How much of what someone thinks is reality can survive the objectivity test? That’s the question posed in THE NIGHT LISTENER, based on a real-life experience and later a novel by Armistead Maupin, which ponders how perception and raw need have a nasty habit superseding everything else. The answer is an engrossing thriller that probes… Read More »
TALLADEGA NIGHTS — THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY
I can’t think of a film more rife with product placement than TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY. Yet, this backhanded homage NASCAR, not to mention every sports film cliché ever devised, requires nothing less to make one of its many satirical points. Hence the eponymous Ricky doesn’t just sport the name of a… Read More »
BARNYARD
You can generally tell within 20 minutes or so if a film is going to fly or not. Very few films recover from a disastrous first 20 minutes, and there are even fewer that go from bad to worse to engendering in its audience an active and vitriolic hatred. Such a film is BARNYARD, that… Read More »
WORLD TRADE CENTER
In this offering from the fecund imagination of Oliver Stone there is no hyperbole, no bombast, and no vast paranoid conspiracy. Instead, with World Trade Center, he has turned his considerable gifts, and using actual events, to recreate what it was like to be at Ground Zero, literally and figuratively, on the day that everything… Read More »
QUINCEANERA
The QUINCEANERA is a coming-of-age celebration for Mexican girls in which they take the step from childhood to adulthood, a step from which there is no turning back. As observed today, there is painstaking attention to the rituals, but the underlying meaning as often as not, gets lost in the materialism of expensive clothes and… Read More »
STEP UP
STEP UP is a surprisingly wholesome bit of fluff with an amiably charismatic cast and a script that should be cited for violating the basic tenets of solid scriptwriting. Uneven, undecided, and rife with everything except aliens from space and a natural disaster, it’s further hobbled by cliches, bouts of stale dialogue, inadvisable turns into… Read More »
CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER WOMEN
A chance meeting between two strangers (Helena Bonham Carter, pretty in pink, and Aaron Eckhart, suave in a tux) at a wedding reception in New York City starts the action in CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER WOMEN, a slippery delight with as much tension as a standard thriller, but the smarts of a literate drama, both of which… Read More »
THE ILLUSIONIST
Click here to listen to the interview with Neil Burger (15:34). A man in shirtsleeves sitting in intense concentration on a bare stage. The audience watching in rapt silence. Police lining the aisles ready to act. Thus begins THE ILLUSIONIST, a tale of sleight-of-hand, misdirection, and magic in many senses of the word. The only… Read More »
IDLEWILD
IDELWILD starts with a bang, splashing across the screen with a raucous exuberance full of sass, attitude, and an irreverent visual sense that enhances the edginess to the life the protagonists have chosen. If it weren’t for a love story that plops itself in the middle of it, this would have been a classic. As… Read More »
HOLLYWOODLAND
HOLLYWOODLAND deals with the death of George Reeves, television’s Superman and the idol of millions of kids who were devastated by not just his passing, but that it was reported to have been suicide. It was during a party at his house, when he went upstairs and was later found with a bullet through his… Read More »
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