Past Stories
The Not-So-Good ‘German’
Steven Soderbergh has been chasing the ghost of film noir for much of his career. The Good German is the 15th feature he’s directed since his legendary indie success sex, lies, and videotape, back in 1989, and at le...
Dystopic Pregnancy
Alfonso Cuarón’s films to date have centered on widely ranging themes in widely ranging genres, and the gripping Children of Men represents yet another new direction. This makes it harder to pin down a characterist...
CINEPHILE
"I kind of came in as an AWOL," says Vietnam Vet Randy Rowland, "and within two days of hitting the stockade, I was facing a death sentence for singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’" If that’s not t...
PAN’S LABYRINTH
Guillermo Del Toro’s (Hellboy, The Devil’s Backbone) latest tortured dreamscape pits a small girl named Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) against a faun, a disconnected mother, a fascist—literally—stepfather,...
THE DAME FROM HELL
Dame Judi Dench has spent the last decade playing queens, spies and Shakespeareans. Though Our Favorite Dame’s (save Helen Mirren) spinster schoolteacher, Barbara, in Richard Eyre’s wickedly enjoyable thriller...
FUTURE PRIMITIVE
There are no laser guns or flying cars in Alfonso Cuaron’s brilliant and horrific Year 2027 thriller Children of Men. (In case you’re wondering, the film’s relationship to the P.D. James novel approaches...
REEL LIFE: A 2006 TOP 10
A 12-year-old upset that Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties didn’t earn a slot on anyone’s Top 10 list might shed a few less tears if she knew taste was subjective. It must be—how the hell else did treacly,...
PRETTY ON THE OUTSIDE
Renée Zellweger suffers for her art. She muscled up for Chicago, puffed up for Bridget Jones, and here, as childhood’s inescapable authoress Beatrix Potter, Zellweger nervily appears to go onscreen sans make...
ABSOLUTE WILSON
David Byrne once said of avant-garde director Robert Wilson (Einstein on the Beach, The Black Rider) that he “makes 98 percent of theater look hopelessly old-fashioned.” A choreographer who came of age in the ...
LOATHING IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
In The Painted Veil, Kitty Fane (Naomi Watts) is stuck in rural China, 1925, and if the rebels or the cholera don’t kill her, the boredom certainly will. However, for her, the real villain is her husband Walter (Edw...
REST IN PIECES
According to writer-director Karen Montcrieff’s meticulous nightmare The Dead Girl, women’s plight hasn’t advanced much since the rape-’em-all, kill-’em-all, subjugate-’em-all biblical ...
ALPHA DOG
“I’m not interested in making a 90-minute version of America’s Most Wanted,” writer-director Nick Cassavetes told District Attorney Ronald J. Zonen when he pressed him for access to the police file...
POSTCARDS FROM THE LEDGE
The American Dream is as much a punch line as a promise. The famed “rise up the corporate ladder” has given way to parodies of motivational speakers a la Greg Kinnear in Little Miss Sunshine and satires of cub...
Embrace of Evil
Idi Amin was a bad mofo, and in his Uganda, the penalty for not shutting your mouth was execution. But to impetuous (and fictitious) Scotsman Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), the loony ex-dictator—whose self-desig...
HEAVEN AND HELL
“There is a saying in America—time is money,” advises a Pittsburgh guide. A week earlier, that was unfathomable to the four young Sudanese men depicted in God Grew Tired of Us. At their jobless refugee c...
Nudity and Tears
For most of human history, by the time news of your celebrity rippled across an ocean, you were likely already dead. But then came the Gutenberg, and the telegraph, and most devastatingly for Edie Sedgwick, the camera. Ed...
Biddy On Parade
Hollywood isn’t letting Diane Keaton age gracefully, but at least she’s doing it in style. Her wardrobe in Because I Said So, a slap-happy battle of the sexes (and generations), is her best since Annie Hall&md...
Pointed and Clumsy
Judging by modern history, there are few things worse to be in a war than French—except North African. As a French colony, the people of North Africa were told to look to La France as their Queen. In turn, they wer...
All Thaied Up
Every time I go to my favorite Thai restaurant, Thai Elvis, the waitress asks me what level of spice I can handle. And no matter what lowball number I pick, my noodles come out at atomic 10.
Channel that trait for…
It’s the Cheese!
This life-affirmer about a wealthy scion who learns the value of a dollar is a Chicken Soup novel 2 tha X-treme. “You look like you’ve never worked a day in your life,” grumbles rancher Brian Dennehy to Jason ...
Exploding Plastic Inevitable
Maxed Out, James Scurlock’s exposé of the evils of credit, starts appropriately in Vegas, where financial gambling and heedless extravagance are the norm. That money-lenders, bill collectors, and interest rat...
Hacking Up Hokum
To his credit, Chris Rock has never worn a fat suit. Yet without succumbing to the career-killing layers of padding that have swallowed up Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence and Tyler Perry, Rock manages to disappear entirely into h...
Blood of Shallows
World War II cursed and blessed serial murderer Ray Fernandez. A head injury left the former family man brain-damaged and bald; other soldiers’ fatal wounds gave him a crop of pension-rich widows to seduce and rob. Once R...
DISTURBIA
Suburban teen Kale Brecht’s (Shia LaBeouf) summer of house arrest is supposed to be safer than juvie. At first, his gorgefest of peanut butter, Twinkies and trash TV is no more perilous than an upset stomach. But when a r...
Vacancy
Puttering down a rural road past midnight, Amy and Dave (Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson) think the worst is behind them: they’ve lost their son and let grief shatter their marriage. But after their car breaks down, the s...
Bobbies Gone Wild!
The biggest difference between England and the US? Bruce Willis. In the last 30 years, the UK hasn’t made a single action hero cop movie. Here, Willis alone has starred in a dozen. Face it, bobbies just ain’t cool. ...
Cheeto Nation
It seems like lately we’re constantly being bombarded with advertising campaigns that proclaim “Zero Grams Trans Fat!” or “Now with Omega-3s!” But why do these things truly matter, you ask, if the ...
SING NOW OR FOREVER HOLD YOUR PEACE
Fifteen years after their crooning of Phil Collins’ “Take Me Home” rocked their college campus, this seven-man acapella group—now on the wrong side of 35—have managed, mostly, to stay tight. They&r...
