation of Tom Eyen & Henry Krieger’s 25-year-old Broadway musical is roaring into theaters to save a lackluster fall.
Watch the trailer for Dreamgirls
(QuickTime)
By: BRETT MICHEL
We are Marshall: More than a football film
In 1970, a plane carrying the Marshall University football team crashed, killing all on board.
Watch the trailer for We are Marshall
(QuickTime)
By: TOM MEEK
Off the Black: On the ball
The first 30 minutes of James Ponsoldt’s understated feature debut feel scripted; you can see the typed-up lines of dialogue in the exchanges between aging umpire Ray Cook and floppy-haired high-school pitcher Dave Tibbel.
Watch the trailer for Off the Black
(MySpace)
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
The Good Shepherd: A blue-blooded Godfather
The CIA and the Mafia have been in bed together at least since the Bay of Pigs in 1961, so why shouldn’t Robert De Niro turn the former’s history into a blue-blood version of The Godfather?
Watch the trailer for The Good Shepherd
(QuickTime)
By: PETER KEOUGH
The Good German: Packs in the movie stars
Steven Soderbergh merges his mainstream aptitude with his proclivity for experimentation, making a conventional post-WW2 proto-espionage noir packed with movie stars, but daring to make it in the black-and-white style of period classics like The Third Man, Notorious, and The Lady from Shanghai.
Watch the trailer for The Good German
(QuickTime)
By: MICHAEL ATKINSON
Unknown: Not worth knowing
“Unfolding in the style of Memento,” begin the press notes for Simon Brand’s freshman effort, which also reveals the “style” of Reservoir Dogs and Saw.
Watch the trailer for The Unknown
(QuickTime)
By: BRETT MICHEL
The Pursuit of Happyness: A career-capping performance for Smith
Not what you’d expect given the title or star Will Smith’s wholesome persona — no, not at all.
Watch the trailer for The Pursuit of Happyness
(QuickTime)
By: TOM MEEK
Charlotte's Web: Unravels fast
This live-action adaptation of E.B. White’s hallowed classic runs out of gas once the cows start farting.
Watch the trailer for Charlotte's Web
(QuickTime)
By: ALICIA POTTER
The Architect: Lacks structure
Anthony LaPaglia’s Leo Waters is a self-satisfied architect whose little world starts to fall apart when a housing project he designed comes under siege by its residents.
Watch the trailer for The Architect
(QuickTime)
By: BROOKE HOLGERSON
Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj: Flops without Ryan Reynolds
In this lame Animal House knockoff, one of Van Wilder’s disciples makes waves at a stuffy English university by leading a rag-tag band of misfits against a fratful of uptight bluebloods.
Watch the trailer for Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj
(QuickTime)
By: CHRIS WANGLER
Unaccompanied Minors: The Breakfast Club meets Home Alone
Five children — mostly products of broken families en route from one parent to the other — get snowed in at a fictitious Midwest airport on Christmas Eve.
Watch the trailer for Unaccompanied Minors
(QuickTime)
By: TOM MEEK
Turistas: Will have you gasping for air
A bunch of fit, freewheeling twentysomethings stray off the beaten path in search of a hedonistic paradise and wind up in Hell.
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(QuickTime)
By: TOM MEEK
The History Boys: Scores an A
The History Boys from Nicholas Hytner, based on the Alan Bennett play he directed in London and on Broadway (where he won a Tony), stars the original cast of those productions.
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(QuickTime)
By: BROOKE HOLGERSON
Fuck: Not for children
Steve Anderson’s freewheeling but pointed investigation of the perennially popular deleted expletive boasts a convincing cast of experts, among them Hunter S. Thomson, Pat Boone, Sam Donaldson, and Alan Keyes.
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By: PETER KEOUGH
Blood Diamond: Raping Africa for ratings
After centuries of raping Africa for its resources, now we exploit its misery for our amusement.
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(QuickTime)
By: PETER KEOUGH
El Aura/The Aura: Just another heist film
The “aura” is the moment of impotent clarity before a seizure, or so says Espinosa (Ricardo Darín), the epileptic hero of Fabián Bielinsky’s devious mystery.
By: PETER KEOUGH
Apocalypto: Chaos with a Stooge twist
Although there are references along the way to such disparate films as Planet of the Apes and Midnight Cowboy — not to mention his own Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ — Apocalypto reveals that Mel Gibson’s chief inspirations are chiliastic fundamentalism and the Three Stooges.
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(QuickTime)
By: PETER KEOUGH
The Holiday: A safe box office bet
A reminder to all producers: alluding to iconic romantic comedies in a bid for legitimacy can be a dangerous game, even when you have appealing stars.
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(QuickTime)
By: BROOKE HOLGERSON
3 Needles: A sad reminder
Thom Fitzgerald’s dramatic meditation on AIDS is harrowing, gritty, and about 10 years too late.
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(QuickTime)
By: TOM MEEK
The Nativity Story: Too reverent for its own good
This straight retelling of the birth of Jesus is like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ with less violence and more Heavenly backlighting.
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(QuickTime)
By: BROOKE HOLGERSON
Dreamland: More like Snoozeland
“It’s more memorable to almost kiss on a first date,” agoraphobic widower Henry reflects to his lovelorn daughter, Audrey, and her multiple-sclerosis-stricken best friend with beauty-queen ambitions, Calista.
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(QuickTime)
By: BRETT MICHEL
Candy: Not so tasty
When the first of three segments in a film about drug addicts is titled “Heaven,” you have a pretty good idea where it’s headed.
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(QuickTime)
By: PETER KEOUGH
Absolute Wilson: Absolutely bewildered
Back in 1991, in the American Repertory Theatre production of When We Dead Awaken, Robert Wilson’s musical based on the dour Henrik Ibsen play, there was a moment when the cast, led by Honey Cole, started a cakewalk line while chanting the play’s title over and over again.
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(QuickTime)
By: PETER KEOUGH
Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny: For hardcore fans
I’m a Jack Black fan — let’s get that out of the way.
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(QuickTime)
By: BRETT MICHEL
Requiem: Exorcise this
Hans-Christian Schmid fictionalizes the real-life story of Anneliese Michel, a young German woman who died of exhaustion and starvation after a series of attempted exorcisms in the mid ’70s.
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(QuickTime)
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
Let's Go to Prison: Drops the soap
As a comedy, Bob Odenkirk’s penitentiary send-up is bootless.
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(QuickTime)
By: TOM MEEK
The Fountain: Overflowing
Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) took a big risk in proceeding with this project after original leads Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett left the film.
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(QuickTime)
By: BRETT MICHEL
51 Birch Street: A child discovers his mother
Doug Block comes close to poisoning his family interrogation with dreary self-regard and an NPR-ish tone of simpleton obviousness, but the family, as families often do, offer up some prime rib.
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By: MICHAEL ATKINSON
Déjà Vu: Terminator meets Groundhog Day
Off a busy dock in New Orleans a ferry blows up in spectacular fashion. Flaming cars and bodies fly across the screen in slow motion.
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(QuickTime)
By: TOM MEEK
Deck the Halls: Lands like a lump of coal
Somewhere in Western Mass, an anal-retentive optometrist prides himself on being Mr. Christmas.
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(QuickTime)
By: TOM MEEK
Bobby: ...and everyone else
The Camelot mythography lives on in writer/director Emilio Estevez’s earnest bid for significance, a cliché’d collage portrait of LA’s Ambassador Hotel on June 4, 1968.
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(QuickTime)
By: MICHAEL ATKINSON
Shut Up and Sing: Proves freedom of speech is alive
“Who are the Dixie Chicks, anyway? They should shut the fuck up.”
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(QuickTime)
By: BRETT MICHEL
The Return: A sad excuse for a ghost story
Sarah Michelle Gellar’s career has been a bit like Linda Blair’s or Jamie Lee Curtis’s.
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(QuickTime)
By: TOM MEEK
Pucker up: Not what you think
Whistling has always struck me as something that’s fun only for the whistler.
By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN
The Motel: Not a bad place to check-in
Taking up residence in the wayward purgatory of pubescence, writer/director Michael Kang’s humorous debut compassionately observes the taciturn struggles of “chubby” Ernest Chin, a perpetually misunderstood Chinese-American boy.
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(QuickTime)
By: BRETT MICHEL
Going Under: Worth stepping down into
Director Eric Werthman has been a New York therapist for 25 years, and the temptation is to read his absorbing, daring debut feature as autobiography.
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(QuickTime)
By: GERALD PEARY
For Your Consideration: It's been considered
The mock documentary has been around so long that it should have evolved by now into its own parody, the mock mock documentary.
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(QuickTime)
By: PETER KEOUGH
Fast Food Nation: Hold the fictional fixings
The line between factual documentary and fictional re-creation, if it ever existed, has disintegrated before the assault of Fahrenheit 9/11, Syriana, and now Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation.
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(QuickTime)
By: PETER KEOUGH
Iraq in Fragments: A stark portrayal of reality
James Longley’s documentary about the War in Iraq isn’t groundbreaking, but it does put a face on the grim reality of Iraqi life and the mounting anti-American sentiment (“They are worse than 100 Saddams”).
Watch the trailer for Iraq in Fragments
By: TOM MEEK
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